This leader is not about the situation at Air Malta, but about Libya, or rather Malta and Libya, or rather Europe and the Arab world.

First in: the first official visitor after the 1 September 1969 coup that removed King Idris from power and replaced him with Muammar Gaddafi was Maltese Prime Minister George Borg Olivier.

Last out: the last head of government to visit Gaddafi prior to this bloodbath was Maltese Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi.

Now where does that leave us? It leaves us terribly exposed as a country very susceptible to its neighbour down South.

The intervening years between 1969 and 2011 have seen even worse instances of this: Gaddafi and his tribe of chanting mobs completely overshadowed what had been prepared for the exit of British military forces from Malta on 31 March 1979. Then Libyan ships turned up when the Saipem was about to start drilling for oil in an area that Libya claims as its own.

Those were the years when our schools were made to teach Arabic as a basic language, and when influx after influx of Libyans came to Malta and settled here.

Nevertheless, for all this, Malta is in no way as linked and as subordinate as other countries. No Maltese prime minister has ever kissed Gaddafi’s hand the way Silvio Berlusconi did last year. No Maltese prime minister had ever allowed Gaddafi to parade with a photo of Omar el Mukhtar attached to his breast (together with the explanation that, since Christians adore a god on the cross, so too a Libyan can revere a national hero).

Nor has Malta ever had to pay reparatory damages for its colonial years. Nor has Malta ever paid the money Italy has paid to get the Libyans to force back asylum seekers who were trying to escape from there (well, maybe Malta is not completely innocent here, either). Nor has Malta ever had a foreign guest creating the circus atmosphere that Gaddafi did in Rome when he tried to convert nubile women chosen by an escort agency.

Deep down, we always knew it would end pear-shaped. Like we always knew, and this with full respect and concern for the people there, that a job in Libya paid well but there was always a trade-off involved.

Others may say the Maltese are racist, which we are, but ever since ‘they’ started to indoctrinate us that the Libyans were blood brothers, we always knew that in the particular political circumstances they were in, this smacked of political opportunism.

That was not the way forward for friendship between the two peoples.

Let’s take it further. At least, in Malta’s case with Libya, there was never the suspicion that now brews in British minds: that the bullets now killing Libyan protesters are British; that Tony Blair, ‘a family friend’ as the Gaddafis call him, did not really look into what moral basis his interlocutors had. Nor did the French foreign minister, who accepted gifts from the Tunisian regime when it was already facing protests in the street; nor the French prime minister, who accepted a family holiday from the Mubaraks.

The way forward is solidarity among peoples, and a solidarity among governments based on respect for human rights. Minister Tonio Borg was quite right in going to Tunis and speaking to the new government before going to Brussels to take part in the European Council. At least, what we are losing in Libya through complacency and worse with a tainted regime we may gain by a moral approach to all governments who reflect the will of the people.

And, as we wait in trepidation to see what will happen next, and in anxiety about the families of the victims and the Maltese caught as hostages in Libya, let us collectively and individually re-address our moral stances, instead of closing our eyes to evident dictatorships. Expediency is not all in life, and also in international relationships.