The earthquake and tsunami that devastated Japan have conveniently swept Libya off the front pages in newspapers and off the main items in news bulletins.

It seems the world’s media was looking forward to that, as the Libya news has now been relegated to sixth or even lower in ranking.

People feel impotent about natural catastrophes, though in this case, the sheer scale of the quake is such that it and its aftermath will continue to dominate the news in the coming days.

But people are feeling equally impotent about the situation in Libya. There is no doubt about it: the rebellion is being routed and Gaddafi and his forces are well on top.

There is mopping up being done in the west, and soon it will be the turn of the east: Cyrenaica is warned.

One hesitates to imagine just what mopping up could mean in the Libyan context – midnight arrests, torture, summary executions, disappearances. There has even been a report of burial places of ‘martyrs’ being destroyed so that no memory survives.

At the same time the rest of the world has been dithering and discussing, and postponing decisions and shying away from them. We can safely bet nothing will be done: the world will allow Gaddafi to murder and torture Libyans as much as he wants.

Barring an improbable reversal of fortunes, or sanctions that really become effective, Libya will become a pariah state, one of those states, like North Korea is now, or Albania under Hoxha; impenetrable, a living prison for the inhabitants, a black spot to our south.

We had better adjust to this reality, even if that makes me sound like a defeatist.

Once more in its history, Malta finds itself the southernmost bastion of civilization and democracy. Hopefully, the evolution of events in Tunisia and in Egypt – none of which is guaranteed – will see them become a functioning democracy, though that is what we all hope and believe will happen.

We had better start thinking how we as a nation must adjust to this new reality. In the light of what we have been seeing, there is now no point in our attempting to be a bridge between Europe and Africa, as Malta tried to do in the 1970s. We now know what that has meant: while we were still outside the EU, we could conceivably be a bridge with one leg in Europe, but the Libya we were trying to build a bridge to was a dictatorship.

We were thus giving credibility and acceptance of a ruthless dictatorship. We were followed by many others − Berlusconi and Tony Blair being the most known, the American oil firms, British manufacturers, the Italian arms makers, etc.

Many times fiction tells the truth far more than television coverage. For all the Al Jazeera newsreels, and on the other networks, courageously shot by news teams that risk their lives (some of whom were captured and tortured), there is nothing like fiction to tell it as it is, just like Charles Dickens’ novels described the reality of the industrial revolution better than any study.

In the case of Libya, there has been a book that described the situation in Libya as it has always been under Gaddafi. This book is Hishan Matar’s In the Country of Men, which describes the suffocating fear of living under the Libyan dictatorship, the betrayals, the arrests, the torture, the warping of human relationships.

The book was published in the UK in 2006 and was short-listed for the Booker Prize but it speaks about Libya in 1979.

Mr Matar’s father, a Libyan dissident and former diplomat, disappeared in Cairo in 1990 and may still be alive inside Gaddafi’s prisons.

(Mr Matar has recently published a new novel, Anatomy of a Disappearance. And in the same vein, to get a real feel of Mubarak’s Cairo, read Alaa Al Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building).

So Mr Matar’s first book reminds us that Libya has long been like that. One of the doomed democracy activists, plotting against the regime, insists: “It is our obligation to call injustice by its name.”

I know a bit how Libya was in 1979: we were invited for the 10th anniversary of the revolution (I had been to Libya before, for the doomed and flawed Dialogue between Religions where a potential Papabile − Cardinal Pignedoli − was tricked into signing a statement that condemned Zionism, but that’s another story). In the middle of the night we were woken up and bundled into planes and ferried across the Sirte to Benghazi. Then, for hours on end, we watched as Gaddafi marched his terrible army with its hundreds of tanks and missiles along Benghazi’s main street to show them who was master.

Later on that same year, I spent a month in Tripoli and every week I used to fly to Marsa Brega (so much in the news these days), which back then was a civilized enclave with mostly British, American and Irish personnel. Once back in Tripoli, fear took over again and one had to watch one’s step all the time.

Those were also the years of the forced militarization of the population, with children of 12 or so carrying arms.

So much water (and oil) has flowed under the bridges since then. Today we have to ask ourselves whether that was warranted at all. And, more importantly, seeing that we will now have to adopt a stance as a country, what stance should we take after this bloodbath?

Our voice is small at the EU table, and we have unfortunately been compromised by the various incidents that showed up some key Maltese personalities – from John Dalli to Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici – as well as negative media reports that portrayed Malta as almost representing Libya at the European Council.

So certain key decisions taken in this past month – especially the refusal to allow the Libyan plane with the wrong flight manifest to land, and also the refusal to give the planes back, or the absconding pilots, and the refusal to mediate between Libya and the rest of the world – did a lot to redress the balance.

OK, the Prime Minister should have told the Libyan undersecretary that Gaddafi must go, rather than state that his removal is inevitable. Tonio Borg, early in the crisis, should perhaps not been so negative about the possibility of partition and that this could lead to an Islamic emirate in Cyrenaica.

It is important to say the right words, but it is now equally and crucially important to do the right thing. And this is where we must be absolutely clear. Such as in ensuring that the sanctions work. Too many times such sanctions do not really work because there would be well-placed people who either turn a blind eye or even suggest ways of subverting the sanctions. When flights to Libya were banned, Malta became the real airport of Libya.

Since then, a network of fronts have been created not just in Malta but also elsewhere. If the sanctions against the Libyan regime funds are done properly, with vigour and rigour, the ramifications of the many-tentacled Libyan state funds will be uncovered. It is now our duty as a country, to honour the martyrs if for nothing else, to ensure the sanctions work properly here too.

There are also individuals who have been on this huge Libyan massaging of public image for years. Including my friend – and I am not being sarcastic: he is my friend – who I found out years and years ago, had been commissioned by his Libyan masters to draw up a report on the few of us who had written anything about Libya and assess where we stood. Possibly the other embassies do this sort of thing.

This friend, even till recently, wrote articles to papers about Libya, and there he was, at the only press conference the Libyan ambassador gave, sitting next to him.

He is a harmless person, well-meaning too, but his work was to massage the image of the tyrant.

Malta must stand firm in its condemnation of the brutalities that have been committed and demand that justice be done. Forget about being the bridge, pull up the drawbridge.

If we were to be selfish about things, it would be in our interest if Gaddafi wins. Not just, as a person who claimed he is Libyan, said in reply to a blog in the past days, that the Maltese who invested in Libya were friends of the regime (this is not true of all of them), but also because were Gaddafi to lose, we would get boatloads of people running away from international justice, perhaps even people with arms. As it is, we will possibly be flooded by non-Libyans of a dark colour who are being mistaken for mercenaries, or by opponents of the Libyan regime if they succeed in getting this far.

In the case of Malta, we will come under more intense pressure from people who have business interests there, to silence our horror and to carry on as if nothing happened. We have been doing this for so long that it has become part of our natural make-up. The countries that get their oil from Libya (not Malta, but others) will be in a real hurry to get things back to normal. Seif al-Islam is already threatening Italy with retaliation for its ‘treachery’.

In all this we must remember that we are a small people, just like the Libyan people are a small people. If the entire world could walk away from the Libyan repression, would it do the same to us? Or does being in the EU protect us from such an eventuality?

We were nationalistic (small N as Josanne said) when the ships with evacuees came in. Let us hope we will be nationalistic (small N) when it comes to standing firm and condemning what is unmistakably wrong, even if it’s a bully neighbour who does so.

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