What the flamingo…?

You can generally tell something sinister is going on when your country’s police force starts taking a very keen, almost obsessive, interest in the preservation of wild birdlife… but only when birds are ‘threatened’ by the efforts of conservationist activists to save their lives.

And that sort of thing has been happening quite a lot lately. The most recent case concerns the police interrogation of Ray Vella, a park ranger at Natura 2000, over the transfer of a live flamingo from Paradise Bay to the Ghadira Nature reserve.

Vella himself describes this as “intimidation and harassment”; and these are two activities that the park ranger should know a thing or two about. He has so far been shot in the face not once, but twice… and his assailants were never apprehended by the same police who now interrogate him like a suspect for ‘handling a protected bird’.

But on to the facts of the case. It turns out that the bird in question – a juvenile Greater Flamingo – landed alone at Paradise Bay and was seen wading about by a sizeable number of people. Someone called BirdLife Malta on the (not unreasonable) suspicion that it may have been injured; BLM in turn called Ray Vella, their closest official to the site, who also has a certain experience of this kind of situation.

Vella established that the bird was not injured, but had most likely got separated from the rest of the flock. Survival chances for such birds are usually slim, for more reasons than just hunting (fatigue, dehydration, etc). So Vella did what he has done on countless comparable occasions, sometimes at the request of the police themselves (more of this important detail in a sec). He captured the bird and released it at Ghadira, which is a more appropriate habitat for flamingos anyway.

This, by the way, is the extent of the ‘threat’ that the police later acted upon… a ‘threat’ to this bird’s survival, posed by an experienced park ranger who was actually trying to protect it from harm.

You could almost stop there and already the situation is intolerably perverse. The autumn hunting season opened last Monday, and there has been the usual barrage of reports of illegal hunting since then. In one case, a man allegedly shot at a flock of little egrets from a boat in Gozo… regardless of the fact that there were people within close proximity to the birds when he pulled the trigger.

Naturally I don’t expect the police to be immediately at hand to apprehend every culprit within minutes of the crime… it’s a bit hard to do that anyway, when ALE officers assigned to monitoring illegal hunting are being transferred to other departments, and their number was never very large to begin with. But that the police would waste their already limited resources to ‘investigate’ cases even when there is plainly no threat to any bird at all, or even any crime being committed… there is clearly more than just clumsiness or the usual bumbling administrative incompetence at work here. 

But let’s stick to the chronology, because it’s about to get interesting. What happened immediately after the bird was transferred was that – as per standard procedure – BirdLife Malta sent an email about the incident to the Environment Ministry, the Wild Birds Directorate and… drums rolling… the Administrative Law Enforcement unit of the police, complete with a photo of the flamingo.

A strange course of action to take, I would think, had the handling of that bird indeed been a criminal offence. Why inform the police that you’ve just committed a crime? Do hunters send emails to the ALE with photos of the protected birds they’d just shot? I somehow doubt it. Clearly BLM was acting in good faith when it informed the police about Operation Flamingo. If not, they’d be more birdbrained than the flamingo itself… which was, as you’ll remember, immature.

Yet soon after receiving this email, the police paid Vella a little visit at his home, and – finding out that he was at work at the time – subsequently at the Ghadira Nature Reserve, where they questioned him and took his particulars.

I’ll leave you to decide whether this constitutes ‘intimidation and harassment’. What interests me is the stark way in which the police seem to interpret the same law differently in different circumstances, without any explanation ever given. At this stage it is unclear if criminal charges will be pressed against Ray Vella… but if so, it will hardly be the first time a law on ‘handling protected species’ (regardless of circumstances) will have been twisted beyond recognition, resulting in a spectacularly pointless and counter-productive criminal prosecution.

If the story sounds familiar, it is because all this happened before, and not that long ago either. Recently five BLM activists were arraigned in court over a remarkably similar misinterpretation of the law on handling protected species. They had posed for a publicity photo alongside several shot birds, all of which had been brought to their offices by members of the public. The police on that occasion agreed with the hunters’ lobby that the law against handling such birds applied even when the birds were being used as evidence of crimes committed by others; and – in a telling indication of Malta’s desperately hopeless judicial situation – the presiding magistrate agreed with both these absurd positions. The case is ongoing as we speak.

