This is not the time to indulge in our normal partisan bickering, although even there much can be said and will undoubtedly be said, right or wrong.

It is a time for deadly seriousness and for a thorough re-evaluation of our national consciousness and international relations. That we have to do it under the strain of the present very threatening circumstances is a pity, but we have only ourselves, collectively, to blame. When people have not thoroughly thought out the implications of their actions that is what normally happens to them.

On Friday night, I was at the Valletta waterfront and mingled with the first returnees from Libya. They were all ordinary human beings, mostly families, all uprooted from a settled life, many quite young, many with small children – who told stories of having been through hell just to get to the boat, of having kept away from windows to escape the indiscriminate shooting outside their houses, some even told of being robbed at gunpoint in the ensuing lawlessness, especially out in the desert.

All that we consider acquired and normal suddenly became unobtainable for them – above all safety and security, the Internet, mobile telephony, transport, plane tickets and flights to a desired destination.

Those, and we must consider these to be the lucky ones, were left to scramble around for a seat on a plane or on a boat, or for the absolutely essential scraps of paper that told you that you could leave.

I can still not believe the nun who told PBS that she did not see anything, or the Maltese man who told l-orizzont this was all Al Jazeera lies (although another man who had also been interviewed by l-orizzont later claimed his words had been twisted and cut). If nothing was happening, why did they come back?

I can understand the Libyans, or some or many of them, protesting outside their embassy in Balzan, but cannot forget the millions of fellow Libyans back home who would also like to protest but dare not, who would also like to call some news channel or other to say what is happening to them and to express their free views, but dare not for fear of a violent gang barging into their homes and shooting them dead.

Whatever the outcome, this leaves the country in an absolute shambles. For Libya was not, not by a long chalk, a normal country. The people we saw coming off the catamaran were ordinary people, doing ordinary jobs, but mostly indispensable since they do not have, mostly, a Libyan replacement. For that was how the Great Leader left his country after 42 years of having total power – absolutely dependent on foreign workers not just in oil extraction, refining and managing, but also in road building, house construction, water extraction and management, in mostly anything.

The supposedly oil-rich country has been left with almost the same kind of problems that neighbouring countries, who do not have that amount of oil, are plagued with – youth unemployment, housing needs, lack of educational opportunities.

In contrast, the Gaddafi extended family and its immediate circle, bought property around the world, invested in blue chip companies, dabbled in football clubs and cars, and amassed an enormous fortune that will need years to unravel and to freeze.

Whether the revolution is successful or not, it will take years for Libya to regain any apparent normalcy. Hopefully, the normalcy will not be the kind of normalcy that was there till a month ago, for we can all now see it was a normalcy based on fiction, the fiction of a country that appeared to be normal and modern and almost a democracy but which was none of these.

All it took was one man’s protest in neighbouring Tunisia and it all started to get unravelled – from Tunisia to mighty Egypt and now to Libya. And all it took was for some spontaneous public protests for the Libyan regime to shed its patronizing and benevolent veneer and shoot to kill anybody who dared disapprove. All it took was some early defeats and mercenaries were brought in from all over Africa, and, it seems also from countries like Serbia and even from Italy, and ordered to kill.

No leader who does that to his people deserves to win, or to escape justice. However, history is full of people who did that and lived on and continued to rule.

Whatever people may say, and many are still in denial even today, many still spout optimistic phrases, whatever the outcome (and I do not think the final outcome will emerge immediately) huge damage has been done and is being done. Not just to Libya but also to us as a country.

We are the victims of geography. Over the past hours, many have had a patriotic (or nationalistic) high hearing Malta’s name mentioned in all the news bulletins. But that’s a double-edged sword. True, the organisation down at the waterfront was impressive and the outflow of people rescued has kept up with more people brought in. But we must also realise that Malta’s name mentioned so often in the news all over the world can also be reinforcing fears among many people thinking of a Malta holiday that the island is far too near Libya for comfort.

But we are also the victims of our shortsightedness, both in the private sphere and the public one.

Let me widen this comment a bit. Over the past years, we have been seeing factories closing down in Malta and relocating to Tunisia where wages are cheaper. In the light of what has happened there, the final outcome of which we still cannot see, what do we think now of such a strategy?

We cannot lump together in the same category all those who have invested in Libya – and these are now the real unfortunates. But in many cases, it is well known that no one could open up for business in Libya unless one had a Libyan counterpart – and in the circumstances of the country, that meant someone with connections to the regime. The structures of authority in the country were capillary, down to local levels and down to ground level in all areas of business, even to the level of shops and retail outlets.

That may explain how instinctively many of the Maltese who came back have adopted the same kind of defensive talk as expressed by the regime’s defenders. While the Brits who came over on Friday were reasonably circumspect, at least they called a spade a spade. They just did not have the internal, mental, and self-censor on.

This should be a time of great seriousness for all of us – certainly no time for the endless posturing and scoring of partisan points. We are all in it together and we are all to blame. I never thought I would find myself in agreement with Graffitti, but they’re right. They would have been more right had they included photos of Gaddafi with Dom Mintoff and with KMB.

It wasn’t, it isn’t, just our political leaders – there’s a whole underclass of go-betweens, intermediaries, back office people. People who are now ducking down but who have provided their Libyan counterparts with valuable assistance, and, most notably, respectability. It is precisely because of this brigade that the Libyan regime was made to appear as being more palatable, as almost, heaven help me, democratic. People who were of consequence there and act insignificant here. People who made good money there.

Over the coming period, as we emerge from this nightmare, we may come to understand, perhaps, the inestimable value of acting right, of not grabbing the nearest opportunity to turn a quick buck, of not cutting corners, of not shirking from doing things right, in the right way, with the right people, without any trace of shady deals. (I am not saying all business in Libya was shady, though I would like to be in the Prime Minister’s shoes when he meets that business community, as he has been doing in the past days).

Even so, the government has disappointed me these past days. I am coming to be instantly suspicious whenever the government and Opposition get too pally. Let’s accept for starters the government was right to first get all Maltese out of Libya before speaking its mind – after all, the mighty US did that, within minutes of the catamarans arriving in Malta.

But we would have liked to hear that our government sent for the feisty Libyan ambassador and registered a firm protest against what was happening in Libya, rather than issue a rather ambiguous and irenic condemnation of violence (as if the protesters, with stones, were on the same moral level as the soldiers with guns!). I was rather shocked by the government’s strong-worded criticism of The Times’ story that the EU had agreed on sanctions, considering that the EU member states were well on their way to do that and that Barack Obama had done just that. Internationally, according to the government wrongly, but there you are – Malta had a bad press over the past week for the arms trafficking story and the story that Malta and Italy were dragging their feet on the sanctions issue.

Switzerland, with unhappy memories of Libya’s revenge when Hannibal Gaddafi beat a maid and was briefly incarcerated, froze Gaddafi’s funds, without waiting for the UN Security Council. And other countries have suspended or broken off relations with Libya until the present regime is still there.

But of course, we could not do that – not while we had jokers like Berlusconi kissing hands and hustling for contracts, or Tony Blair for all his newfound conversion, shutting both eyes to the reality of the regime.

In such a big-time league, we are still minnows, whatever we like to think.

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