While we posture and mince about on matters like divorce and remarriage, we have been content to embrace a murderous psychopath who has kept his people in absolute terror for almost as long as I have been alive.
Our foreign minister, in a previous incarnation as minister of the interior, used his influence and his office resources to try to drum up support for the Gift of Life Movement and its campaign to have a ban on abortion entrenched in the constitution of Malta. But faced with the harsh reality that his close friend is murdering people 250 miles away, his response is to tell all and sundry that friends should stick together despite their differences.
Tonio Borg can see Gaddafi going down in a bloodbath of destruction and still he continues to hedge his bets – just in case the monster pops up again and bites Malta in the butt. As the Maltese saying goes: don’t fall out with anyone, because you never know who you might need.
Meanwhile, his counterparts across the world are queuing up to condemn Gaddafi – except for Italy’s Franco Frattini and his boss Berlusconi, a famously unprincipled and unscrupulous duo. Even Sarkozy has now called for sanctions against Gaddafi, and the reaction among some people here is that ‘it’s all very well, but France sold him arms’. The same upside-down reaction met William Hague’s harsh condemnation of Gaddafi’s behaviour, because British Petroleum signed deals with him in 2007. Yet it is precisely because France sold him arms and Britain signed an oil exploration deal with him that their unequivocal, no-going-back condemnation of Gaddafi’s insane and murderous actions is to be respected. They have vested interests in his regime that are far greater than piddling Malta’s. Their losses are going to be massive. Hundreds, if not thousands, of their citizens are stranded in Libya. But still they speak out. And now look at pathetic, spineless, shameless and shameful Malta. While people risk their lives and lose them to stand up to Gaddafi, our political leaders show no leadership and instead scurry about like frightened rabbits, far too heavily conditioned by long years of sucking up to Gaddafi to tell him at last where to get off and what we really think of him. While the government moons on about friendship, the Opposition says nothing. Some very poor briefing, lack of insight and a massive failure of diplomatic intelligence led our prime minister and foreign minister to visit Gaddafi in his tent just five days before the simmering situation in Benghazi boiled over. This act of phenomenally bad judgment now has them framed as two lackeys giving a public show of support to the only North African leader not yet facing a baying mob – or so they thought.
The statement they made with that ill-timed visit was that Malta stands with Gaddafi and not with Libyans. For the two are not the same. It suited us to believe that Gaddafi was there because Libyans wanted him to be there. Over the years, and despite mounting evidence that Libyans were miserable and desperate, we convinced ourselves that Gaddafi and Libya were one and the same. We deluded ourselves so that we could carry on taking his 10 pieces of silver with a clear conscience and sleep at night. We looked the other way so that we could do whatever it took to keep the monster 250 miles away off our backs and out of our territorial waters and airspace.
Our behaviour was craven and it’s time to admit it. We are going to wear sackcloth and ashes for a long time, as more of the truth is revealed when Gaddafi goes down. But instead, our foreign minister is eking out the last few remaining opportunities for crawling about on his belly and living on his knees. What is he hoping exactly: that Gaddafi might somehow pull off a magic trick and stay on, with everything returning to normal, so that Malta doesn’t have to contend with the fall-out of change, with floods of refugees, or with the problems of those who have lost their businesses and their jobs? Let six million people suffer for more decades still, so that 450,000 people in Malta don’t have to be temporarily inconvenienced? One day I will understand why to be born Maltese appears to mean being born egocentric and with tunnel vision. Or maybe it’s just the way we are raised: looking after Number One first and foremost, and screw the rest.
Muammar Gaddafi is not Libya. He is not the Libyan people. You cannot be a friend of Gaddafi and also be a friend of Libya or its people. Perhaps Malta is now learning the hard way that what it thought was friendship with Libya and its people was actually friendship with Muammar Gaddafi and his henchmen, and that is exactly how Libyan people saw it.
They saw us – and Italy – as mercenaries and opportunists who collaborated and colluded with their oppressor. That’s why there were so many shouted insults at Berlusconi during Tuesday’s protest outside the Libyan Embassy in Attard. That’s why the Italian flag was torn and burned. The message was clear: those who profess friendship with Gaddafi are no friends of the six million people he has oppressed for 42 years. Let’s be sensible: if we were in their position, that’s how we would see it too.
Even as the fighting, the shooting, the bombings and the killings were under way in Benghazi and Tripoli, Tonio Borg told a newspaper here: “Malta, through successive governments, has had close contacts with Libya since the 1960s because there was mutual friendship. We even remained close when UN sanctions were imposed upon it. It would be a mistake to stop contacts with countries because they have governments different to ours.” During his visit on 9 February, they spoke about “renewing the friendship agreement between (Malta and Libya)”.
How badly Tonio Borg misunderstands the situation. Malta’s relationship has never been with Libya or with its people. It has been only with Gaddafi and his regime. It is because he cannot grasp this distinction that his judgment has been so clouded and continues to let him down, even as it becomes clear to him that it is the Libyan people he is going to have to convince of his integrity now, and not Gaddafi.
Libya has long hated Gaddafi, detested him with a passion and feared him so much that few Libyans felt safe talking about how they really felt, even when they lived outside Libya. Gaddafi’s agents spied on expatriate Libyans. Transgressors were popped off. Back home, members of their families ‘disappeared’.
What all this meant is that only those who listened really carefully and ‘between the lines’ got to know the true picture. Maltese politicians and businessmen were divorced from that reality, because the only Libyans they ever met were Gaddafi’s henchmen, members of his regime or – here’s the real bummer – ordinary Libyans who never felt comfortable speaking to them precisely because they are Maltese politicians and businessmen who were close to Gaddafi and his men. That’s why Maltese politicians and businessmen were the last to know about what was happening in Libya and thought that riots would never reach Tripoli and that Gaddafi was inviolate: because Libyan people who were not part of the regime did not trust them enough to tell them the truth.
If it’s any consolation to Tonio Borg and Lawrence Gonzi – although this will come as a great shock to Joseph Muscat and his band of brontosauruses – it is the Labour Party that Libyans despise and not Maltese people in general. They despise it because they associate it with Gaddafi, because Mintoff was a Gaddafi ally, because Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici warned him of incoming US bombers and saddled them with the psychopath for another 25 years and now a bloodbath, because the new leader tried so hard to carry on with that system, to the extent of getting AST to organise meetings with their hated despot.
Libyans admire Eddie Fenech Adami, conversely, because they see him as the man who saved Malta from Mintoff and Labour/Gaddafi oppression. For all those years, we thought “Mintoff = Gaddafi = Libya = Libyans”, when all along Libyans hated and despised Gaddafi (and Mintoff) far more than we did, because they had every reason to do so.
Now that Tonio Borg and Lawrence Gonzi have finally understood just how much the six million people of Libya hate their close friend, the murderer Gaddafi, they had better do the clever thing and tailor their behaviour accordingly. As for doing the moral thing, I would say it’s rather too late for that.