They don’t make racists like they used to anymore. In the good old days, home-grown, genuine article racists wouldn’t mince words about their prejudice, and would justify to anyone prepared to listen and to anyone not prepared to listen, their cruelty and their willingness to discriminate with what they seemed to genuinely believe was their self-evident superiority.
But look at how half-hearted Robert Abela was in court yesterday. Give him some credit, of course. He defended his decisions to deal with migrants the way he did during covid.
It all started, as he explained, when on the pretext of covid he ordered Malta’s harbours closed to people (that’s black people) who had just been rescued from drowning at sea. If anyone were to save someone from drowning, they were not allowed to bring them here.
That policy had a logical gap. Covid was not unique to Malta. It was a pandemic. It was everywhere. So, if it was sensible policy for Malta to close its harbours to people rescued in its waters, where were they supposed to go? Robert Abela’s racist answer was ‘not here’.
You may recall how Robert Abela instructed a privately owned vessel, Dar Al-Salaam, to pick migrants drifting at sea and take them down to Tripoli which was at the same time being bombarded by enemy fire in a civil war. It didn’t matter to Robert Abela if the migrants carried covid to Libya because a good racist could not care less if Libyan people are infected. It didn’t even matter if the migrants rescued from drowning would be hit by bombs or shrapnel. Or that if they survived that like Candide making shore in Lisbon, it didn’t matter to Robert Abela if they were captured, imprisoned, and indentured into hard labour. A good racist would rather that then have black people make land in Malta.
But during that April 9th incident, 12 young men drowned, a detail which attracted unwanted attention from the international press. So, Robert Abela changed tack and resorted to an alternative ‘solution’ (a word racists are extremely fond of).
How does one avoid the criticism for letting people drown or for pushing them to an unsafe war zone, without bringing those people to Malta? Well, Robert Abela thought, you leave them there. In the water. He requisitioned four harbour cruise boats, sitting idle because tourism was shut down due to covid, and sailed them out of Malta’s territorial waters as a holding pen – like one does with tuna – a watery limbo where, Robert Abela seemed to believe, Malta would have no legal or moral obligations towards the people imprisoned on them.
Why did you leave them out of the territorial waters, lawyer Cedric Mifsud asked the prime minister yesterday? Why put them in a prison 13 miles out at sea from where they could never swim? Because covid, came Robert Abela’s reply. Now a lot of what happened during covid is fading in distant memory. I do remember social distancing. But the recommended distance was not 13 miles. You could consider yourself reasonably safe 2 metres from anyone infected. Robert Abela surely remembers that.
A self-respecting old-fashioned racist would not have answered like the prime minister did. They would have said the government felt it could justify denying the migrants their right to apply for the recognition of their status as refugees if they were kept outside of Malta’s territorial waters. Because a racist would not care if a person was really a refugee before deciding to deny them refuge. They would only care about how to avoid having to check if someone was really a refugee.
You can see there’s a closet racist in Robert Abela screaming to get out. The pathetic self-centredness emerged when he compared the comfort of hindsight in the courtroom yesterday with the tough days of April 2020 when the covid crisis hit in earnest. ‘We weren’t in an air-conditioned room,’ he said.
That’s funny. Was the air-conditioning in Castille not working during covid? I rather think it was. Robert Abela was indeed in the comfort of an air-conditioned room from where he decided it was ok to pen 400 black people on boats designed to host people for 2 hours at a time in the shelter of closed harbours. His room was cool when he ordered pleasure boats to drop anchor in the open ocean when bad weather was just as likely as the scorching sun. There was no air-conditioning on those boats. But that’s not what Robert Abela was talking about yesterday.
Robert Abela yesterday congratulated himself for choosing to rescue the migrants from drowning, implying that choosing to let them drown was a legitimate alternative. Only a racist would think that, though he’s not old-fashioned enough to be so explicit about his prejudices. He would not declare that he would have been just as right to let them drown. But he did say that not to let them drown was a choice he made for which the people he imprisoned on boats out at sea ought to be grateful.
From Times of Malta’s court report:
“We had a choice: either lose those lives or save them within the restrictions we were facing at the time,” he told the court.
“The country was closed. Most of the country was not paralysed but shut down. Our core function was to save lives and keep them as comfortable as possible, providing them with food, medicines, daily provisions and even cigarettes. Obviously, as comfortable as possible. Because at the time, the whole country was not comfortable, and everyone bore a part of the burden. “
If you had a heart attack in the street during covid would the doctor perform CPR or even emergency heart surgery from 2 metres away? Or would you be shipped 13 miles out to wait for treatment there? Is that what happened to white people?
The country may have been uncomfortable during covid but did any of us have to live on watery prisons for the crime of being rescued while drowning? None of us did. Robert Abela didn’t. And the false equivalence of the inconveniences suffered by all for eminently justified health reasons and the gross injustice suffered by falsely imprisoned migrants in utterly inadequate jails is borne of racial prejudice. The false equivalence also brings into question the covid measures ordered on the rest of us. If it was necessary to keep people held up 13 miles offshore because of covid why were the rest of us left in peril of contagion much closer to each other here on land?
Contagion had nothing to do with it. Robert Abela told the court yesterday that 650,000 migrants were waiting to come to Malta implying they would have if he hadn’t imprisoned 400 migrants on Captain Morgan boats. Which is an admission that he used the 400 migrants as human shields. Cedric Mifsud asked him if his decision to block the migrants at sea was a health decision or a policy decision. A health decision would have been based on the scientific conviction that if they were allowed in the country people would have got sick. There was no such scientific basis. The health emergency was just an excuse because he’s too spineless to give his explicitly racist reasons for leaving them there.
Once he admitted his alleged fear of 650,000 migrants his racism reluctantly came through. As a racist would, he blamed 650,000 straw men and used them to justify his cruelty to 400 real ones. Where were the 650,000? Who counted them? Which boats were they going to use? How does he know they were dissuaded by his cruel policy?
He doesn’t. Robert Abela doesn’t think black people are entitled to live. He thinks rescuing them from drowning is an act of reluctant charity not a product of them being human. Robert Abela doesn’t think black people are entitled to apply to be considered as refugees. He’ll keep them 13 miles out at sea just to avoid it and prevent responsible officials from speaking to them. Robert Abela doesn’t think black people have a right to be treated with dignity, not to be arrested unlawfully, and not to be tortured. He thinks it’s fine because they’re black and they should just be grateful he shipped them cigarettes.
He won’t tell you he is because they don’t make them that way anymore, but Robert Abela is racist.