The facts cannot be negated. Malta was legally responsible for protecting the lives of those who requested help while in our waters. Instead, the refugees and migrants were illegally pushed back to Libya. The human rights violations that the ‘survivors’ will be forced to endure are well documented. Five migrants lost their life and seven more are missing.
The prime minister assured us that “At a time when we are all focused on ensuring the health of all the Maltese, there were some who want to see me serve life in prison. My conscience is clear because we are doing what is right. That is why I am serene”.
Not for the first time I find myself reaching for Hannah Arendt’s book The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), specifically chapter nine wherein she discusses the concept of the “right to have rights”. Her historical account documents how the very notion of human rights was challenged in the years following World War I specifically in relation to the displacement of millions of people, during a time when many states were only concerned with looking after their own self-interest.
Arendt’s historical analysis revealed a disturbing truth about human rights – they mean nothing when confronted with nationalism and racism. “Statesmen”, she recounts, “were quickly given the opportunity to prove it practically with the rise of stateless people – that the transformation of the state from an instrument of the law into an instrument of the nation had been completed; the nation had conquered the state, national interest had priority over law long before Hitler could pronounce ‘right is what is good for the German people’”.
Those who supported and continue to support the illegal push back and denial of human rights, find nothing sacred in the body of the refugee
Arendt documents how the disintegration of government came about when the “precarious balance between nation and state, between national interest and legal institutions broke down” when “the supremacy of the will of the nation over all legal and ‘abstract’ institutions, was universally accepted”.
Stripped of any legal status, with no political community, Arendt reminds us of how the Nazis challenged the refugees’ most basic of rights – the right to life. She notes how “the conception of human rights, based upon the assumed existence of a human being as such, broke down at the very moment when those who professed to believe in it were for the first time confronted with people who had indeed lost all other qualities and specific relationships – except that they were still human”.
Her frightening conclusion is that the “world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human”. To be human was not enough to be saved.
The refugee crisis we face today in Malta reflects a familiar political and moral crisis. We all know that had the boat been filled with Maltese citizens, their lives would have been saved. Their lives were, and we are assured, still are disposable, for only citizens can be assured of the right to have rights.
As EU member states turn their back and retreat, each protecting its own self- interest, the government of Malta stands defiant. The justification for this act is divorced from any form of legal and moral responsibility, the act itself detached from the brutal and cold reality of drowning in the Mediterranean.
Unlike the prime minister, I am not serene for the truth is that the government of Malta and all those who supported and continue to support the illegal push back and denial of human rights, find nothing sacred in the body of the refugee.
Maria Pisani, Academic and Integra Foundation director