Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/433160
maltatoday, SUNDAY, 14 DECEMBER 2014 20 Shoot at a car? Uproar – Rape O k, 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 Opinion Raphael Vassallo End of the car chase – the scene in the Sta Venera tunnel when the chase ended