Where is all that money going?

Daphne Caruana Galizia Sunday, 5 January 2014, 10:05 Last update: about 11 years ago

Our foreign minister gave an ill-advised interview to CNN a few days ago, claiming that Malta can no longer handle what he portrayed as an onslaught of asylum-seekers coming in by sea (except that he didn’t call them asylum-seekers but “these people”) because – wait for it – they “break the toilets” and “smear the place”.

Aside from the fact that the exact same thing happens at wedding-halls and bars after a good old Maltese knees-up, the foreign minister should have mentioned the fact that there are hundreds of men to a single lavatory, a recipe for squalor, filth, blocked drains and dysfunctional flushing mechanisms even if the people using those lavatories were 300 hospital matrons and fussy nurses rather than 300 young men. But he shouldn’t have mentioned the lavatories at all because it is a ridiculous excuse for saying you can’t cope with people rescued from the sea and who are claiming refugee status: “We don’t want them because they smash the toilets.”

Oh, and there’s the money, too. Our foreign minister also said that we can’t cope with These People because not only do they break the toilets and smear the place, but they also cost money and it’s not fair. He failed to mention that the money we are spending on caring for asylum-seekers (and caring for them so very badly under both the Nationalist government and this one, with the key difference that this government is overtly intolerant and xenophobic, and speaks about These People like animals) is not our own. It has been given to Malta by others, and the sums are rather generous. They are certainly enough to care for asylum-seekers properly. Yet as things stand, those asylum-seekers live in truly appalling conditions and have to beg, scrounge and rely on charity drives for even the most basic things like shoes and something to sleep on, or to cover themselves with in winter.

Yesterday, The Times of Malta carried an interview with one of these young men who shares one pair of shoes with another two men. “We take it in turns to go in to Valletta wearing the shoes,” he said. One man wears those precious shoes and goes out, while the other two stay back at the camp. Why is this happening? There are sufficient funds given to the government to allow the purchase of some simple and inexpensive shoes for everybody rescued from the sea. Even the blankets and sheets on their beds come from charity drives – the jackets, jumpers and jeans, those too.

When the xenophobic individuals who colonise the internet complain about asylum-seekers wearing clothes of certain brands – the suggestion being that they somehow have the money to buy them – what they don’t know is that those clothes are donated by women clearing out the wardrobes of their husbands, sons, fathers and brothers. There is an organised voluntary network, with collection points and sorters, who often have to go through a great deal of shocking rubbish which people should have thrown away rather than tried to dump on others. But there is lots of good stuff, too. The women who do this have a social conscience: they see people in desperate need of the most basic things and they volunteer and pull together to supply them. But the point is, they shouldn’t have to. Donations should complement what the government provides and not serve as a substitute for it, with the government leaving men to shiver without blankets in winter or three men sharing one pair of shoes, when those men are their responsibility until they are permitted to fend for themselves.

The fact of the matter is that Malta has received around €91 million from the EU over the last six years to spend on asylum-seekers and migrants coming in by boat on trafficking routes. Where has all that money gone? On what is it being spent? The funds include €12.5 million from the European Refugee Fund and almost €4 million from the European Integration Fund. Surely that was more than enough to stock a warehouse with winter quilts and other bedding, with shoes and basic clothes and other necessities, for issue as and when required? It’s even enough to pay for the rental of that warehouse and for the wages of three or four employees to run it with proper stock-control systems.

And yet what do we have instead? We have appeals on Facebook for blankets and quilts, for shoes and warm jumpers: the latest was only a few days ago, for 100 blankets for the people at Hal Far. There are surprising individual acts of generosity, too – like the person who spent a thousand euros on blankets at a household store and asked for them to be delivered to one of the camps. Leaving it all up to charity would be primitive and Victorian in any circumstances, but when Malta is receiving tens of millions in funding from the EU for these purposes, it is not just Victorian. It is shocking that there have to be any charity drives at all.

A spokesman for Minister Manuel Mallia, who is responsible for asylum-seekers, told The Times of Malta: “The generosity of individuals and organisations complements state-funded aid to the residents of open centres.” Complements? I wouldn’t call buying shoes and blankets for those who have none an act that “complements” state-funded aid, but which fills the gap where there is no state-funded aid. Shoes and winter blankets are hardly optional items or add-ons.

And in any case, it is not ‘state-funded aid’ as the ministry claims, but EU-funded aid. I think people are owed a break-down of where all that money is going and how it is being spent. I can’t help suspecting that much of it is going on the army, even as the xenophobic element in our society are encouraged, by their equivalent in politics, to lament the expense to the army of having to handle all this.