The news from Libya keeps getting grimmer and grimmer.

Even a cursory look at the front pages of our papers these past four weeks shows how things have drastically changed from the heady early days of the insurrection when Gaddafi seemed about to be toppled.

As we write, there are no angry protests in Tripoli against the tyrant, nor at Zawiya. The Gaddafi forces are rolling the freedom fighters back along the east coast. What looked like being in the rebels’ hands is back in Gaddafi’s hands, or else, as at Ras Lanuf, its oil tanks have been set on fire.

This air of despondency has even reached Malta. Gone are the crowds of Libyans protesting outside the embassy at Balzan, except for a few hardy ones.

The European powers are in disagreement on the next step. All the talk about enforcing no-fly zones is just that – talk. No one seems able to bell the cat. There was disunity also in Brussels yesterday about the French unilateral declaration of formal relations with the rebels with at least one foreign minister, that of The Netherlands, reportedly calling it a ‘crazy idea’.

There is some sporadic talk about military action but most countries say they want a UN or an EU directive first – which will never come. It is true there are naval ships galore in the seas between Malta and Libya and it is also true that AWACS planes are monitoring what happens in Libya 24 hours a day – but what’s the use? They do not even tell the rebels that planes are coming in their direction.

Gloom and doom has overtaken all Libya. The iron repression is back – people are arrested in the middle of the night and are heard of no more, the BBC team who was briefly incarcerated along with rebel fighters spoke of people being tortured. There are summary executions and the bodies are then disposed of without the families being told.

This is definitely not the first time that the West has left a country alone when facing an iron repression. Remember the Hungary of 1956, then the Czechoslovakia of 1968, the China of 1993.

There is a limit to which countries go to defend the freedom of another country. No country risks its own freedom on behalf of another, except if that country is the USA, the land of the free, and even this is now strapped in Afghanistan and Iraq.

It is true that economic sanctions have been imposed and that they can be made stricter and stricter. They will have an impact on the Gaddafi government, but in the best hypothesis, the impact will be long-term and dependent on the Libyan government not finding complaisant countries/companies etc who help it evade sanctions. Here in Malta we all know about that.

So is the West, are we, leaving the Libyans in the clutches of the tyrant? From what people around us tell us, regardless of their political belief, there is enormous sympathy with the rebels but most people feel they are impotent to save them. We have looked at the terrible footage which television stations, not just Al Jazeera, have been showing and imaging the carnage that is not shown; but people are helpless to do anything.

One senses that the terrible earthquake in Japan finally dislodged the Libya crisis from the first item in foreign news bulletins. Will the Libya tragedy be henceforth relegated to the secondary areas of foreign news since ‘there isn’t much we can do about them’?

However, one must also look at the whole picture, before succumbing to understandable despair. Gaddafi is still in power, but the country he is winning back is a broken country. Even before his forces were attacking the oil tanks at Ras Lanuf, Libyan extraction of oil was a small percentage of what used to be produced before. The huge thousands of foreign workers who have escaped and returned home were essential not just for oil production but also for infrastructural works. And Gaddafi’s forces still have to win back the east – which undoubtedly he will do, but at a terrible, still to come, cost. At the end he will be on top of the heap but the heap will be a cemetery.

Hopefully, too, the countries and the individuals who believed there could be a sane side to him and his sons will now realise they have been had. Hopefully, those who attempted to ride the tiger will now realise what a terrible mistake that was. Hopefully, the financial institutions (and also the universities) will now realise what a mistake they made.

And hopefully the rest of the world will come to understand there can be no negotiation with such a tyrant with bloody hands.