There are many reasons why Friday’s report on the disturbance at Lyster Detention Centre earlier this year doesn’t impress me much. For one, I didn’t find the disturbances at all disturbing. I rather thought of them as the predictable and desirable result of a policy that insists on locking up migrants for up to 18 months and denying them all access to the staples of a democratic society – things like the media and so on.
Why ‘desirable’? Because there are circumstances in which protest by any means fair or foul is the only chance to make one’s voice heard. I wouldn’t call the Tienanmen or the June 7, 1919, riots undesirable or unwarranted. The first were the only means of representation possible in an oppressive state, the second the result of widespread poverty and injustice at the hands of the British and their menagerie of fat toadies.
The clue is in the timing. The riots at Lyster took place on the day of a visit by a parliamentary delegation (a rather passive one, apparently). It’s obvious that the riot was one of representation. And, since I think representation is desirable, it follows that I should deem the riots necessary. Ugly, as in the best part riots are, but desirable nonetheless. The real mystery is why the riots don’t happen more often. I suppose rubber bullets and batons provide useful clues.
There’s also a bit of a question as to why there was only one riot rather than two: the first inside the centre and the second outside, by a crowd of journalists demanding access and information. Then again, the Eurovision song contest and the litany of stories of big-hearted Maltese (‘il-qalb kbira tal-Maltin’) must be seen to.
The second reason why I wasn’t exactly flummoxed by the report is in the following lines: “Over the years, stakeholders in the sector, particularly NGOs, have argued against detention, which may cause frustration among irregular migrants. It is however to be recalled that those in need of international protection are granted such protection, along with attendant rights ...”.
I love the “may cause frustration” bit. It reminds me of the Burns inquiry of 2000 which concluded, among other things, that foxhunting “may compromise the welfare of the fox”. What can I say? If 18 months of detention may cause frustration, migrants must be a right edgy bunch.
But there’s a more serious side to this. It’s obvious that the authors of the report believe detention is acceptable. They even say there is “a need to retain a detention policy on the basis of security considerations”, among other things. It follows that they should read the riot as a disturbance of the rightful order.
It wasn’t that. Detention has consistently been shown to play dirty tricks on inmates’ state of mind and to have long-lasting effects on their psychological and social welfare. The arguments for are, frankly speaking, ridiculous. Take that from ‘security’. The idea apparently is that it is necessary to detain migrants in order to be able to weed out any terrorists. Nonsense, for three reasons.
First, it flies in the face of all the recent evidence which shows that terrorists are usually well-organised and well-equipped enough not to have to travel half-naked in wobbly boats. The Mumbai attacks of 2008 came from the sea alright, but the terrorists used high-speed inflatables and carried an arsenal of weapons and equipment.
Second, if the possibility of budding Bin Ladens were real, detention would be a recipe for disaster. I can’t think of a better recruiting ground for terrorists than a prison full of disaffected and desperate young men.
Third, the notion that we are surrounded by a hidden enemy, and that anyone who is a bit dark is likely to spend their spare time plotting and fiddling with fuses, is a pig-headed legacy of the George W. Bush days. That paranoia poisoned our lives and made a nightmare of the simple act of packing a hand-luggage. The sooner we leave it behind, the better.
Which leaves us with a question. If the official arguments are obviously baseless, what are the real reasons behind the detention policy?
It is clear to me that the policy is based on two principles. The first is that of deterrence. Detention sends a message to prospective migrants, the logic goes. That message is that life in Malta for asylum seekers is nasty, brutish, and best avoided.
The real mystery is why the riots don’t happen more often
The principle of deterrence was spelled out in a public meeting held at Safi in 2005. The exact words were that the best solution to the problem of migration is to make the lives of migrants “as arduous as possible”. The speaker at that event was Imperium Europa leader Norman Lowell. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the logic is flawed, but it does give us some idea of its ideological and moral bearings.
Which is the whole point really. The principle of deterrence by detention and/or other means is immoral, whether or not it actually works. (Concentration camps served their purpose rather well, I suppose.) It is based on a sick collectivist ideology that overlooks individual suffering for the sake of some grand scheme of social engineering. It is, quite simply, fascist.
The second principle on which the detention policy is based is that of sectioning and its political dividends. The bogeyman in question is black and comes to us by the boatload. There are millions of bogeymen in North Africa waiting to do just that. It’s a national emergency (never mind that boats have been rather thin on the water of late) which calls for decisive action by our elected champions.
Only they can’t do very much about it. That’s where Plan B comes in. If you can’t keep the bogeyman out of the island, you can at least keep him out of general circulation – or appear to be doing so.
If this were a scholarly piece I would at this stage lapse into ‘techniques of marginalisation’ jargon and such. I would also probably mention the numerous examples of such techniques that have been described by migration scholars. But since it isn’t I’ll just say it’s all a matter of political expediency really, paid for once again by the suffering of migrants in detention.
I don’t care much if the rubber bullets came from “warning shots” that were “clearly off-target” (that report again). The point is that riots are what you get when you proceed to make, in a systematic and institutionalised way, people’s lives as arduous as possible.
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