I am utterly repelled – there is no other word for it – by the shameless and shameful refusal of our politicians to be forthright about Muammar Gaddafi.

Is it because they remain afraid of him even now, or still more afraid because they know that if he isn’t removed, then he will be worse?

Is it because they don’t wish to burn their bridges and plan to carry on sniffing around his ankles for any crumbs he may choose to let fall on an island which he has long regarded as his vassal state?

Or is it because, despite their pro-life protestations and their cries in favour of liberty and democracy and human rights, they are not really appalled by what he has done and what he is doing now? “The violence has to stop”, the Prime Minister said – and indeed it does, but that is not a remonstration. That is an observation, like the observation that “the end of Gaddafi’s regime is inevitable”. Of course it is inevitable. As the saying goes, in the long run we are all dead.

If our politicians were truly appalled, they would want to personally rip off Gaddafi’s chest those decorations Malta gave him, and then wear sackcloth and ashes for the next 10 years for having such poor judgement. Nobody can pretend not to know what Muammar Gaddafi’s regime was like. We knew, but we lived in denial like those whose minds shrink away from awareness of abuse in the family home. We did not have to wait for the testimony of those who are speaking now to know that he had his opponents systematically tortured and killed, that those who criticised him or stood up to his demands were made to disappear into the night, their families left without a corpse to bury or even a prison to visit.

What do Lawrence Gonzi and Joseph Muscat imagine is happening right now to the rebels who were captured when Zawiya fell, to those taken at Ras Lanuf, to the courageous men whose eloquent words against Gaddafi were broadcast to the world by the international news networks? Perhaps they should ring the three BBC journalists who were beaten severely and kept in a cage, while all around them people lay bleeding with broken ribs and the wild screams of the tortured were heard from neighbouring barracks.

Yes, every country courted Gaddafi but Malta went one step further. We called him a friend. When meeting him, our politicians did not extend their rigid right arm and shake his hand with their body turned half away from his and a facial expression of barely contained ‘oh-god-the-things-I-must-do-for-my-country’ distaste. Instead, they embraced him, hugged him, and were voluble, their faces wreathed in smiles, like Silvio Berlusconi or Tony Blair signing the BP contract.

Maltese politicians of all stripes called Muammar Gaddafi a friend of Malta. Last August, three of them – Joseph Muscat, Karmenu Vella and Michael Farrugia – even went as far as accepting a lift back home to Malta on Gaddafi’s private jet. I wonder if they were conscious of the fact that Al Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber, sat there before them when he was brought back from prison in Britain in that very same plane.

The photographs that have accumulated in my files since 17 February are a litany of shame and servile acquiescence, from those depicting prime minister Dom Mintoff beaming up at Gaddafi with prideful pleasure in the early 1970s, when Gaddafi came to Malta to address Labour rallies, inspect troops of state schoolchildren and give our premier $3 million for his vote-catching children’s allowance, to the last of the lot, showing Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi embracing a face-lifted and decrepit maniac in a Canadian trapper’s hat and looking supremely delighted to be doing so.

Yes, it’s true and accurate to say that the Labour Party’s relationship with Muammar Gaddafi was and probably still is personal and much embroiled, that they liked and admired him and held him up for adulation, rather than seeing their dealings with him as merely doing the necessary, a sort of needs must when the devil drives. Gaddafi has spectacularly negative significance for those of us who were raised in the Golden Years of Labour and hated it. We must have been the only children outside Libya to know – because we had no choice – what the Green Book was and what Libya’s flag looked like, the only children outside Libya able to recognise Gaddafi’s face and who knew his name. Up until today, the only two colours that provoke in me a visceral reaction are the royal blue of my school cardigan and Gaddafi green.

Gaddafi visited Malta seven times between 1973 and 1984. He even visited with his family. There is a photograph which shows Mintoff, who was unfailingly boorish and uncouth to visiting dignitaries unless they were from the Communist bloc or Libya, bending low to fawn over a young Saif Al Islam, proffering a piece of fruit while Lorry Sant and Alex Sceberras Trigona wring their hands indulgently like two proud grandmothers, and Colonel and Mrs Gaddafi look on.

Things were different when the Nationalist Party came to power in 1987, but sadly not different enough. There were no more visits from Muammar, no direct donations to the country’s coffers (we don’t know whether the donations to the Labour Party’s coffers continued; they might well have done). But Maltese government officials popped over rather a lot themselves, for what purpose has never really been made clear. One government minister got to know to know Tripoli and the Gaddafis so well, and built up such a network of useful contacts, that he bought a house there and set up an eponymous consultancy company – John Dalli & Associates – which claims on its website that it helps others enter the Libyan market.

Though, unlike Labour, they have left the party out of the equation and conducted their relationship with Gaddafi solely at government level, Nationalist politicians too have been guilty of fostering the impression that Malta has some kind of special relationship with the Tyrant of Tripoli. They were proud of this special relationship. They thought it was something to boast about, that they were ‘in with’ Gaddafi and had one over those clueless Anglo-Saxons. As for the criticism that the French and the British sold him weapons and that’s worse, I beg to differ. Far better to sell an evil man weapons than to bestow on him the gift of friendship, though both are scandalous. Are we expected to believe that Malta would not have sold weapons to Gaddafi had we made them? The only reason we didn’t sell him weapons is that we never had any to sell. We were happy enough to sell him anything else that we could, which is why Malta has a trade surplus with Libya. So please, let’s get off the moral high ground here.

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