It is completely unfair. It’s an insult to Mediterranean solidarity, an affront to traditional relations, humiliation of the feeble and the poor. It’s all so bloody Greek tragedy, in fact.
Why the Greeks should butt in with the rest of our neighbours to object to Maltese exploration for oil in the sea surrounding our archipelago is beyond belief. Here you have two small islands without even a shred of useful resources trying to tap into something that possibly exists down there in the hope of finally extracting it, like others already do around them, for the benefit of the national economy.
That we should have the Italians, the Tunisians, the Libyans and now the Greeks ganging up on us in this way confirms once and for all the popular adage about the meek being always the meek. Stronger and bigger nations would have simply called in their navies and put a stop to all this bullying. We can only say we agree to disagree and let’s let the international courts decide – probably when it is already too late for our economy and all the cars and the power stations of the world work on some new, non-polluting, inexpensive fuel.
The Italians, we have always taken for genetic brothers. Not only have we had prominent politicians in the past stressing our “italianità”, but Mussolini’s fascists also named streets after them in eternal Rome! That they finally chose to drop bombs on our mothers’ and fathers’ homes was, of course, a quirk of history and today many of us have sons and daughters married to spouses from across the water.
But don’t you go out searching for oil in our waters, boy.
We are also blood brothers to the Tunisians and the Libyans. Never mind the lingo, Malta has been dealing with them for centuries and yet, as soon as our Aussie and American contractors go out to sea with their oil rigs and the latest technology, suddenly out come the fangs of the North African lion.
On one occasion, way back in the 80s, the Libyans even sent a warship to ensure – in a not-so-brotherly manner – that our contractors, ironically from a top Italian company, stopped drilling for oil in controversial waters we have considered our own for ages but which they eyed hungrily as if the desert has not given them enough of the gold liquid. I was running the TV news department at the time and can vouch for the unpleasant remarks that were exchanged in the process.
The simple message was: don’t you go out searching for oil in our waters, boy. In regional Arabic this time.
But back to the lubricating attitude of the Greeks and their patronising gods. To think that we have recently committed ourselves to dishing out quite a few millions by way of salvaging their crisis-ridden economy is a hard pill to gulp down. The ungrateful bastards. May their workers and their students bring down the Acropolis.
Our benevolent contribution to the EU salvage programme is repaid with an “up yours” and, of course, a “don’t you go searching for oil in our waters, boy”.
The next thing we need is for the hot-headed Irish to claim some old Viking connection to the central Mediterranean region and, no less dramatically, object to Malta exploring for oil in what are – we all agree, don’t we? – her waters. You see, we have also committed millions to the Irish economic crisis cause, and yet we are denied the pleasure of, for the first time in our ancient history, extracting something precious out of the barren limestone making up the bottom of our sea.
Don’t you go out searching for oil in our ancestral waters, Paddy, the Irish could possibly say once they have put their house in order with our millions.
What can you do when you are small? Inject more millions into other people’s pockets and hope they would let you search for oil in your own waters? Brussels may have other more original ideas.
People who know the business well insist that Maltese oil does exist. It is just a question of political clout. Wherever we drill, there are others who claim ownership. Whichever way we turn, there are always neighbours who think they were there before. The Italians, the Tunisians, the Libyans and the Greeks (the Irish are still trying to decipher some of their mysterious Viking codes) have all been wagging their forefingers at us and warning us: don’t you go out searching for oil in our waters, boy.
A friend of mine working for the oil division at Castille once woke me up in the middle of the night, insisting on the phone that there was something very secret he wanted to show me. Curious as ever, I went to our agreed meeting point hoping the thing he wanted to show me was worth the disrupted good night’s slumber and, possibly, a good news item.
He got into my car carrying a small glass container. Coffee, perhaps, I thought. Great to bring you back to consciousness. But it wasn’t. My friend had a huge smirk on his face.
“See this, Charles?”
I said I did, trying to sound and look as dramatic.
“This is Malta oil, the first sample to be brought up” he finally dropped the bombshell, and as if reading my mind, he promptly produced a small whisky bottle from the neck of which we celebrated the event. I still do not know whether he was taking me for a ride or not.
To this day, that jam-jar-sized quantity of Malta oil, if it really was that, seems to have been the only extraction we have made since or could make in the foreseeable future. Once our beloved neighbours got to know of it, they quickly served us notice.
Don’t you go out searching for oil in our waters, boy, but Happy New Year, anyway – in three distinct languages.