Over a month has passed since the National Conference on Immigration and despite a clear government commitment to “improve material conditions” in detention centres and to set up an “action group” to tackle immigration, it seems that little or nothing has so far been done. Raphael Vassallo reports

Over the past week, individual social workers and members of non-governmental organisations have contacted this newspaper to express their disappointment with the outcome of last month’s National Conference on Immigration.

These volunteers, who requested not to be identified either by name or by NGO, expressed their frustration that “an ideal opportunity had been wasted”, and also their scepticism that the conference may have been viewed by government simply as a public relations exercise to give the impression that some form of action was being taken.

According to NGO members, the bold claims made over a month ago by Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi and Justice Minister Tonio Borg have yet to be translated into any form of concrete action. Last Tuesday, The Malta Independent specifically asked Minister Borg to confirm whether the promised “action group” had been set up; to identify its members, and to explain what “concrete policies” had been adopted since the conference. At the time of going to print, our questions have not even been acknowledged, still less answered. Meanwhile, a number of volunteers who work on the ground at closed detention centres have confirmed that “no significant changes” have yet taken place. As things stand, the only noticeable recent change has been a speeding up of the application process: since 13 January, some 120 detainees have been released from detention.

Conditions at Safi still “unacceptable by any standards”

This is cold comfort to the remaining detainees, who, in spite of repeated government promises, continue to live in conditions which have been variously described as “shocking”, “inhumane”, “mediaeval” and “unacceptable”.

According to a report published by JRS and presented during the conference, “the current conditions fail to guarantee asylum seekers even the most basic standard of living”, including electricity, hot water, and heating/cooling facilities. More specifically, the number one concern is the appalling state of the sanitary facilities at Hal Safi... as well as the apparent non-existence of any form of sanitary facilities at the makeshift detention centre at the police HQ in Floriana.

Despite any number of public commitments to install new facilities, social workers have confirmed that, up to this very day, there are still only four mobile toilets to cater for the needs of all detainees in Safi – who, at the camp’s most overcrowded moments, numbered just under 2,000.

It seems also that the drainage system in use at the barracks is archaic and needs to be replaced altogether. The drainage pipes are too narrow to cope with the sheer volume of waste, with the result that these four over-used toilets are more often than not blocked, resulting in a daily health hazard to the immigrants.

Ironically, this is one area where the AFM guards fare even worse than the detainees. For while the immigrants’ sanitary facilities are at best insufficient, the AFM quarters apparently do not have any toilets at all. This state of affairs leaves soldiers with little choice but to either use the detainees’ facilities, or to relieve themselves in the open air. The fact that they tend to choose the latter option (according to at least one eye-witness account) is itself testimony to the squalid living conditions in Malta’s detention centres, unchanged since last month’s national conference.

Of health and accountability

One issue which has been raised separately by all the social workers who spoke to The Malta Independent is that the medical facilities in closed detention centres are grossly insufficient to meet the needs of the detainees.

This view was amply corroborated by an article in The Times last week, in which doctors complained about the state of medical facilities at Safi, claiming that there is no permanent clinic on-site, that essential equipment is virtually non-existent, and that visits have to carried out in the presence of other detainees – with the undignified result that female patients are expected to undress in the presence of male immigrants, and vice-versa.

One social worker in particular also complained that at this stage, there is “no sense of accountability” among the administrators of the camp. After a visit by the camp’s doctor, individual soldiers are entrusted with purchasing the prescribed medicines and distributing them to the detainees. However, there does not seem to be any monitoring of the proceedings, or any form of accountability whatsoever – a fact which inevitably allows for the possibility of serious abuse. (However, it must be added that this latter concern was not shared by all the NGOs who contacted this newspaper.)

“We are not nurses”

All NGOs, however, concur that the quality of medical treatment itself leaves much to be desired. Another concern is that the authorities – not just the administrators of the compound itself, but also the Ministry responsible for detention as a policy – appear not to be answerable to anyone when things go wrong.

A case in point is that of Zeray Okbaledet, the Eritrean national who passed away early in February, presumably due to complications arising from an asthmatic attack. For one thing, news of Mr Okbaledet’s death was revealed during the conference itself by AD chairman Harry Vassallo – and not, as one would reasonably expect in a country which values democratic principles such as “transparency”, by any formal government communication channel. After Dr Vassallo’s revelation, Police Commissioner John Rizzo hastily admitted that Mr Okbadelet had indeed passed away – adding that a magisterial inquiry, conducted by Silvio Meli, had immediately been ordered.

