On 10 June of 78 years ago, speaking from Palazzo Venezia in Rome, Benito Mussolini announced that Italy had entered war. The next morning, Italian planes started bombing Malta.
The Maltese have long memories. The ensuing war years wreaked much damage but did not break Malta. On the contrary, it was Italy that got broken.
It would seem that the beginning of hostilities in 1939 was furthest from the mind of Matteo Salvini, the Italian Deputy Premier. Yet turning around the policy on migrants was a key issue in the election and on the government programme. So, when faced with NGO ships collecting asylum seekers from their boats near the Libyan coast, the new Italian government ordered the first ship to go to Malta, not to Italy.
This time, the Italians intended to bomb Malta with bodies of migrants. As we know, Malta stood firm and Italy huffed and puffed. At the end, Spain helpfully intervened and took in the ship and the migrants. There is no doubt this scenario will be repeated in the hours and days to come.
Salvini is the bruiser of Italian politics and the sorry state of the Italian economy has put his League party within the governing coalition and polls and Sunday’s election show the League briskly overtaking the other party in the coalition, 5 Stars. A huge component of this swell in popularity comes from the asylum seekers’ presence in Italy.
We are talking of human beings here, many of them have travelled great distances and suffered all sorts of deprivations, risked their lives in small boats and mounting waves, so as to be able to have a better life.
But today’s Europe is no longer ready to give these people a chance. The entry of 1 million refugees in Germany caused and still causes huge problems. Hungary, Austria and now Slovenia have shut their borders to migrants. So has France. The coming election in Sweden will most probably bring xenophobes to power in reaction at the many migrants allowed in by an easy approach.
Salvini’s approach to Malta is not much different from the approach of so many ‘gerarchi’ who demanded that Malta does their bidding. Besides being mistaken in law, he is also mistaken in facts. As the accompanying graph shows there are far more migrants in Malta than in Italy.
Nevertheless, as anyone who knows what’s going on in Italy realizes, the successive waves of migrants have turned areas of Italy into no go areas. This is what drove the governing coalition to promise to return half a million asylum seekers who have lost their bid to be accepted as refugees back to their countries of origin.
There is a lot of sympathy in Malta with Italy’s predicament – but not if Italy tries to download excess migrants on to small Malta. Malta, which was a part of Sicily so many centuries back, has excellent and close relations with Italy, which it intends to keep. But not to the extent of having a newly-arrived Italian minister act as if Malta was under his boot.