An attempt to cover up a cover-up with a bigger cover-up is how I would describe what the Prime Minister did in Parliament on Wednesday. Reacting to what he termed the sanctimoniousness of the Opposition on the Manuel Mallia case, he tabled a 2012 report on the state of migrant detention which he said put Carmelo Mifsud Bonnici (who was Home Affairs Minister at the time) in bad light.
The idea was to shame the Opposition into seeing the beam in its eye, so to say. Surely a party that, when in government, had failed to publish a damning report on something as serious as abusive detention, did not have the moral authority to criticise Mallia’s or the present government’s shortcomings.
Let us for the sake of argument accept that Mifsud Bonnici did indeed cover up the Valenzia report (it was written by magistrate Geoffrey Valenzia). He has denied having done so, but never mind. Let us also accept that the Opposition’s past is such that the party enjoys little to no moral authority.
Still, that leaves us with a burning question. Why did the Prime Minister not publish the Valenzia report himself? He’s been in power for almost two years now, and the contents of the report scarcely leave room for dithering.
The reason why Muscat chose to table the report on Wednesday is that he seems to think of it as a device by which to neutralise the Opposition. In other words, a report that should have launched a thousand soul-searches has been reduced to a political pawn.
One can only appreciate the seriousness of this when one looks at some of the findings of the report. The personnel in charge of the wellbeing of hundreds of migrants are described as the deadwood of the army, in some cases people with a criminal record. The migrants were living in dire conditions of extreme heat, filth and overcrowding. At least one officer took to womanising with the female detainees. And so on.
It was an accident waiting to happen. And it did. On June 30, 2012, 32-year-old Mamadou Kamara died after a vicious beating at the hands of two soldiers. To those who knew what detention was about, Kamara’s death was shocking but hardly surprising. Rotten regimes produce rotten results.
This is the kind of information that was withheld, possibly by the Nationalist and later by the current Labour governments. The Valenzia report is one of the most damning documents I have ever had the displeasure to read. It should have spawned an urgent and radical rethink of the system.
And yet it was consigned to a drawer. The key to that drawer has been with Muscat since March 2013. It is breathtaking to think that the Prime Minister had the cheek to turn to it now, in circumstances which seriously compromise the report’s potential impact.
Why did the Prime Minister not publish the Valenzia report himself?
Only we’ve been told that things have changed, that the findings of the report are no longer relevant. On Friday, Colonel Mario Schembri, who is now responsible for Detention Services, told Times of Malta that all was now fine and sunny down at the barracks. The nasty people have been replaced with nice ones and “operations were running smoothly”.
Thing is, why should we be expected to believe Schembri, or the people he represents? I for one, don’t, for at least two reasons.
First, it’s not the first time we’ve been told that detention is humane and running smoothly. For example, Andrew Azzopardi once wrote that he had been invited to walk around Lyster Barracks, parts of which were a sort of Potemkin village of detention centres. He reported high standards of hygiene, top-notch medical facilities, forthcoming personnel and a well-stocked library no less. That was in 2011, around the time of the horrors described in the Valenzia report.
I don’t think Azzopardi was lying. He was just massively gullible and had been taken for a ride by people whose job it was to maintain a veneer of acceptability. But if that was the case then, why should I just happily believe that the veneer is gone now?
Which brings me to my second point. I might perhaps be convinced to believe Schembri, had there been some kind of overhaul of the system. But there hasn’t, not remotely.
People I spoke to from a migration NGO told me that they’ve been pushing for reforms for several years, and that those reforms became a matter of life and death when Kamara was killed. Only they never came.
The only reason why the situation may, in fact, be a bit better now is that there are far fewer people in detention – about a hundred of them as I write. The clue to that greatly reduced figure is Mare Nostrum, of course.
Other than that, nothing has changed. The detention regime is still very much in place and will revert to type as an overcrowded and filthy den of State-sponsored cruelty the minute a boatload of asylum seekers make it to Malta.
The Valenzia report is not about a cover-up by a minister who has since joined his colleagues on the Opposition benches. Nor is it about the moral standards of the Nationalist Party. Rather, it challenges the very fundamentals of the detention regime in Malta and puts into question our human rights record as a country.
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