The Prime Minister acknowledged in an interview on Radio 101 that his government’s stance on Libya is an unpopular one. Perhaps he should have been a little more specific: it is not generally unpopular, for Labour supporters appear to love it, and so do many of those who voted for Lawrence Gonzi. It appeals to a certain xenophobic mindset and fits with the general attitude of disengagement and isolation.
What the Prime Minister meant to say, I suspect, is that his government’s decisions on Libya have proved unpopular with many of those who voted for him. It is true that I am the most vocal example – by dint of my work, which is to write about such things – but then I rarely speak in a vacuum. People who vote Nationalist tend to have a completely different outlook on life to those who vote Labour, and that outlook does not involve ‘what does it have to do with us’, ‘what do you mean, principles’ and ‘let’s stay out of it’. It certainly does not glorify neutrality, something we associate with Dom Mintoff and Gaddafi, despite the Nationalist Party having voted for it too in that constitutional trade-off after 1981.
Some of the Prime Minister’s supporters have accepted with alacrity the new reason he gave, in the flood of opprobrium after his ‘neutrality’ talk, for not offering Malta’s services as a military base: that the airport is too small and we have but one. They clutched at it eagerly because talk of neutrality embarrassed them. Neutrality = Mintoff = Gaddafi in the minds of people like me. But others have not, and I am one of them. We are left with the distinct impression that a decision was taken at the outset that Malta is not to get involved, for reasons that are being kept from us, and that the government is making up its explanations on the hoof, hence the inherent contradictions.
But this goes deeper. Many of the Prime Minister’s supporters, because of their political beliefs, have never regarded Muammar Gaddafi as anything other than a terrorist and oppressor of his people. We even regard him as an oppressor of Malta, because many of us grew up with the real sense that he was puppet-master to our prime ministers Dom Mintoff and Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici. I was only 14 at the time, but I can remember vividly the fear when the British left 32 years ago this week, that Gaddafi would take over and Malta become a satellite state of Libya. Those fears were well founded.
If you vote Nationalist, the likelihood is that you despise Gaddafi and his regime – unless, of course, you felt it necessary to tolerate him so as to do a spot of business or, like EU Commissioner John Dalli, you got to know Gaddafi and his henchmen so well that you were able to open a Tripoli-based consultancy taking payment to open doors for others.
Politicians like the Prime Minister and his foreign minister are unable to understand just how much the people who voted for them despise Muammar Gaddafi and all that is associated with him because, for all these years of government, they have been forced into a relationship with him and have ended up embracing that relationship with enthusiasm. They went from shaking his hand to hugging him. That must have demanded a certain amount of accommodation of their conscience and principles, but the mind works to allow that sort of thing to happen. Needs must when the devil drives – that sort of thing.
Dr Gonzi’s supporters, unlike Dr Gonzi himself, have not changed their view of Muammar Gaddafi since the 1970s, when he used to bully Dom Mintoff, give him cash handouts and speak at Labour mass meetings. So we cannot understand Dr Gonzi’s reluctance to help zap him out of existence now. The way we see it, we should not only be joining in with our mosquito’s worth, but we should be doing so with cathartic zeal: “Take that. And that. And that again.” This shouldn’t come as a surprise to Dr Gonzi and Dr Borg, if they care to remember that Muammar Gaddafi was the devil incarnate to all those of us who were opposed to Mintoff and Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici and who haven’t, unlike our political leaders, changed our minds since 1987. Every one of those 170-plus Tomahawk missiles was met with a silent cheer in Maltese households. If we get the much-awaited news that one of them has finally landed on his rooftop and blown him to kingdom come, the champagne corks will be popping all over the island. It may not be very Christian, but we’re not playing games of ‘let’s pretend’.
Gaddafi has been a threat to Malta and a great impediment to the furtherance of the so-called national interest for the last four decades. The way people like me look at it, this is the very reason Malta should embrace with everything it has got the coordinated effort to blow him out of existence. High-flown arguments about principles and morality aside, we should do this because it pays us to do it. It is in our national interest to get rid of him and to start afresh without him.
Those who say otherwise are short-termist in their thinking. Malta stands to gain far more in the long term by having him wiped out than it stands to lose in the short or medium term. It stands to gain more by getting rid of him than it could ever have gained had none of this happened. By saying that Malta will not get involved, the Prime Minister and his foreign minister suggest that to them it makes no effective difference whether Gaddafi stays or goes, because the outcome will be the same for Malta. If they acknowledge that getting rid of Gaddafi is the best option for Malta, then they cannot continue to say that Malta will keep out of it because it is not our battle. And that is why neither of them has given a straight answer to the simple question of whether they believe Malta – not Libya – will be better off without Gaddafi.
The ‘fear of reprisal’ excuse can be similarly demolished. To many of those who voted for Lawrence Gonzi to become Prime Minister, myself included, the way to deal with a constant threat is not to appease it, keep out of its way or try to neutralise it by playing nice. First you stand up to it and then, when you can, you simply eliminate it. Eliminating Muammar Gaddafi was not possible in these last 42 years. When Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher tried their hand at it in 1986 in response to his acts of terrorism, the leaders of Malta and Italy vied for the privilege of being the first to warn him of US bombers travelling through our airspace and heading his way.
But now that the Libyan people themselves have risen up with the single goal of getting Gaddafi out – a euphemism for killing him with the same relish that the Romanians killed Ceaucescu and the Italians killed Mussolini – sensible countries like Britain, the United States and France have seized the day. David Cameron’s thinking on the matter can be boiled down to its essence: “Now’s our chance.” To say that it is about oil, as the unthinking do, is to miss the point. It is not about oil. It is about eliminating, once and for all, a dangerous and long-standing threat.
The mistake Malta makes is to claim special ‘endangered status’ because of geographical proximity, when the remoteness from Libya of the United States and Britain did not spare them. Gaddafi funded the Irish Republic Army throughout those terrible years in the 1970s and early 1980s when every week seemed to bring a fresh bomb attack in Northern Ireland and England. And when he blew up an American passenger plane, he did so over Scotland.
Kenneth Clarke, the Lord Chancellor, has given an interview to The Guardian in which he suggests that the end-game is to eliminate the threat called Muammar Gaddafi – though he says ‘depose’ rather than ‘kill’. “The British people have reason to remember the curse of Gaddafi – Gaddafi back in power, the old Gaddafi looking for revenge, we have a real interest in preventing that,” he said. The UN Security Council resolution does not support regime change, but the Lord Chancellor’s remarks make it quite obvious that the British government understands it has a “direct security interest” in removing him.
Malta shares that exact same interest, and the sooner we stop pretending to ourselves that we don’t know this, the better for us all.
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