That Was The Week That Was as the old TV programme used to say.

We can well say that the week just ended was a watershed for the country.

We always knew that there was a widespread rabid fear and horror in the Maltese population at the persistent arrival of boatload after boatload of asylum seekers.

We never knew, however, just how widespread the feeling was, how fundamental and radical the solutions most people harboured.

When the idea was put out that the government was planning to push back any future immigrants, it opened Pandora’s Box. At last, there was a government that was about to do what many people hoped for in their deepest of hearts.

But when a ‘foreign’ court, the European Court of Justice (which once you stop and consider that we are now European and European institutions are ours and not foreign at all) stopped the proposed repatriations, howls of anger, frustration and worse could be heard everywhere, especially on the all-important social media and comment spaces of news portals.

That was then turned into rage at the few who had protested against the repatriation plan.

On the one hand, a new majority, xenophobic if you want, was born, quite different from the 37,000 ‘taghna lkoll’ majority in which coloured people took part in PL activities and were welcomed.

On the other hand, a new movement was born, people with no known Nationalist tendencies, but mainly in the arts and culture, intelligentsia and the like, who, with an evolved conscience was sincerely aghast at the mere idea that a government of a democratic modern government could even think of such an expedient. People I know were very seriously anguished last Tuesday when it seemed the repatriation would take place.

Let me take a step back and consider the issue from a wider than wide angle. There were, up to the time I am writing, two incidents of verbal violence against asylum seekers – the YouTube rant by a woman on a bus and the Arriva incident at Mgarr involving a coloured woman driver.

There is still no comparison with the bomb planted in a mosque set off at the time of Friday prayers and at the very same time of Drummer Lee Rigby’s funeral in the UK. Then again, one can feel racial tension in some areas of the UK, a simmering situation just waiting to explode, like in the 2011 riots.

There is xenophobia too in Italy, especially in the North-East but such have been the social changes of the past decades that foreigners, and asylum seekers especially, though deeply resented, are mostly allowed to live and let live.

Then too, matters need to be put in perspective here as well.

Malta, first of all, is not multi-cultural like many other countries. This is changing, a glacier-like move you don’t notice at all. There are places in Malta that are quite multicultural and others that are still national. Yet the xenophobia, as has become evident in the past days, relates exclusively to coloured boat people. There are other coloured people in Malta who have not come by boat, and they too are looked askance at. But no one notices, and that’s an understatement, the people of other nationalities who have somehow found their way to Malta.

Then too, what many people complain about with regard to the asylum seekers, they do not complain about the others, especially the illegal immigrants there are around.

One complaint is that the asylum seekers get free health assistance. So too do the people of so many other ethnic origins. They also get free education for their children but no one complains about that, except with regard to the boat people.

We speak and argue a lot but we do not have the real figures. How many boat people have come to Malta over the past years and how many are still in the closed centres? How many are still in Malta, one might ask?

The others, the ones in the open centres and the ones who have moved out into some of the 70,000 plus apartments and houses that are unoccupied, do not cost the State more than any other citizen and mostly they work and they (should) be paying their taxes. Like anybody else.

The ‘burden’ on the State are those in the closed centres where interaction with the soldiers etc guarding them is a huge problem. Successive governments have not provided the soldier-guards with proper equipment (and sometimes the asylum seekers, in a fit of temper, break up or badly use what equipment there is).

A government, which seeks to douse the flames of passion and racial hatred, would perhaps explain what does it cost exactly to keep the asylum seekers in the closed centres for the 18 months that Maltese legislation demands. What does the whole effort cost each and every one of us on a daily basis?

There may be scope for intensifying the battle against the people-traffickers by perhaps increasing the penalties (although many times they seem to grab the money and push the boats out). There may even be scope for far better, no-nonsense security.

Other peoples have their own problems relating to their geographical position; we have ours. Our problem is we are the nearest shore to the North African seaboard and our problem derives from the instability in the Saharan regions, the wars in Africa, the porous Libyan southern frontier and the instability and worse in post-Gaddafi Libya. There is practically nothing we can do to change these factors.

That Europe is deaf to the issue, to our pleadings, that solidarity is honoured in words but not in practice is also very true. To threaten repatriation as our government did last week generates negative publicity for us but hardly improves matters.

To create all this enormous blame-game bringing up the sad tragedy of the Eritrean asylum seekers just inflames people’s minds.

We have now had a change in government and still the boats come. We threatened repatriation but still more boats came. And more will follow. It is wrong to succumb to despair or to allow ourselves our own personal acts of mayhem just to cover up our impotency in the face of these events. These people have got nothing to lose. To wreak our anger at our impotency on these unfortunates solves nothing.

These people do not belong to Malta: they do not want to stay in Malta. We may, we should, help educate them so that they may become better people, especially their children, after they leave Malta.

There is no call to integrate them, as there is in other countries. Integration does not come if some of them get a girl pregnant and through that become citizens of Malta. This comment goes wider than the asylum seekers. People must not become citizens of Malta without knowing the language, without understanding the basic principles of Maltese democracy, without understanding the basics of Maltese culture. They do not have to change over to the religion of the majority, as their forefathers were made to do in previous centuries.

What we could do without is someone, anyone, deluding people there is a simple solution to the problems of the asylum seekers, whether that be forced pushback or repatriation. People last week genuinely thought the solution had been found. They now know otherwise and are angry and disillusioned.

Then too, if the issue is regarded solely as a problem, people’s minds and hearts get inflamed. It is one thing to get elected, and quite another thing to govern. The latter is the harder.

 

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