Author: Jacques René Zammit

Filmed on the occasion of the visit of Commissioner Jacques Barrot, this reportage examines life in Malta’s detention centres.

Worlds Apart

from the station.lu news:

Luxembourg receive asylum requests from Serbia, Bosnia & Iraq

Luxembourg was the 32nd most preferred destination for asylum-seekers in 2008, according to a report published by the United Nations Commission for Refugees.The USA, Canada, France, Italy and the UK received the most applications of the 51 developed countries covered in the report, which counted 383,000 asylum applications, an increase of 12% on 2007’s figures.Iraq (40,500, down 10% on 2007), Somalia (21,800), Russia (20,500), Afghanistan (18,500 up 85% on 2007) and China (17,400) represented the origins of the highest number of refugees.Luxembourg received 460 applications for asylum last year, compared to 430 in 2007, 520 in 2006 and 1,580 in 2004. Last year, the applications were mainly received from people coming from Serbia (219), Bosnia (31) and Iraq (29).

Extract from the UNHCR report:

Based on the first indicator (national population), the two Mediterranean islands of Cyprus and Malta received between 2004 and 2008 the highest number of asylum-seekers compared to their national population; 38 and 18 applicants per 1,000 inhabitants, respectively. Sweden ranked third (14 applicants per 1,000 inhabitants), followed by Austria (10 applicants per 1,000 inhabitants), Switzerland (8.5 applicants per 1,000 inhabitants), and Norway (8 applicants per 1,000 inhabitants). The United States of America, the main recipient of new asylum-seekers during this period, was ranked 27th with an average one asylumseeker per 1,000 inhabitants.

Also from the report one can see the origin of asylum seekers in Malta in 2007 and 2008 :

2007 : Somalia (585), Eritrea (339), Ivory Coast (77), Sudan (76), Ethiopia (73), Mali (46), Nigeria (38), Niger (25), Ghana (15), DR of Congo (14).

2008: Somalia (1,081), Ivory Coast (264), Nigeria (223), Mali (208), Eritrea (176), Ghana (111), Ethiopia (97), Niger (94), Togo (71), Gambia (44).

Somalia is a failed state in the Horn of Africa that only has a de jure government. it’s recent prominence in the news is due mainly to the fact that pirates operating in the seas around the Horn of Africa use Somalia as their base.

Go – Malta’s former telecommunications monopoly has announced that it is setting a target of 350 employees. That’s 350 people who have to lose their job because Go is…. “rightsizing”. Now there is nothing abnormal with a company in a competitive market adjusting its employment levels in order to remain competitive. When Go was privatised 3 years ago, one of the condititions imposed on it was that no employees could be dropped for three years. Well, the time has come and Go is availing itself of its right to do so. It has offered its employees a voluntary retirement scheme worth €60,000. This is the last offer of its kind CEO David Kay told employees.

What really struck me in David Kay’s letter to the employees is the use of the word “Rightsizing”. Now there’s a euphemism for credit crunch time. I was listening to a radio emission on France Info on my way to work this morning. One of the many union leaders was complaining about the government’s attitude to the not so well off. He said (and I paraphrase): “The government knows that people with €1000 a month can barely make ends meet, yet the government’s message to these people is that they should be grateful for having €1000 a month.” In other words, the mechanism of governmentspeak requires the citizen to be thankful for a desperate situation and makes it sound as if he should actually be thankful to the government for that situation.

GonziPN has not quite reached those levels yet. What it has shown to be capable of is turning around its failures into pseudo-achievements. The removal of a tax that should never have been is the typical case in point.

Anyway. “Rightsizing”… until recently it was “downsizing” – an objectively neutral term that could be agreed upon by both employer and employee. Now it is “rightsizing” – from the comfortable point of view of a CEO I guess it is the right term. An employee on the brink of unemployment (VRS or no VRS) would disagree. Don’t you just hate newspeak?