While President George Vella was assuring Pope Francis that Malta does its utmost to save migrants’ lives at sea, the four survivors of another disaster, where 90 migrants died, were being returned to Libya.
International reports say the tragedy happened in Malta’s search-and-rescue area and that the Maltese authorities did not do all they could. The reports add that the four survivors were returned to Libya at Malta’s request.
Malta says that Libya is a safe harbour. It seems the foreign ministry hasn’t got the memo. Its official travel advice for Libya is headlined: “Avoid all travel.”
In its section on safety and security, the ministry’s website urges any Maltese who are in Libya “to leave immediately”. It explains: “The political situation in Libya remains fragile and the security situation remains dangerous and unpredictable.”
We’re sending migrants to a place that we consider too dangerous for ourselves. Moreover, we send them back to detention camps, where only the fortunate escape torture and violence.
There can be only one explanation. We believe migrants’ lives are worth less than ours.
Malta is not alone. Last year, thanks to the EU’s support for the Libyan coastguard, 32,000 persons were intercepted at sea and sent back to ‘safe harbour’.
Is it possible that we’re betraying what we really believe? That we’re turning away from the facts, and avoiding looking at the mirror, so as not to see what we’re doing? The pope’s visit raises those questions.
The migrants who met Pope Francis told him of their suffering. They were telling him a story in which we are characters. In our name, they are treated as criminals. They are detained in centres for far longer, in practice, than the official policy allows and in conditions so dire that the government prevents almost all outside observers from scrutinising them.
Of course, this is what the migrants go through if they survive at sea and make it to shore, instead of being sent back to Libya.
Pope Francis told them that they are not statistics but flesh and blood. He wasn’t just consoling them, telling them what they haven’t heard for a long time. He was also addressing us. What we mete out, we inflict on living breathing people.
When Pope Francis said their story is the story of a shipwreck of civilisation, he wasn’t exaggerating. The migrants’ story is our story.
Look at what’s happened to us. We have a policy that has led to a sixth of our prison population, approximately, being made up of people in jail for immigration-related offences. We are becoming a prison state.
You cannot treat people inhumanely without losing your own humanity- Ranier Fsadni
We’re also becoming a brutal state. Despite the outcry following the case of two Turkish mothers who were separated from their young children, that policy continued to be enforced in other cases that followed.
You cannot treat people inhumanely without losing your own humanity. Can it be a coincidence that our prison has recently come to treat Maltese prisoners so callously, with scandalous disregard for their lives, as though they matter less?
It’s tempting to think that migration was one individual ‘topic’ on the pope’s agenda, an item to be ticked off, while the environment, transparency, legality and corruption were others. That would be a mistake. They are all facets of the same topic.
For the pope, universality and care for the roots of a particular community go together. The choice is not between rights-based liberalism and communities rooted in territory. For Christian tradition, one without the other is corrupt, even if we didn’t have kleptocrats and konkoscrats to worry about.
We need to be humane with everyone because, otherwise, it’s a short step to brutalising the environment and our own community. Without community, however, we will never learn what it is to be humane in flesh and blood.
If the state sidesteps the law in dealing with strangers, it will soon show contempt for the law at home. We need transparency to learn what it is doing to us; we also need it to learn the consequences of what we demand that the state does on our behalf.
It’s the blunt restating of these values that will be the lasting legacy of Pope Francis’s visit. Frankly, I’m less impressed with the inevitable reference to how, two millennia ago, the Maltese greeted St Paul.
Poor St Paul has little to do with our grave dilemmas. When his ship sank, he swam ashore without waiting for search and rescue. In Malta, he remained under some sort of long-term custody, until taken to Rome and beheaded. Had he been freed, he could have moved as he pleased within the empire.
St Paul matters only because he lived for the values that Pope Francis reiterated. The purpose of the papal visit wasn’t to hand us glib solutions. It was to warn us against the tempting, but false, solutions that will end up destroying us from within.
He didn’t just preach love of neighbour. He preached about love of country and how it is degraded when we’re proud of acts of shame.
You cannot love your flag and dispatch innocent people to certain torment. True patriotism – said the late historian Stephen F. Cohen – is never having to say you didn’t know.