Malta fears sinking under migrants Dan Bilefsky | International Herald Tribune | June 6, 2006
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/06/06/news/malta.php Tourists are greeted with smiles as they fan out of luxury cruise liners in the harbor of this idyllic Mediterranean island. But on the other side of town, newly arrived African "boat people" get a different message, written in bright orange graffiti near the entrance of a refugee center: "Blacks Go Home." Warsame Ali Garare, a 27-year-old Somalian migrant, would like to do just that. Rejected by a country that wishes his rickety wooden fishing vessel had never washed ashore and unable to return to his war-ravaged home, Ali Garare says he feels trapped in a place that has become more prison than paradise. "You feel closed in," says the quietly articulate former language teacher, who arrived here via Libya two years ago after a six-day sea journey in which his boat nearly sank. "You can't leave, you can't go back, and the Maltese people don't want you here and don't want to know you. So you try to be invisible and worry about a future that may never come." On a migration route between Africa and mainland Europe, this island of 400,000 inhabitants - the second most densely populated country in the world - finds itself on the front line of Europe's spiraling migration crisis. More than 1,822 migrants arrived last year. That may not sound like many. But because of Malta's small size - 316 square kilometers, or 122 square miles - the arrival of 6,000 migrants since 2002 is the per capita equivalent of one million people streaming into Germany. Locals say they fear the island will sink under the strain. "We are a just a tiny island, we are just too small to absorb all of these people," says Joseph Muscat, a doctor and former member of Parliament. "The risk is that the Africans will stay here and become part of us." West Africans have also been flooding into Spain's Canary Islands in recent weeks, prompting the ill-prepared European Union to scramble to dispatch emergency patrol boats and planes to the region to prevent the illegal migrants from entering. In Malta, the migrants come primarily from Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Sudan - and most land by mistake while trying to reach Italy from Libya, 290 kilometers, or 180 miles, to the south. On Friday, 15 migrants drowned when their boat capsized off the Maltese coast, adding to the hundreds who have died in the past few years. Several corpses have been discovered by local fishermen, their brown skin bleached white by the sun and the sea salt, their eyes gouged out by seagulls. So many bodies have been found that some locals say they are afraid to eat the fish. Maltese officials say the country, which joined the EU in 2004, is trapped because it must obey EU rules requiring the first country where illegal immigrants land to be responsible for them and determine whether they should be granted asylum or sent home. Even if the majority of the migrants do not want to be here, the government cannot afford to repatriate them. Malta's larger EU neighbors, struggling with their own swelling migrant populations, do not want them either. "We have no hinterland and there is nowhere for these migrants to go, so we are stuck with them and they are stuck with us," said Martin Scicluna, the Interior Ministry's adviser on migration affairs. Nearly 1,500 migrants are living in eight locked detention centers across the island: grim former army barracks, converted warehouses and open fields. A 2004 report by the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture likened the centers, where the migrants are held for up to 18 months, to prisons. The majority of migrants to Malta fail to win asylum status, but 55 percent are granted "humanitarian protection," which allows them to stay in open centers and seek low-paid work. They are typically not allowed to travel to other European countries. The island's largest detention center, Safi, is off limits to journalists, but can be accessed by a footpath that leads across an open field, near Malta's airport. On a recent day, soldiers led out pairs of detainees in handcuffs to a nearby barbed- wire fence. There, they were greeted rapturously by throngs of recently released friends, who exchanged news and packs of cigarettes, sandals and corn oil, smuggled under a hole in the fence. "I am not a criminal, all I want is a better life - and look at me," said Diko Osman, 25, an engineer who recently arrived from Ivory Coast, as he tried to clasp hands with a friend on the other side. Osman said that he and 50 fellow detainees slept in a 10-by-12 meter, or 33- by-39 foot, room. He said hygiene conditions were intolerable. "We have nothing to do but sleep, sleep and wait," he said. Scicluna, the government adviser, said the centers were "not a pretty sight," but safe and clean. The arrival of so many migrants in this insular, overwhelmingly Roman Catholic country is spawning a backlash. In the past three months, seven cars at the Jesuit Refugee Service have been covered in gasoline and set ablaze, and volunteers who work with the migrants have had their homes set on fire. Last month, a Congolese man said a local motorist deliberately tried to run him over. A few months ago, stacks of fliers signed "KKK" for Ku Klux Klan were thrown into the entrance of the Marsa refugee center here. The pamphlets told illegal immigrants to "get out or we will start killing you." A local far-right leader, Norman Lowell, said in January 2005 that refugee boats should be prevented from docking and, after a warning, sunk if necessary. Martin Degiorgio, a travel agent and amateur historian who participates in mock historical battles re-enacted on the island, recently founded the Republican National Alliance, an anti-migrant pressure group. He is lobbying the government to repatriate the migrants, arguing that the "boat people" are threatening the country's social fabric, taking Maltese jobs, and draining government funds. "We are a close-knit society and the migrants are destroying our culture," Degiorgio said from his car, with DVX - the Latin letters for "Duce," the title of the Italian Fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini - written on his license plate. Currently, 1 percent of the country's national budget and 10 percent of its army and police force are devoted to dealing with the migrants. As for popular sentiment, a recent poll by Malta's Sunday Times found that 90 percent of the population would not want an Arab, African or Jewish neighbor. On Thursday, thousands of anti-immigration demonstrators will march through the baroque center of Valletta with signs urging people to defend their country. In front of a square commemorating the defense against the siege of Malta by the Muslim Turks in 1565, Degiorgio said he would warn that the Africans risked turning Malta into the toilet of the Mediterranean. "Islam took the island by force, and now the Africans are invading us silently," he said. The Reverend Paul Pace, head of the Jesuit Refugee Service, said the backlash was an outgrowth of the fear of invasion in the psyche of a country that is ringed by giant fortresses meant to fend off enemy invaders. First colonized by the Phoenicians, Malta has since been ruled by Romans, the Byzantine empire, Arabs, Normans, the Knights of St. John, the French, and the British. It gained independence in 1964. "We get 1.2 million tourists each year - more than three times our population - and have no fear of foreigners," Pace said. "But the Maltese like them as long as they aren't black." It is this harsh reality that is causing Ali Garare, the Somalian refugee, to despair. He left Somalia in 2002, reached Libya the following year, and in 2004 paid 1,000, equal to $1,280 today, to a smuggler who put him and 17 other Africans into a 3-meter wooden boat, where they spent six days huddled together. During the trip, the boat nearly filled up with water and several people tried to throw themselves overboard, Ali Garare said. Today, Ali Garare is trying to get on with his life. He works as a translator at the Marsa refugee center, a converted school where 700 migrants are packed into dormitories so overcrowded that the center has been forced to erect makeshift tents. Inside, the temperature can rise to 55 degrees Celsius (130 Fahrenheit) in the summer heat. "We are at absolute limits," said Terry Gosden, the center's affable British coordinator, turning a young African man away. Under Gosden's guidance, the migrants operate four restaurants, an Internet café, a cinema, and a hairdressing salon. Many of them work in the local construction and sanitation industries, and a few, like Ali Garare, have moved into low-rent apartments in the city center. Gosden said Ali Garare, who has taught himself Maltese and speaks five languages, has become an indispensable mediator who helps keep the peace among the center's disparate groups. "Warsame is someone who most countries would dream of having," he said. But Ali Garare says he will never feel at home in a country that will not accept him. "I worry about the future," he said from inside a tent where a group of refugees were helping to build a makeshift air-conditioner, using a fan and pointing it at a bucket of melted ice. "How long can we go on like this?" ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Get to your groups with one click. 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