Shoot at a car? Uproar – Rape and murder? No comment

Ok, let me get this straight. Last Tuesday, Manuel Mallia was sacked as minister for home affairs on the basis of an inquiry into a shooting incident involving his personal driver, PC 553 Paul Sheehan.

No one was hurt, still less killed, in the shooting… but a shooting it remained. Serious, scary stuff. So understandably, the country was in an uproar. And we all know what happened next: an inquiry, initiated under a cloud of toxic political pressure; a two-week deadline to publish the inquiry’s conclusions; a damning indictment of the lax and amateur standards of the police force…

…and, of course, the only conclusion that seemed to even remotely interest anybody in this politically sick country of ours: an indication of ministerial responsibility, for which the minister was (rather reluctantly) removed.

Amazing, isn’t it, how quickly the wheels of justice suddenly begin to turn, when there is something to be gained by one or the other of our two glorious political parties?

Now consider this. Three days after the publication of the Sheehan inquiry report, government tabled the results of a separate inquiry, this time into the death (got that, folks? DEATH) of an African asylum seeker in detention… more than two years after this inquiry was concluded.

The Valenzia inquiry was in fact completed and submitted to government in 2012… which means that both parties, when in government, chose to sit on it for several months (five in the case of PN; 18 in the case of Labour).

No two-week deadlines this time. And, even more significantly, no political pressure from the Opposition to have the report published. Not from the Labour Opposition, when the Nationalist government chose to hide this shameful and quite frankly disgusting document from the public; and (for pretty obvious reasons) even less from the Nationalist Opposition over the last 18 months, when the government doing the hiding was Labour.

Why was the report not published until now? Ooh, let’s try and work it out, shall we? It certainly wasn’t for lack of media enquiries. I myself had asked after the inquiry at the time (we didn’t even know it had been concluded until this week), to no avail. Other journalists had the same experience: Christian Peregin, formerly a Times reporter, posted the following: “I remember pushing for this inquiry to be published and facing a brick wall. Now we know why.” As recently as October 2014, MaltaToday carried an article questioning the fact that it had never been published, after Neil Falzon, chair of human rights NGO Aditus, had flagged the issue in an interview.

And all along, dead silence. Where was the Labour Opposition in 2012? Why was it not hammering at Mifsud Bonnici’s door demanding to see a copy of the same inquiry it now suddenly pulls out of a top-hat with a flourish? And why did they take almost two years to publish it themselves? They’ve been in government, comfortably sitting on that report, since March 2013. Yet they only produce it now, as a trump card in an increasingly childish game of political tit-for-tat.

Fact of the matter: there was no political interest in this case whatsoever, until it became politically convenient for the Labour government to come up with something quick as an antidote to the political venom that still surrounds the Mallia driver incident. Which of course raises the inevitable question: would this report ever have seen the light of day at all, had the Labour Party not been galled into turning the tables onto the Opposition?

The answer is very clearly NO. And there is a reason that goes well beyond the short-sighted, grubby little interests of the two parties concerned. Nobody in the rest of the country – with the exception of a handful of much-maligned NGOs – was in the slightest bit interested in the death of an African migrant. Nobody gave a toss about the deplorable state of detention camps like Hal Safi in 2012: and I’m not just talking about the material conditions in which those people were detained, either.

The Valenzia inquiry also reveals glaring systemic and administrative shortcomings within the entire detention regime: the smallest of which makes the corresponding rot in the police force, revealed by the Sheehan inquiry, look positively insignificant by comparison. We are now talking about at least two deaths against the backdrop of systematic human rights violations. One of those deaths has now been established as a homicide by the inquiry… and there is also evidence of serial rape and sexual abuse of female detainees by one or more guards.

Here are a few of the details: “a kind of inappropriate relationship [was] going on between some members of staff and migrant women being detained. It could have been consensual but given the context, you question this consent…how real it is… because they are detained and there is a soldier-detainee relationship which renders the relationship inappropriate”.

Lt Col Brian Gatt, who was in charge of Detention Services (DS) at the time, was somewhat more blunt in his assessment: “I had a sergeant in Hal Far who used to prey on migrant women, entering their rooms during the night and taking a woman back to his office with him. Even condoms were found in the room…”

And while some DS personnel were serially exploiting vulnerable women for their own sexual gratification, others were involved in criminal behaviour that was every bit as dangerous and volatile as the Sheehan case:

“They used to send me the worst of the worst… soldiers refused by the army,” Gatt had told Valenzia “…They decided to send an officer who had been charged with shooting at a yacht during training. I rushed to Luqa barracks asking whether they were in their right mind. How could they send me someone with a criminal record when we just had the incident of that migrant?” he added, referring to the death of another migrant, Nigerian Infeanyi Nwokoye, in 2011. 

