After reading my piece about the pointless existence of our army and the apparent belief of many Maltese soldiers and their families that theirs is just another government job, a friend emailed me to make a valid point. It is not just through luck of location that Maltese people can join the army safe in the knowledge that they will never be called upon to fight, she wrote. It is because of Malta’s neutrality and political approach to war.
Malta will never be embroiled in a war of its own (against whom, and for what?), and it will not, given its firm embrace of neutrality, fight side by side with another country in any other kind of war. This, of course, only serves to render the Maltese army even more pointless.
Before the hegemony of Dom Mintoff, who disbanded the Royal Malta Artillery and began the creation of his own armata, Maltese soldiers expected that they would be called upon to fight, and fight they did, in the wars of the 19th and 20th centuries. Wherever the British fought, they fought with them. As a result of having to be ready and trained for war, they were more disciplined and motivated.
Lack of purpose is a main reason why the Maltese army is now so debilitated, discipline and training having been much atrophied over the past 30 years or so. At times, the AFM seems to be little more than a glorified version of Dom Mintoff’s Pioneer Corps.
It must be truly demoralising for those who see themselves as career soldiers, and it is not my wish to criticise the individuals who take their profession seriously. I admire them, and they also have my sympathy for the fact that they are in such a no-hope army where they can never develop to their full worth and potential. It is the same with other careers in Malta.
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During the national conference on illegal immigration, the point was made by almost every speaker there that it is not the role of the army to run the detention camps. No, of course it is not. Why did the speakers see the situation as all or nothing, though? This is not a choice between having the army run the show from A to Z, including feeding the detainees and housing them, or pulling out altogether and playing no part in the process at all.
Nowhere was it said that those who come to Malta without papers are going to be released into the country immediately, and this means that we will continue to have detention camps. Somebody will have to guard those camps – that much should be obvious. Equally obvious is the fact that it will have to be the army. Who else could it possibly be? The boy scouts? The National Council of Women? Vince Farrugia and the GRTU?
In every country where there are detention camps for immigrants, these are guarded by military police, soldiers, or the paramilitary. They are not guarded by civilians from non-governmental organisations or the civil service. The reason is simple: the borders of a country are guarded by the forces of the state, and the perimeter fence of a detention camp for illegal immigrants is nothing more than a representation of the borders of the state. Civilians cannot be made responsible for the guarding of borders.
Guarding the camps and running them are two separate responsibilities, and they should be kept that way. The forces of the state have the competence and responsibility for the first, and they should retain it. They now have the responsibility also for the second, but they do not have the competence for it, and so should be relieved of their duties in that regard. In short, the army should guard the camps, but others, like the Jesuit Refugee Service and the Red Cross, should run them, with funding from the government.
The way the camps are run now is like a textbook lesson in abysmal inefficiency. Yet all the talking and political hoo-ha cannot obscure the fact that this is a management job, pure and simple. There are probably managers in largish organisations who are reading this and nodding their heads. The army is not only guarding the perimeter of the camps, it is also administering to the needs of the people inside, right down to doing the daily cooking for hundreds of detainees. It would be less expensive and more efficient to farm out this daily mass catering, freeing up the army to do its duty elsewhere, even though we have yet to work out what that duty is, in a tiny island state that is perpetually at peace.
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The brigadier gave an interview in which he claimed that he cannot bear to think of those people exposed to the elements in torn tents, on nights when the temperature plummets to five degrees and the wind chill factor is lower still. One man has already died of an asthma attack by those terrible conditions. Even my dogs have kennels that are warmer and weatherproof, and if I were to leave them chained outside in a storm with little or no protection, I would find myself reported to the SPCA.
Last week, when the wind was ripping off aerials and slicing the plaster off the walls, as the hail hit the windows and the rain came through the doors, I lit a fire, poured liquid money into the paraffin heaters, and found myself unable to relax in the warmth. My thoughts kept going to those people just a few miles away, sitting in the mud under a torn piece of canvas. How can we be so cruel? For that is all it is, really, despite the political euphemisms we use, and the excuses we make to justify our behaviour (“Heqq, we can’t do
otherwise, eh!): sheer, unbelievable cruelty.
