For a while, these past weeks, the news from Libya repeatedly threatened to disappear from the main items in the news.

First there was the terrible earthquake and tsunami and nuclear complications in Japan.

Then, as the fighting in Libya became a stalemate and a quagmire, attention was more focused on the bickering between the Coalition partners.

Then protests erupted elsewhere in the Arab world, from Yemen to Syria and for a time threatened to put whatever was happening in Libya in the shade.

Until yesterday the rebel fighters, helped by the coalition air strikes, broke the stranglehold by the Gaddafi forces in Ajdabiya and the last reports say the fighters have now reconquered not just Ajdabiya but also overrun Brega with the Gaddafi forces in full rout.

So, at least as seen yesterday evening, the situation in Libya has come again to be in the main focus of the world news. Now it all depends on what happens in the coming days or weeks.

But there were times, last week, when one could have profitably reflected on the irrelevance of being in the margin of things but in a non-influential position. This was even more so in the case of our self-imposed neutral (or is it neutered?) position as a country.

Let’s look at the wide picture first. Obviously, in the wake of yesterday’s possibly decisive victory, it looks as if the Coalition is on a roll. But there were days, as recent as last week, when the US looked like holding back, and when people wondered whether this Anglo-French push was a re-run of the Suez crisis of 1956 which ended in ignominy for both countries. It looked like the two belligerent leaders, Sarkozy and Cameron, had been too trigger-happy in their rush to start the offensive but they had not really thought out the whole strategy first and lacked enough fire power to reinforce it. Just like the two countries did in 1956.

When things looked like being stalled, Germany and even Barack Obama were beginning to look not quite like being less than lukewarm on attacking Gaddafi but as actually being more prudent, cautious and having thought out things much better than the trigger-happy duo.

And as riots erupted in Syria, in Yemen, in Bahrain, and even in Jordan, the question was: now what will the West do? Can it impose a no-fly zone on all these countries? There are also wider implications: what would be the implications on the very delicate Middle East situation if the stability of some key countries becomes unhinged?

The Sarkozy-Cameron jape quickly looked like being a speculative adventure that could end in tears. At some point, the diplomacy of the two countries began to appear as reining in the exuberance of their leaders and feelers began to be put out to assess whether there could be, after all, any chance of giving diplomacy a run.

Then, yesterday, as I said earlier, the stalemate was broken and the rebels look like running after the Gaddafi forces all the way to Tripoli.

Things however, were so near to breaking down in the past days that they can easily break down again any day now.

Just imagine if the situation in any of the countries just mentioned gets out of hand. The US is desperately resisting getting involved in another foreign adventure that has US soldiers attacking a Muslim country.

As to Libya, the situation is still far too fluid to really make any predictions. At its present best, it looks like Gaddafi’s hold over the whole country has been broken, but that still leaves him and his forces in control over the West and around Tripoli while impotent about what happens in the East around Benghazi. Despite what all the rebel leaders say that Libya must remain one country, the situation at present looks more like partition in practice.

Meanwhile we, as a country, have increasingly become irrelevant in what is happening.

We used to think that Malta had a strategic position in the middle of the Mediterranean. This is no longer so. Aircraft take off from Sigonella in Sicily and Gioia del Colle in Italy, or even from Markham in the UK or from ships in the sea. For all the rather tiresome debates about whether we are constitutionally neutral or whether we are constitutionally bound to observe a UN Security Council resolution, the fact is: nobody needs us.

There is no valour or virtue in this. We are damned if we do and damned if we don’t. Nobody in his right senses would say we should try and be equidistant between the tyrant massacring his people and the protesters. Yet it is a fact that for a long time Malta looked like a Gaddafi protectorate and most links, including business ones, with Libya were made through Gaddafi’s wide range of tentacles.

It is also a fact that otherwise, the Maltese people or its institutions have no link with the Libyan people that does not pass through the Gaddafi network.