Yet another DS assignee came complete with a small army of loan sharks in hot pursuit: “They didn’t want him because he was involved in usury and he was being chased by people who wanted their money back. Once he took the driver out with him during the night, only to be stopped by armed people…”

As for the two fatalities involved in this increasingly nightmarish Midnight Express-style scenario: one of them, Mamadou Kamara – a 32-year old man from Mali – was literally beaten to death. The inquiry found evidence of a severe beating, and that the blow which ultimately killed him was probably a kick to the groin.

“A blow on the testis can cause a sudden death. The death can be instant. Death was caused by vagal inhibition due to severe pain followed by blunt trauma…” … “He was in great pain when he died. […] Severe pain is a known cause of cardiac arrest.”

There was also a cover-up… though again, people only seem interested in such matters when they can be traced directly to a Labour minister (the minister, in this case, was Nationalist, so no one gave a shit until now.)

The original 2012 reports – including a DOI statement, of the kind which caused such a ruckus in the Sheehan case – suggested that Kamara had died in the back of a van destined for Mt Carmel Hospital, where he was being transferred. The inquiry report however concluded otherwise: “We also found that when we saw the scenario that this person was dead when he was put in the van. Probably he was already dead. His stomach was full of food. He had eaten within half an hour of his death. If he was running, if he was on the run, he couldn’t have eaten. There was food in the stomach. It was very slightly digested. It was recent. One of the lungs had haemorrhage at the base which corresponds to the blows and there were petechiae on the surface…”

That’s as far as I have the stomach to go on quoting. Now let’s add it all up and see what we’re left with. Murder in the first degree; a cover-up of the circumstances of the murder to make it look like an accident; high probability of systematic rape and abuse of female detainees over a period of time; concealment of evidence of both these crimes by the authorities for two years; and, of course, no criminal action ever taken against any of the suspects. Neither the people suspected of beating a handcuffed migrant to death, and then manipulating the crime scene; nor the ‘sexual predator’, even though his behaviour was brought to the attention of the home affairs minister in 2012.

And I need hardly add that there was no call for the government’s communications co-ordinator to be sacked following a misleading DOI report, either.

Yep. That’s the long and the short of it. In a country which howled in indignation when the police took a week to arrest Paul Sheehan for shooting at a car… there was not a whimper at the fact that not a single person has been arrested in connection with crimes such as murder and serial rape, even though two frigging years have gone by since the evidence first came into the hands of the Home Affairs Ministry.

Oh, and as for issues such as ‘culpability’, ‘accountability’ and ‘criminal responsibility’… you know, the same issues that the Nationalist Party, now in Opposition, made such a god-awful stink about when there was a chance of toppling a political enemy…. well, not a trace of any concern with those issues now. The same Simon Busuttil who each week ‘challenges’ the government to publish its every document, contract, report and paper of any description  – down to the toilet paper they use to wipe their arses in the Cabinet – never expressed the remotest interest in the publication of the Valenzia report. And this man was also for years a rapporteur on migration for the European Parliament…

“The whole truth and nothing but the truth”, aye, Simon? Something tells me you will live to regret those words.

Yet even now, after the same report has been in the hands of the Labour government for 18 whole months – where it would have quietly remained forever, had it not suddenly served a useful political purpose to a government which had its back to the wall – even now, nobody has been arrested for the crimes it revealed. At least, not at the time of writing.

Instead, the only thing that seems to interest Joseph Muscat is whether the minister who was responsible in 2012 – and who already lost his ministry in a vote of confidence that same year – would be ‘sacked’ (from what position, exactly, remains unclear). Is that the only thing the prime minister has to say? Why isn’t he demanding to know why those crimes were never investigated by the police, and the perpetrators brought to justice?

Justice, zigg! That only matters when we are dealing with cases which may or may not have political repercussions. In cases where poor black people are systematically raped or beaten to death, on the other hand… who gives a shit about justice? Joseph Muscat? Simon Busuttil? Who?

Perhaps the time has come to inject a slightly different perspective on the matter. As it happens, I don’t give a shit about political gains and losses made by two power-hungry and utterly unscrupulous political parties. But I do give a small shit about having functional and reliable institutions serving the interests of justice in this country.

So instead of asking what this or that leader will do about this or that MP… how about we change the question slightly? What action are we all going to take, as a nation, about the intolerable aura of filth and squalor that now infects our most pivotal and strategically sensitive national institutions? What action are we going to take about a corrupt and foul criminal justice system that only ever kicks into action at the command of its political masters; and even then, only to serve the interests of political parties while ignoring everybody else?

Let me guess: we’re all going to settle back comfortably in our armchairs with a nice bucket of pop-corn, and have fun cheering and jeering while Joseph and Simon grapple in the political slime like the mud-wrestlers they have come to resemble so much.

Yes, indeed. Countries really do get the excrement they deserve...