Four hundred and twenty- five people are being detained on four cruise boats just outside Maltese territorial waters. Some of them have been stuck there for many weeks.
This is above all a humanitarian problem. We’re assured that all on board are in fine health and good spirits, and that they spend their time singing and playing football. I’m not sure I’m fooled. People will sing on death row. They will play football in concentration camps. It’s that side of the human spirit which sees a bit of la vita è bella in even the cruellest of circumstances.
I’m writing this on Friday morning. A strong easterly wind has been blowing all night, and the sea’s rough with a heavy swell. Now I’ve been seasick a couple of times in my life, the longest for about six hours, and it’s the worst feeling in the world.
Still, I’m not surprised that this latest stand-off between Malta and the EU – for that’s what it is, with migrants as pawns – has gone on for so long. While the two positions may appear different, they correspond perfectly to each other.
What the government has done is replicate the geographical and political equation. It has created islands, four of them in fact, and used them to dump undesirables.
It happens to be one of the oldest tricks in the book. Take the so-called ‘Madagascar Plan’. The question of what to do with the Jews of Europe was a major self-induced headache for the Nazi government. Surely the simplest solution would have been to leave them in peace: instead, the Nazi ideologues came up with a plan to relocate them all to Madagascar. The scheme turned out to be unworkable.
Not so the various island prisons – and I don’t mean that metaphorically – of fiction and fact. Seven years on a Mediterranean island with a lustrous nymph who is madly in love with you and also wants to make you immortal might not seem entirely disagreeable, but Odysseus spent most of his time pining for home.
There were no nymphs on St Helena, or Alcatraz, or Ellis Island, or Ross Island. At the French penal colony on Devil’s Island, the impossibility of ever leaving was rubbed in by governors who encouraged a kind of homosexual marriage known as the ‘cucumber solution’ (‘la résolution du concombre’). I’m not trying to be funny, because it isn’t.
Also highly unfunny are the various offshore detention centres around the world where states dump migrants out of sight and out of mind. Australia’s contributions on Nauru and Manus Island have been described by the International Criminal Court as ‘cruel, inhuman, and degrading’.
This is above all a humanitarian problem
They’re a vile taunt, too, as the sea of hope becomes the sea of despair. In fact, it’s not unlike dying of thirst surrounded by an ocean of water. No wonder journalists are being kept well away from the Captain Morgan boats and the voices of those on board. Coronavirus: but of course.
I wonder if it ever occurs to the prime minister, perhaps while he converses with the dumbbells, that his actions are an exact copy of the very thing he and his foreign minister are complaining about.
It’s probably true that there has been a lot of foot-dragging in Brussels. But I may not be a million miles from the truth to say that it partly has to do with the history of geography. Malta and Lampedusa may be full member states or a piece of them, but to mainlanders they are islands. Sun-kissed and romantic and exotic and all that, but also places where undesirables may conveniently be dumped.
All the better if they make the journey themselves. Islands, like mountains and deserts and so on, come with a cultural baggage.
Thanks to the Odyssey and Papillon and Gulliver’s Travels and a thousand other currents, certain things come to mind when we think islands. Incarceration is one of those things.
There is probably no contradiction in the minds of the movers in Brussels to think of Malta and Lampedusa and the Aegean Islands and so on as places where to contain undesirable migrants.
When I chanced across a detention centre on Chios a couple of years ago, I was not in the least amazed.
A matter of misguided Brussels, then? Not quite. Thing is, we all have our islands. I find it fascinating how even Maltese students who return from a few months of Erasmus exchange sometimes say it’s nice to be back ‘on the rock’.
There’s more. Where they don’t exist, islands can be made. For different reasons, Gozo and Comino are out of the picture as offshore detention centres. That leaves us with very little islandness: which is exactly where the Captain Morgan boats come into the picture.
They’re our own improvised islands. That they’re small and vulnerable and threatened by the elements is added value, because it means they can be used as a sort of humanitarian ransom in the battle with Brussels.
Once again, it’s exactly the argument we wheel out to make the case for burden-sharing or relocation or whatever it’s called these days: Malta is a small island and vulnerable to overpopulation and what comes with it, and so on. For some reason, our government doesn’t apply the logic to the smaller islands of its own making.
The prime minister cannot expect Brussels to deliver us from our islandness. He first has to stop delivering others to theirs.