People will say, on the frequent occasions that this subject comes up: but where can they be housed? My answer is always the same one: the former British military barracks at Ghajn Tuffieha, that for the past few years have gone by the name of the Hal Ferh Holiday Complex. The place is perfectly suited to the purpose because it was built as barracks, and despite the conversion for habitation by tourists, it retains the original military format.
The place is isolated and has a perimeter that can be guarded. It is manageable, and easy to keep clean and organised. It has the right amount of sanitary facilities for that number of people, and a functional kitchen for mass catering. It is Spartan, and so will satisfy those who believe that illegal immigrants should be not be rewarded for their law-breaking wicc tost by being kept in undue comfort. Yet it is also fit for human beings, which a torn tent in the mud is not, whatever those human beings may have done. Even convicted murderers are kept out of the rain and are not forced to sleep in mud.
The Hal Ferh former barracks complex is empty for most of the year and, even when it has paying guests, it loses money. As a holiday complex, it does not perform. As a detention camp for those we class as illegal immigrants, it will perform admirably. It now fills its beds with bookings from Maltese teenagers on school party bonding weekends, and with happy-clappers on prayer group marathons.
Here is the chance to get that place to perform a useful service, something it has not really done since the British left. Hal Ferh, as with all former military barracks, is owned by the state and, or so I believe, by Air Malta, which is just an extension of the state. It does not have to be requisitioned or expropriated.
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Had I been called to speak at that national conference – an unlikelihood, given that my views about the detention camps are considered by the government to be irrational and even irresponsible – I would have been true to my pragmatic character, which fights shy of talking shops, and would have made a rational suggestion.
Solve the problem, I would have said, by putting the detainees in the Hal Ferh barracks. Get the army to guard the perimeter, get the Red Cross and other NGOs to run the camp, have two doctors call every day, and above all, outsource the catering.
It does not take Edward de Bono to see this, for heaven’s sake, nor does it take a Harvard DBA to conclude that a job performed in mud is that much more difficult, unless the job is mud-wrestling. Yet all we got at that national conference was more of what we do so well: talk, talk, describe the obvious, talk, talk and talk some more, slap each other on the back and tell ourselves how clever we are for talking so much and so well.
Did they have to get together and have a conference? Could the police, the army, the Red Cross, the consultant who drew up the report, and all the others, simply not have emailed each other the papers they read out? Could they also have not emailed them to the press? Could they not have simplified it further still by posting those papers on the internet and asking the rest of us to read them? No, because that would have been too cost-and-time efficient, and we do not like that, do we? We like to talk, preferably in front of an audience.
We do not solve problems; we just get people together to talk about them, and then feel we have done our bit.
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The brigadier said in his interview that, when Xarabank tackled the subject of the Safi beatings, he had all his men summoned on standby at the barracks for the duration of the show. Not to watch it on a giant flat-screen, you understand, but because he was afraid they would join the studio audience or find some other way to make their views known on air. As the brigadier himself pointed out to his interviewer, the army gives clear instructions against communication with the media.
Yet the brigadier felt those orders are not enough. He did not trust his men to obey them, so he corralled them instead, and physically prevented them from disobeying. It was the equivalent of grounding a 15-year-old to prevent her from going to a sex-and-drugs party, because you cannot trust her not to go if she is allowed out for the evening.
Yet we are not speaking about a 15-year-old here. We are speaking about the Maltese army, whose soldiers apparently cannot be trusted by their brigadier to obey simple, clear, strict instructions. He feared that, if he had simply told them not to speak to the media, not to join the Xarabank audience, and not to air their views on radio and television or to write to the newspapers, they would metaphorically wave two fingers at him and go ahead and do so anyway.
It is for this reason, if for no other, that we should be grateful for the redundancy of the Maltese army, and that it will never be called upon to defend us.
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There are 18 members of the police force who are facing criminal proceedings, the minister of what was formerly the interior told parliament. Ten of them have been suspended from the force. What about the other eight, we should know?