In case anyone thinks this situation regards Libya only, we have much the same problem with other North African neighbours. I distinctly remember being invited to speak to Tunisian academics some years ago. Now Tunisia is not like Libya: there were many universities there and huge thousands of students. It is true that Tunisia is strongly Francophone, so there are huge language difficulties, and Tunisia was a dictatorship as well, but there were immense opportunities for links between our academia and theirs, as well as opportunities for dialogue between the peoples – but still there was never any interest that I could see from Malta.

All we seemed to want was to shift our gaze northwards towards the EU.

And so we lost in relevance. You do not become relevant in the middle of a popular uprising. To be relevant you must establish links before and beyond the immediate.

And all we seemed to think before the riots began, and even now, is to worry and fear the amount of asylum seekers that will come our way once the fighting dies down and the seas get calmer. Even here, however, what we fear is rather irrelevant.

Ask the people of Pantelleria and Lampedusa who time and again were swamped over the past days until they were actually less in number than the asylum seekers clambering over their rocks. Had the same thing happened to us, we do not even have the option that is open to Italy, that of shipping the asylum seekers to the continent and then letting them go practically anywhere. We would have to keep them all here, feed them and share our health services with them. How’s that for total irrelevance?

Our leaders have suddenly become huge irrelevancies. Prime Minister Gonzi slid in just a few days from a statesman handling well the inflow of people from so many nations rescued from the fighting in Libya to mumbling half-baked statements on Al Jazeera, outbid by his deputy in his notorious interview on Sky.

I many times wonder what the prime minister’s colleagues around the EU table make of us, but even here I fear we are hugely irrelevant. We all have our problems with keeping up with the acquis communautaire and the many directives that are issued by Brussels but are we making any impact on the EU decision-making processes? Many times I fear we only get noticed when key people who are said to be representing us make asses of themselves (and of us) and people start noticing our many failures. Our ministers fly there around the clock, and we all get DOI pictures and sometimes a statement or two, but these seem to be for home consumption. I have yet to be at an EU summit and hear our leaders being engaged by journalists other than us tame beasts on the matter at hand.

To be relevant does not mean to be sitting down at the table where the decisions are taken but to have a hand in the decisions. Take Luxembourg and its doughty Prime Minister Juncker for instance. Time and again I have seen him at close quarters making himself available to journalists of all kinds and giving clear, pondered, and even courageous quotes. The last time something like that happened was at the beginning of the Libya crisis when Tonio Borg told journalists outside the Council hall that the main fear in the riots was an Islamic emirate out of Benghazi.

Last week I included in my article some points I felt I needed to make about Air Malta, for which, late at night I received a message full of anger. The issue of relevance also relates to our industries and businesses. Those that are not relevant will not survive in a competitive environment. It seems clear, from an analysis of even those industries we seem to think are doing well, that foreign investors look at us as cheap and handy locations. We have more than one facility where we do mostly assembly-chain operations here and R&D are done in their home countries. Unless we go up the value chain, we are doomed to irrelevance.

This applies equally to Air Malta, if we really want a solution to be found there. To try and preserve the national airline as it was at the time of monopoly is no way forward. Nor is it relevant to stay pointing fingers – we all know the government is to blame for the past years of inaction. The airline survives only if it seeks to be, or become, or remain, relevant, whatever the sacrifices that have to be made.

Now if the airline, or its component parts, seek their sectoral interests rather than the survival of the company or if any of them wants to play brinkmanship until the very end, it’s their choice. They would have made themselves, and the airline with them, irrelevant.

We may think, following the statement by Ryanair’s CEO last week, that the low cost carriers are all waiting for Air Malta’s demise to take over. Do these people (and the thousands employed by the tourism and hospitality sector) ever stop and think what would it mean to become dependent on the whims of here-today-and-gone-tomorrow Ryanairs?

Nothing is guaranteed in this world, not even the continuance of what we used to enjoy in the past. We only owe it to ourselves to make ourselves relevant if we want to feature in the coming scenarios.

Otherwise we render ourselves past history.

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