I read a story in The Observer about how Lampedusa – an island much smaller than Malta and with far fewer resources – is coping with the illegal immigrants who are washed up on its shores. What struck me most is not that Lampedusa has very many more such people to contend with, but how different the attitude of the quoted officials is to that of our own. Our Minister of Home Affairs, when interviewed for The Financial Times, went to great pains to make it sound as though Malta is under siege and cannot cope. Even when communicating through Maltese newspapers, he used the terminology of battles and sieges: we are being “invaded” and the police are battling “bravely”. Indeed.
He demanded help from other countries and more or less said that Malta would renege on its international obligations if such help is not forthcoming. This instead of pointing out to his badly-informed electorate that Malta has a legal as well as a moral duty to rescue those in peril on the sea, when that peril occurs within our waters. He hasn’t gone to any pains at all to explain to the befuddled electorate some basic aspects of international law, and though he has pointed out – in tones of regret, it has to be said – that the rescued cannot simply be shoved onto planes and flown back to North Africa, he hasn’t explained why not. If he won’t, then some other figure of authority should. The Minister of Home Affairs would be astonished to find out just how many people know only what they were taught at school or university, what their friend or neighbour told them, and what they read in the Sunday newspaper. They know nothing else, and they don’t try to find out.
Nowhere among the Minister of Home Affairs’ quoted remarks in The Financial Times was there any acknowledgement of the fact that these are defenceless human beings under discussion. Instead, he spoke as though they are inconvenient crates of cargo irritatingly delivered to the wrong address, or a Martian invasion. That must have struck something of a discordant note with readers of The Financial Times, so soon after they had heard Bob Geldof speak during Live 8 about the countless deaths in the Mediterranean of Africans desperate to make something of this one life they have. “Dead children are being washed up on the beaches at Lampedusa,” he shouted.
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The Lampedusan authorities were annoyed when they heard that – and not because Bob Geldof failed to call for international assistance for them, rather than for the desperate Africans. They were angry because, in the words of Commander Cavallin of the Guardia di Finanza, his men risk their lives every day to rescue survivors of the broken boats. His tone and attitude, when he was quoted by The Observer, could not have been further removed from that of our Minister of Home Affairs, quoted in The Financial Times.
“When the sea consents, we get 250 to 300 of these poveracci every day,” he said. “You see the tears, the terror in their eyes – it is always a desperate situation. Once, when a woman and her children were brought for questioning about their identity, my wife came by with some sweets for the children. They did not know how to open them or what they were, because they had never seen sweets before.” He showed the reporter from The Observer a plaque hanging on his office wall: a commendation signed by President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, for the particularly difficult rescue some time ago of a boatload of people. “There were a lot of dead people in that boat – 13 bodies,” Commander Cavallin said. “I found this girl and she was frozen, completely frozen, and almost dead. I pulled her out and warmed her with my own body to keep her alive.” She lived, but he and his men were quarantined for a month.
Do you see what I mean? Commander Cavallin speaks of them as people, in full and profound recognition of their plight. Our politicians, with the exception of the Prime Minister, speak as though of vermin, using words like “invasion”, and the subtext is that they wish they could call in the rat-catchers. They speak as though Malta, with its hundreds of thousands of tourist arrivals, is collapsing under the weight of some hundreds of boat people. They cannot understand why others laugh disbelievingly and shake their heads in amazement when they speak as though the plight of the “brave Maltese” is greater than that of those miserable wretches in boats, and suggest that it is the Maltese who need rescuing, rather than those in danger of drowning.
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Their attitude is, quite frankly, not just contemptible but ludicrous. They are an embarrassment in the public arena, without the intelligence to realise that, even if they wish to mimic the voice and attitudes of those who elect them, they should adopt another tone when speaking in forums where people are more sophisticated. As it is, they come across like confounded housewives who behave as though it’s the end of the world because their washing machine has broken down and they can’t wash their husband’s shirts and their children’s underpants. I rather suspect that, like the housewife whose entire world is composed of a few streets and her family, our politicians don’t know what real problems are, and they are only just beginning to find out.
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All they have to do is compare the numbers. So far this year, the Guardia di Finanza in Lampedusa has rescued 5,000 people. Commander Cavallin predicts that the final tally for the year will be 10,000, as it was last year. The record for him and his men was 1,000 people arriving in 48 hours. And we complain. We complain – fully-fledged nation State with a functioning army, police force, and considerably more space and resources than Lampedusa
The Lampedusans at least have struck the right note when speaking about this. We, on the other hand, are completely discordant, vacillating between piteous mewling and the sort of threats that Tom Thumb might have made. When our politicians – especially our government politicians – speak about the illegal immigrants who come in by boat, they should choose their words carefully, and not behave as though Malta is quite apart from the rest of civilization, even though to all intents and purposes, and despite membership of the European Union, it remains dangerously near to being so. Isolated from the mainstream for so long, we have remained emotionally and intellectually stunted, the developed world moving on without us. It will take much, much more than a drive towards state-of-the-art information technology to make Malta a modern State.
Lampedusa is a tiny volcanic island with a population of just 5,500 – far fewer than the number of students on our university campus. Last year, the people of Lampedusa rescued 10,000 boat-people – twice their population – and coped with them. The remark that Lampedusa is part of Italy is fatuous. In geographical terms, the island is further away from mainland Italy than Malta is: 205km off the coast of Sicily. It is also closer to North Africa: 113km from Tunisia. It is the people of Lampedusa, and not the central government in Rome, who are on the front-line, dealing with these survivors. But their attitude is completely different to ours. They have more compassion, more humaneness, and a far better understanding of how to speak of this problem to others.
