Four thousand refugees are blocked in Malta – some for over five years – with no job, or prospect of reuniting with their families. They are squashed into tents or between the plates of an enormous hangar, and forced to queue up, three times a week, as in a military camp, to prove their presence and obtain four euros a day with which they will have to get by.
The Maltese don’t want them and cases of threats towards anyone who takes care of them are recurrent. The local government counts on slow reinsertion programmes in other countries, to get rid of excess refugees provided that the Italian-Libyan agreement continues to work.
Three months ago landings stopped. But the situation is growing ever more tense in these overcrowded open centres, and degenerate appears to be around the corner.
“They are the real emergency,” says Alexander Tortell, director of Awas, the agency dealing with asylum seekers’ welfare, “there should be structures in place able to provide temporary assistance, waiting for immigrants to find a job in Malta or abroad. But sometimes it takes years.”
The “Dublin II” regulation prevents these 4,000 refugees from leaving the island. Because Malta is their country of arrival, it has to take care of their bureaucratic assistance. Those who try to escape illegally, to look for a job in Italy or in the rest of Europe, are brought back to the island, where they can also end up in jail. For the majority of them, be they Somali or Eritrean, it’s even impossible to think of going back to their homeland. Some are stateless. And finding a job in Malta is very difficult.
The hangar
The worst accommodation type is called the hangar. It is situated in Hal Far, in the extreme southeast of the island. Here, far from tourists and the Maltese, in an area once occupied by an airport which has been abandoned, the worst kinds of camps are born.
800 people live in the hangar, distributed between a line of eight containers and a big, dark and dilapidated warehouse. The former hangar was converted into a gigantic dormitory about a year and a half ago. Outside there are bivouacs everywhere, while inside you find an unbearable smell.
Migrants – the majority of whom have humanitarian protection – are forced to sleep in a hive of bunk beds, surrounded by dust and dirt. Dangerous camping stoves are used to cook and just eight chemical bathrooms have been provided for the entire area. The government is building new bathrooms and a space for the kitchens. But work is only starting now.
The situation here is similar to that of Rosarno in Calabria, southern Italy, and the situation is getting worse in the tent village, a real tent city, which was opened in 2006, and is constantly growing to accommodate new arrivals.
As it stands, guests are 800 – 22 per tent. There are only ten showers and ten dirty squat toilets. Cases of dysentery and scabies are frequent, while mental health problems are becoming more common. Violence and rape cases are also on the rise.
Wondering away from the camp is unadvisable. Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, refugees are forced to queue up and sign their names in order to prove their continued presence in the camp. If you don’t show up, ten euros are taken off your monthly subsidy of 130. If you try to run away from Malta, or if you are brought back by force, the cut is of 50 euros.
“The practice is a strike against human dignity,” says father Joseph Cassar, of the Jesuit Refugee Service in Malta.
“We are witnessing more and more cases of psychological problems. The situation must be monitored, to avoid a degeneration in the future.”
In the past, Jesuits exclusively took care of migrants held in detention centres. The emergency is now coming from a prison, even though those who are inside it, do not realise that they are.
The detention centre
48 people are detained in Ta’ Kandja: thirteen are men and the rest are young women. The detention centre extends itself along a line of short, one-storey buildings, made out of tuff, in the Malta tradition.
When we arrive, at about 10, young people are already waiting for us at the entrance of their block. They are the last few to have arrived in the archipelago State, on October 6. 106 of them landed – 86 men and 20 women – on board a big ship that managed to escape not only shipwreck at sea, but also being turned back on arrival.
They are lucky but they don’t know it. It is likely that they will be the last tenants of those cells, before returning to freedom. For them however, the word freedom will mean sleeping indefinitely and without a job in the hangar or in the tent village.
One of the prisoners has been in Libya, in Garabulli, in one of Gaddafi’s prisons. He is Eritrean, about 30 years old. He speaks about torture every night, about electric cables. He confirms that many women are exposed to sexual violence from the Libyan military. When we ask him if he knows about the rejections and about the agreement between Italy and Libya, he shakes his head.
He doesn’t know he is one of the last “lucky people”, he doesn’t know what awaits him outside. People who lower their eyes (volti bassi), looks that tell of hardship and all the while the policeman who is accompanying us – Mike – is praising the integration process and the cleanliness inside the camp. As a matter of fact, the rooms have actually been cleaned up very well, there is a television, but the impression is that there is something false.
Ta’ Kandja is the finest of Malta’s closed detention centres. It is the one which the most often shown to journalists ever since the second half of 2008 when they were allowed in by La Valletta’s government.
In the remaining two camps, the Lyster barracks and the Safi barracks, which are managed by the army, the situation is notably different. To the extent that, in both of them, revolts have broke out at the beginning of last year.
In some centres detained people are allowed just four hours outside the gates a week. There is no heating, water comes directly from the Mediterranean sea through desalinators and the food is always the same.
Up until last year, Malta’s situation was considered an exception. Today it is the rule, after the controversial directive of the European Commission which came into force at the beginning of 2009: the so-called “directive of shame.” In any case, the problem now seems to have been overcome.
Rejections
The rejection policies dreamed up and financed by Italy, and managed by Colonel Gaddafi’s motor patrol boats, have brought the results hoped for by the Italian government.
The Libyan leader is awaited at La Valletta, Malta, next month with the aim of drawing up, along with the Maltese government, an agreement similar to that drawn up with Berlusconi.
The great wall of Tripoli can still sometimes be bypassed though. On 24 January, a ship with 25 Tunisian immigrants docked in Lampedusa, three months apart from the previous arrival. In Malta on the other hand, landings have stopped. In January 2010 there were no arrivals – compared to 1500 arrivals in 2009 and 2275 in 2008. Now that season seems to be finished.
The emergency is not. These men and women will have to get by here – trapped but considered free. Waiting for Godot. Just as in a comedy of the absurd.
Article written for Vita magazine by Gilberto Mastromatteo, translation by Cristina Barbetta.
