It’s a cruel irony that, right at the time when the nation commemorates the centenary of a riot, it finds itself having to deal with two riots in as many weeks.
The Minister for Home Affairs and National Security went on television the other day to warn that there was a limit to everything, and that violence would not be tolerated. People had a right to protest, he said, but only if they did so peacefully and in full respect of the law.
As expected, dozens of rioters were hauled off to court, cable-tied in bunches and wearing orange T-shirts. Many of them are now in prison.
Law or no law, I cannot condemn (yawn) what happened at Ħal Far and Ħal Safi. As I see it, it’s the present-day equivalent of Sette Giugno or April 1958. Those events involved people who had had enough of poverty and injustice. Their only means of protest was to riot, and riot they did.
In 21st century Malta, their descendants tend to be black.
To say that violence should be condemned at all times is so much rhetoric. Funnily enough, it’s mirrored by another rhetoric that extols the virtues of a certain kind of violence.
Even if we subtract the trigger-happy British troops, there was nothing peaceful about Sette Giugno. Homes were looted, families terrorised and commercial properties vandalised, and yet we think it was all perfectly justified. The centenary has seen a stream of books, speeches and wreath-laying pomp. The event, violent as it was, is commemorated as a heroic moment in the making of the nation.
Nor was 1958 particularly inspired by Gandhi. Some hurled rocks, others bruised heads, yet others ended up in prison for defying the law. I don’t hear anyone condemning anything. There’s even a monument in Paola to the ‘soldiers of steel’ (suldati tal-azzar), among whom was a certain young woman who later became President of the Republic. Her two fingers at law and order were recently honoured in an exhibition.
Partly the reason why the Sette Giugno and 1958 violence is deemed legitimate is that it involved people who had little option. In one way or another, they were relatively powerless. They could not, for example, lower the price of bread or take part in decisions at the dockyard.
If this isn’t pent-up reason enough to riot, I don’t know what is
The asylum seekers cooped up in detention centres are at least as powerless. They have no access to the media, nor do they enjoy any form of political representation.
Successive governments have dealt with them by locking them away in the middle of nowhere, out of sight and out of political and social mind. Fences and walls separate them from the usual democratic and peaceful means of protest. Their solution, as we have seen, was to think laterally.
The second reason why some riots are kosher is that they are thought to be rooted in real, persistent and legitimate grievances. Profiteering mill owners and an arrogant colonial government both make the grade, thus the heroic poems and bronze.
I am not exactly sure what goes on in detention. I tend to believe the many organisations (Médecins Sans Frontières, Jesuit Refugee Service and such) that over the years have come up with reports of dire conditions. But let’s for a moment put all of that aside and assume that the doctors, lawyers and other specialists who run these organisations are busybodies with nothing better to do in life.
That still leaves us with a basic, brutal fact: detention is one of the many devices by which asylum seekers are thwarted in their life-bettering projects. That can’t be denied, whether or not it’s champagne breakfasts and saunas in there.
Not so long ago, I would often find myself driving through Marsa very early in the morning, past a steady stream of young men from the open centre making their way to work. My mind would go back to when I was in my 20s, and I would think to myself that those people had as many hopes and aspirations as I did back then. I also felt that to dash those aspirations was the worst thing in the world.
A couple of years ago, I interviewed a man who had spent many months in detention at Ħal Far. He told me that the hardest thing about it had not been the food or the cramped conditions, but rather the sinking sense of hopelessness that would overcome him every evening as the lights went on in the towns and villages around the centre.
He had travelled thousands of miles to reach them, only to be held back by a fence at the very last minute.
If this isn’t pent-up reason enough to riot, I don’t know what is. The minister clearly thinks otherwise. He said that some of the rioters had been drunk, that it was all the work of a few rotten apples, and that – wait for it – there were certain ‘Maltese and foreigners’ who had fanned the flames (‘xewxu’). These last, whoever he had in mind, would not be tolerated.
The drift is that there was little or no method to the madness. Drunks will be drunks, and the incited have little ideas of their own. Unlike the noble and virtuous Sette Giugno and 1958 rioters, who were no doubt stone sober and motivated by political philosophy at every turn, the Ħal Far and Ħal Safi variety were simply hooligans and rebels without a cause.
In the rush to condemn and pontificate, it’s easy to forget the lesson of history that a few burning cars are as nothing compared to the suffering and dashed hopes of thousands.