The Tripoli government has agreed to let Malta deploy its officials in Libya to ‘coordinate’ migrants. The objective is clear: stop migrants from crossing into Malta’s search and rescue area, whatever the cost. It is an officialisation of the work Neville Gafà claims he used to do. Robert Abela breached quarantine and social distancing to prove that the optician’s assistant made good is not indispensable.
Malta is to get the EU to pay for tougher border controls on Libya’s desert border with the rest of Africa and the beefing up of the coast guard policing the Mediterranean Sea.
The agreement reads like a service agreement for a pest control contractor. Success is measured by the outcome: seeing no roaches, with no limits on how they’re done away with.
There is no concern for the fact that migrants blocked south of Libya’s southern border will either die in the desert sun or pay smugglers to cross another patrolled border. Malta wants migrants crossing from Niger or Chad to be imprisoned in Libya. If they dip their toes in the Mediterranean, Malta wants the Libyan coast guard to pick them up and take them back to prison.
Malta makes no demands on the Libyan authorities to treat migrants and prisoners with humanity. Who cares for vermin? The key to such institutionalised prejudice against black people is the pretence they are not human.
Consider how Magistrate Joe Mifsud’s inquiry into the Easter massacre when 12 people died in our search and rescue area waiting for five days for someone to rescue them from drowning.
In a 400-page report investigating their deaths, the names of the 12 victims appear twice: when quoting a report of their death in a newspaper and when a lawyer told the court he had been hired by relatives of two of the victims to represent their interests. Not that the magistrate cared.
Omar, Mogos, Hzqiel, Hdru, Huruy, Teklay, Nohom, Kidus, Debesay, and three men named Filmon all died of thirst, starvation or drowning in Maltese waters.
Eleven of the men were Christians. Survivors identified “their brother Omar” as Muslim. They were aged 18 to 25. Some of them had already tried and failed to make the crossing to Europe before. And the magistrate who investigated their untimely and cruel deaths could not bring himself to learn their names.
That is not the worst thing about this inquiry report, which amounts to an execrable ignominy for our justice system. But it’s one of the many indications of the institutionalised and bureaucratised racial prejudice that inspired the conduct of that investigation.
In the weighing scales of the courtroom there was Robert Abela on one side and 12 dead migrants on the other. But the migrants were black, weightless in the eyes of the law
Another indication is how 66 witnesses of one of the alleged crimes the inquiry was supposed to be looking into were completely ignored.
Sixty-six survivors from the Easter incidents were brought into Malta. The magistrate, contrary to what he is required to do according to law, did not interview them himself. He hired instead his personal lawyer who left law school four years ago. The 66 interviews were conducted through translators in 30 hours: that’s an average of 13 substantive minutes per interview.
In that time the inquiry should have heard why these people left their native Eritrea and South Sudan. Hint: because risking death in the Sahara or the Mediterranean is profoundly more desirable then staying there. The interviewer will have heard about their time spent as slaves and prisoners in smugglers’ coves in Libya. He will have heard how they earned their place on a boat out of Libya. And he will have taken the time to hear what really happened when they were ‘rescued’. In 13 minutes.
Ultimately, all 30 hours of testimony were discarded as none of it was deemed credible. How can the black devil speak true? Except one line. In one interview a migrant said the smuggler who put him on the boat told him an NGO boat would be waiting in the ocean to pick them up. Proof positive, the magistrate concluded, that the nasty NGOs coordinate with smugglers. The fact that there was no NGO boat as the smuggler promised, did not tickle the magistrate’s imagination enough to consider the possibility the smuggler was lying to a migrant in shock at the sight of a dinghy you and I would not board to cross to Comino.
These witnesses were not on the boat where the 12 died. Fifty-one witnesses to the 12 deaths are in the Tarik al Sikka concentration camp in Libya, a place known for the horror of systematic rape, torture and forced labour.
The magistrate did not think to visit the survivors to ask them what they had seen, or to order the authorities to issue them with a visa to testify in his court.
When someone dies out of time, an inquiry in Malta takes months to make sure all bases are covered. That’s usually without the luxury of eyewitnesses. Here 12 people died, allegedly due to government inaction or worse, and 51 people we know watched their lives expire in madness, thirst, starvation and exhaustion.
But Magistrate Joe Mifsud left all this out and consumed pages of his inquiry lamenting the fact that he could not imprison Repubblika officials for daring to demand an inquiry into the conduct of state officials. In the weighing scales of his courtroom there was Robert Abela on one side and 12 dead migrants on the other. But the migrants were black, weightless in the eyes of the law.
The discarded testimonies were still passed to Abela ahead of his own testimony just in case there was anything that would have needed him to change his story to fit the facts. Four hundred black people have been out at sea for weeks, some of them since the beginning of May.
If they had been white, they’d have been on land long ago. But who cares if they choke on the smells of their own urine, faeces, vomit and sweat? Unless you’re watching TV, black lives do not matter.