Despite an influx of boat-people that was double the population over the course of a year, Commander Cavallin said: “It’s not true to say that we are under siege here.” The Observer’s reporter, who described him and his men as “enjoying a break from their daily routine of picking up survivors from the boats”, suggested to him that it must be difficult work, intercepting the boats and dealing with such wretchedness every day. Where a Maltese politician or other figure of authority might have leapt at this heaven-sent opportunity for a self-pitying “the world revolves around my navel” moan, Commander Cavallin answered with the typical Italian sang-froid that seems to have percolated right down to Lampedusa: “Yes, but you become used to it.”
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The people of Lampedusa are angry at accusations that they cannot cope, not just because they go out of their way to rescue these people before they drown, but also for another, more prosaic reason. It’s bad for the tourism on which the island depends. “It’s bad for our business when the impression is given that we are under siege,” said one hotelier there. Even the local secretary of the ultra-right Lega Nord says that the picture being painted of Lampedusa bursting at the seams with illegal immigrants is wrong. Even she is angry because tourism figures have plummeted, and she says that it is because of the adverse publicity. This despite the fact that her other views bear a remarkable similarity to those of the emotionally and intellectually stunted people who write letters to the newspapers, discussing these people as though they were animals. (“We don’t know who these people are, or what their intentions may be. They are a threat to the Italian way of life. We don’t want them here. We don’t know who they are and what they believe in. They should go back to their own countries” – Angela Maraventano of the Lega Nord in Lampedusa). How interesting to see that the politicians of Malta, which also depends on tourism, are those shouting the loudest to make sure that everybody in Europe gets the impression that we are being submerged beneath a sea of washed-up bodies. And instead of being criticised for doing so, by the people of Malta who live by tourism, they are praised. One day, I might understand.
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I might understand, too, how so very many Maltese have succeeded in performing the impossible: being Catholic without being Christian. If all these horrid little men and women who delight in parading their sheer callousness and utter stupidity in the newspapers on a daily basis didn’t also flaunt their “religion” like a flag of war, I wouldn’t be as bothered. I would say that every country has its dregs and its rubbish, and be done with it. Yet they provoke fascination as well as disgust. I am at a loss to understand what form of Christianity it is that they profess, with all their duttrina and their masses and their chest-thumping, and their waving of flags for the Pope. “Whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers, that, you do unto Me,” is virtually the only Christian instruction that has stayed with me from primary school, where we were made to sing it every day – but then, it is the only instruction a Christian needs, because it is the one on which Christianity is built. Clearly, Paul of Tarsus, a Syrian washed up on our shores, did not do a thorough job of converting the Maltese from paganism.
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Our callousness is surpassed only by our ignorance. We look at the Mediterranean Sea on maps and think of it as a cosy little basin that can be crossed quickly and with ease in a matchbox. I am astounded that so many who have lived all their lives slap-bang in the middle of the Mediterranean do not have any idea what a savage, dangerous and unpredictable sea it is. Expanses of water that look small on paper (as does North America) are vast, lonely and frightening. I don’t know whether to weep with pity for their foolishness, or cringe with embarrassment at their lack of knowledge, when I read suggestions that Libya and Malta should “line up” patrol boats and naval vessels “along the Libyan coast”, to prevent illegal emigrants from leaving. This can only be the suggestion of somebody who has only ever played with boats in his bath-tub, and who thinks that because the Libyan coast is only a few centimetres long on his son’s school atlas, then it can’t be much longer in real life.
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Malta is not bearing the brunt of the Mediterranean boat people problem. Lampedusa is. The figures speak for themselves. And if they are coping with grace under pressure, then we too can do the same, not least because we are better equipped to do so. We can start by acknowledging the presence of suffering in our midst, and by ceasing all attempts at finding a solution to the problem, and an easy one at that. Had we not been so protected from reality for so long, closeted like nuns and sheltered like village housewives on a national scale, then we would know that, in the real world, very many problems do not have solutions, and they are the worst ones. One does not seek a solution; one simply buckles down and copes. With the current scenario, that is what we must do: we have to cope, not whine and complain and shout for some mythical European parent to come and save us.
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I will round this off by quoting Barbara McMahon of The Observer, who was in Lampedusa: “The smell is awful. Sour and overpowering, it rises from two wooden boats and two rubber dinghies tied up in a far corner of the picturesque harbour on the Italian island of Lampedusa. In these small craft some 300 people arriving from North Africa in search of new lives in Europe have endured dangerous journeys at sea, crammed together without adequate water, food, shelter or toilets….The terrible stench gives some idea of the ordeal they must have endured. ‘When they arrive they are suffering from nausea, vomiting, sunburn, dehydration, hypoglycaemia, diarrhoea,’ says Dr Claudia Codesani from the charity Medicins Sans Frontieres. ‘They have been at sea for 17 hours or for as long as five or six days, and they are desperate to eat and drink. Everyone is shocked and frightened. Many of them say to me, ‘Where is the train station for Milan?’’… The people-smugglers know full well that the boats will not reach mainland Italy. They crush in as many people as possible, give one of them a compass and direct him to steer due north. As they set off from Libya or Tunisia, the passengers are unaware that they have only enough fuel to reach Lampedusa. Overcrowded and dangerously low in the water, these boats of misery limp along in the swelling waters of the Mediterranean until, if they are lucky, they are spotted by Italian coastguards.”
The only thing a decent human being can say after reading that is ‘there but for the grace of God…’. And if you call yourself a Christian, you have to remind yourself that it is Christ vomiting in that stinking, fetid, crippled boat, and not a nigger animal who’s coming to take your job, marry your daughter and convert you forcibly away from the Christianity you profess, but in name only, as a badge of cultural identity.