This latter detail, however, did not deter Minister Tonio Borg from summarily passing his own judgment on the issue. After the conference, the Minister informed the press that the 45-year-old Eritrean had died “of natural causes”. Exactly how he came to this conclusion is unclear, considering that the magisterial inquiry had only just been ordered. It is also unclear why this inquiry was even deemed necessary, considering that the Minister had already pre-empted (and thereby, to a certain extent, also influenced) the inquiry’s outcome.

Meanwhile, the only details of the precise circumstances surrounding this mysterious death were supplied by Dr Vassallo himself, who claimed that Zeray Okbadelet had been “denied essential treatment” owing to the general lack of medical facilities. This version of events has since been corroborated by at least one social worker, who confirmed to this newspaper that the soldiers on duty at the time had refused to administer oxygen to the patient and that, when asked specifically to do so, they replied: “We are not nurses.”

This detail can only add weight to the conclusions reached by the Scicluna Report – which stipulated, among other things, that the Armed Forces was not the right institution to take care of immigrants in detention. However, it seems that the Scicluna Report, like the Prime Minister’s announcement of an “action group”, has also been forgotten.

The cost of detention

Meanwhile, a number of observations made by social workers have thrown into serious question the general management of detention centres. Many of these involve poor planning and the execution of harebrained policies, which not only cause direct discomfort and stress to the detainees, but also burden the country with considerable (and unnecessary) costs.

One simple example involves food. At present, government spends Lm470 a day on feeding the detainees (source: parliamentary question). However, much of this food goes to waste simply because not enough thought was given beforehand to the dietary requirements of asylum seekers.

“It is a widely known fact that 20 per cent of all Africans suffer from a condition known as ‘G6PD’ (an allergic reaction to certain legumes),” explained one social worker. “And yet, asylum seekers are fed on items such as peas and beans, etc., which cannot be digested by sufferers of this condition without causing serious medical problems” – medical problems which, needless to add, will only contribute further to the cost of detention.

In addition, it is common knowledge that Muslims will refuse to touch processed meat products, such as burgers or sausages, for purely religious reasons. Needless to say, burgers and sausages feature prominently on the Hal Safi menu, where a sizeable percentage of detainees are Muslim.

Still on the subject of food, there is even an environmental consideration to take into account. According to the same social worker, most of the food that enters the compound comes in containers made out of polystyrene (more commonly known as jablo): a substance which is non-biodegradable, and more harmful to the environment even than the celebrated plastic bags against which the government has, so to speak, “declared war”.

This means that while the Environment Ministry pats itself on the back for reducing the amount of plastic finding its way into the waste-stream, Hal Safi alone contributes to that same waste-stream somewhere in the region of 1,600 hazardous, non-degradable containers... every day.

Malta “hopelessly unprepared” for another influx

In the final analysis, however, the bulk of the volunteers’ concerns at present involves Malta’s state of preparedness (or otherwise) for future influxes.

NGOs such as JRS and the Red Cross have long been arguing that Malta needs a permanent storage facility for basic commodities, to be accessed whenever the need arises. This way, should large numbers of immigrants arrive simultaneously (as has happened here in the past, and as happened on the island of Lampedusa just last week), social workers would be able to provide these immigrants with the bare essentials for survival in detention, ie, blankets, clothes, etc., at short notice.

However, appeals for such storage facilities have repeatedly fallen on deaf ears, as have similar appeals for better transport, and for such basic emergency procedures as a stand-by fire-engine. In fact, had a fire-engine been present at Safi on 13 January (as recommended by NGOs), the Armed Forces would have had at their disposal an alternative means of coping with the protest. Rather than simply tearing into the protesters with truncheons, they could have used the less violent but equally effective measure of spraying the protesters with a jet of water – as tends to happen in similar situations elsewhere.

All things said, then, it seems that the government has chosen to adopt a purely “knee-jerk reaction” approach to the phenomenon of immigration, dealing with each individual problem only as it arises, and not taking the necessary steps to ensure that detention centres are equipped, if not luxuriously, at least for the “basic minimum standard of living” requested by NGOs, and supposedly guaranteed to all human beings by our Constitution.