It seems the accusations of abuse at the Carmichael Road Detention Centre are once again coming back to haunt us, no matter how much our political leaders would like them to go away.
U.S. President Barack Obama's nominee for ambassador to The Bahamas, Cassandra Q. Butts, said that, if confirmed, one of her priorities will be to ensure that all illegal migrants detained in The Bahamas are treated humanely.
Butts was speaking during a recent hearing of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Florida Senator Marco Rubio expressed concern about the "forceful repatriation" of Cuban detainees by the government of The Bahamas, adding, "I've seen the videos of some of this".
Rubio noted that the footage had been disputed by The Bahamas but said, nonetheless, he remains very concerned.
For her part, Butts assured the committee that she would not only look into the issue, but also report back on her findings.
When the allegations first arose last year, the government seemed relieved to grasp onto a video they said appeared staged, holding it up as proof that the allegations were not true.
Later, when eyewitness statements from marines at the detention center emerged detailing severe beatings following an escape attempt, a disciplinary hearing was launched and five marines were charged.
There has been very little progress since then, as after repatriating the detainees in question, the government awaited permission from Cuban officials to interview them for the hearing.
And there the matter lay quietly for the last several months, until the Rubio-Butts exchange.
Now, we are again reminded of the bitter anti-Bahamas demonstrations in Miami last November and our collective anxiety over the possible damage to tourism from South Florida and our international reputation, in general.
For anyone who has followed this issue over the years, its return should come as no surprise. Under the first Christie administration, accusations of violence against detainees at the center also arose only to be downplayed by authorities. Under the last Free National Movement (FNM) government, again the specter of abuse raised its ugly head, only to be dismissed without serious investigation.
Again and again, the attitude has been that to take such allegations seriously would be in some way anti-patriotic - a betrayal of our law enforcement officers and an admission of inferiority on some level.
The fact is the more a country -- especially a small developing country -- seeks to avoid confronting such situations honestly, the more corrupt and backward it appears to the rest of the world.
In truth, we have no one to blame but ourselves. We have allowed a misplaced nationalism to prevent us from instituting the kind of internationally-recognized best practices that would have prevented this kind of allegation, whether true or false, from arising in the first place.
Our immigration detention system should long ago have adopted proper independent oversight to prevent the impression of white-washed investigations; our immigration and defense force officers should have been trained to international standards in how to deal with the pressures that come with this kind of work. Above all, we should have instituted an efficient and transparent system for processing migrants, sorting those with genuine refugee status from those to be repatriated, and taking the appropriate steps swiftly so that detainees are not left languishing for months and the opportunity for abuse does not even arise.
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