Tiny Malta feels pressure of illegal immigration crisis

Robin Pomeroy:

More densely populated than Bangladesh, Malta has little room to house illegal immigrants. Even the newcomers, fleeing to Europe from war and poverty in Africa and Asia, know the island is approaching crisis point.

"There are 400,000 people here. The problem is the land isn't enough for the Maltese, so how about the refugees?" said Mohammed Abdull Osman, a 26-year-old Somali who like thousands of others landed in Malta in a fishing boat from Libya.

This year at least 1,800 immigrants have arrived in Malta -- a rocky outcrop barely twice the size of Washington DC at just 316 square km (122 sq mile).

The wave of migration began in earnest in 2002. Most immigrants land in Malta by mistake as they try to reach the European mainland on overcrowded, wooden fishing boats or are picked up by Maltese authorities, who have a duty to save lives at sea.

Just as the new arrivals don't want to be here, many Maltese would rather they were elsewhere. Critics accuse the former British colony's conservative government of having no answers.

"Rational interest would dictate that we should take a stand and make it clear that Malta is not the dumping ground of the Mediterranean," said Philip Beattie, the founder of Republican National Alliance, a new anti-immigration, right-wing movement.

Home Minister Tonio Borg has called on Libya to take back migrants who leave there by sea, copying a controversial agreement Italy has struck with Tripoli. He also wants other European Union countries to take some of the immigrants.

Illegal immigration has become a highly charged political and social issue in southern Europe. The sight of hundreds of Africans trying to scale razor-wire fences in the Spanish enclave of Ceuta this year underscored the desperation of people driven by the huge gap between lifestyles in Europe and Africa.

Borg said the illegal immigrants arriving in Malta, many with nothing but the clothes on their backs, were sapping the island's resources -- and inflaming passions.

"What is more worrying is the public reaction," Borg told Reuters in a recent interview. "To us, Africa was just another neighbouring continent. Now there are racist opinions."

Beattie, a 41-year-old economics lecturer at Malta University, led the island's first protest march against illegal immigration in October. Minor scuffles broke out with opponents who accused Beattie of racism.

An admirer of Italy's post-fascist National Alliance party Beattie rejects accusations that his movement fuels racism. "The people who call us racists are bigots."

Beattie says Malta should stop patrolling its coastal waters -- a space of a 647,500 sq km (250,000 sq mile), according to the government -- and cease rescuing boat people. He says Libya should also patrol its shores to stop people from leaving.

"If they keep coming, summer after summer after summer, where are we going to put them?"

Further to the right, and better known in Malta, is Norman Lovell, the leader of Imperium Europa, a white supremacist group which talks of Malta leading a "planetary struggle" to save the "White Race" and create a Latin-speaking European empire.

Beattie distances himself from Lovell's ideas about race but credits him with raising awareness of the immigration issue.

"I suppose he will go down in history as the first whistle-blower."

Near the docks in Malta's capital Valletta, a derelict school has been converted into an "open centre" for 400 immigrants, mostly Africans and nearly all men, who sleep in bunk beds in what used to be classrooms.

A curtain hangs around one bed, providing a measure of privacy. A notice pinned to it reads: "God bless our home".

What seems an ironic gesture is in fact probably meant in all sincerity -- the people living in these cramped rooms are the lucky ones, free to come and go and seek casual work.

They have survived the crossing from Libya --a perilous trip which killed at least 600 people between June and October, according to Borg who said this was a conservative estimate.

After the crossing, most of them spend around 12 months in Malta's detention camps while their applications for asylum are processed. The live in barracks, tents or rusty World War Two tube-like Nissen huts under heavily military guard.

"They're detained in pretty miserable conditions," said Katrine Camilleri, who works for the Jesuit Refugee Service, a non-governmental organisation that provides legal and medical aid at the camps, which journalists are not allowed to visit.

Camilleri said the system was both punishing and useless: processing never leads to deportation because it costs too much and is a diplomatic nightmare to return people with few documents to far-flung countries with no links to Malta.

"We have a system that if you are accepted you stay and if you are rejected you stay," Camilleri said.

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