Already, then, we have the beginnings of a pattern which has become all too familiar, and by no means restricted to stories about birds. Police are informed about an incident – which in this case wasn’t even remotely illegal – and go on to treat the informant as a criminal suspect, while disregarding the actual crime. Again, this should sound familiar: it was the entire basis on which the recent debate on a Whistleblower’s Act had been built. 

Naturally, the Whistleblower’s Act was envisaged for cases of greater import than even a Greater Flamingo. The need for such legislation came dramatically to the fore during the ‘Dalligate’ controversy, and even in connection with the Enemalta oil procurement scandal. With this law in place at the time, there would have been no need for a controversial (and to date unproductive) Presidential pardon for the main suspect in the case. This alone should give a rough indication of how important and sorely needed the Whistleblower’s Act was and still is. And from this perspective, it is easy to see how dangerous the police’s habit of interrogating informants over non-existent crimes has become.

As these latest birdbrained incidents have revealed, even with a Whistleblower’s Act in place there is simply no legal protection for informants stepping forward with incriminating evidence. Take the case of the five BLM volunteers, for instance: rather than investigate the crime being divulged by that photo – i.e., the illegal killing of protected birds – the police chose to take action against the people who brought it to public attention.

Yet the provisions of the Whistleblower’s Act apply perfectly to that scenario… as a number of lawyers have already confirmed in reaction to this entirely frivolous prosecution. Nonetheless the police remain free to take action against the people who report crimes, even though this is explicitly prohibited at law. And now that this senseless prosecution has been sanctioned by a magistrate in court, we can only conclude that the Whistleblower’s Act – enacted with much fanfare last year – may as well not exist at all.

Then there’s the question of consistency. What sets Ray Vella’s case apart from the others is that it mirrors almost to perfection similar incidents in which the police themselves had asked Vella (and BLM in general) for assistance when dealing with cases involving wild birds. Here I can quote an entire news story – it’s only two sentences long – that appeared in August 2013:

“A flamingo made an unexpected appearance at the Verdala grounds in Cospicua on Friday evening, interrupting a training session of the Hibs U17s football team. It was given water and taken to the police, which passed on the bird to BirdLife, who in turn released it.”

The story also featured a photograph in which a (presumably) Hibernians footballer was seen holding the bird still while another gave it water from a plastic bottle. Incidentally, it is not known whether any effort was made to actually sign the flamingo to play for Hibs U-17s… hey, they’re pretty nifty on their feet… but that, I suppose, is another matter.

What counts here is that the behaviour of the police then was diametrically the reverse of the same police’s behaviour today. Not only did they fail to interrogate that footballer for ‘handling a protected bird’ (when there was photographic evidence, too!) but when alerted, they themselves called in the very expert whom they now question over an identical event. 

At this point, an official explanation from the Police Commissioner might be appropriate. How does he justify the police’s blatant disregard for their legal obligation to protect the whistleblower in both these cases? On what basis do the police decide when to interrogate people for rescuing birds, or when to call them in themselves for the same purpose? What outside factor may be influencing them in their clearly haphazard and contradictory approach to all such incidents?

Ah yes, outside factors. Knew we’d get there in the end. You see, when different weights and measures are applied, you can rest assured that the reason for the discrepancy will always be extraneous to the actual case itself. In this case it is obvious even at a glance: I don’t think anyone in his right mind would argue that there was any threat posed to the Paradise Bay flamingo that wasn’t likewise posed in the Hibernians’ training session incident. Yet the police handled the two cases differently: this time applying the same procedures as with the more recent prosecution of those five activists.

What, exactly, has changed between August 2013 and today? The answer has less to do with birdlife than with politics. Between then and now, 40,000 signatures for an abrogative referendum on spring hunting were verified by the Electoral Commission, and the referendum will now have to take place sometime next year. This injects a good old-fashioned dose of politics into the equation… and the present government has made its own position – i.e., in favour of the hunters’ lobby, and against the Yes campaign – very, very clear.

It follows, then, that police interpretation of certain laws would (coincidentally, of course) also be amended to reflect this same government policy in favour of hunters and against conservationists. At which point we should really all be asking: what the flamingo is going on?