When the Prime Minister declared, at the end of February, that the end of the Gaddafi regime was inevitable, it sent shock waves across Malta. Some argued the statement had been premature, others that it had not been made soon enough or hard enough.

Much was said of that rare Sunday evening press conference. He was simultaneously applauded and rebuked for having taken a concrete stance on what was the most outstanding global issue of the day. Did Malta invoke the wrath of Gaddafi that day with that statement?

Perhaps we will never know, but one thing is certain, as we said at the time and as we can now confirm with the benefit of hindsight: that bold statement that night was undoubtedly the right one to have been made, and it placed Malta on the right side of history and on the right side of morality.

Had Malta done any different, had it cowered in the face of a madman letting loose with such viciousness on his own people, had it taken the easy way out and turned a blind eye, the country would not be able to hold its collective head up with pride, as it can do now with the assurance that the country did all that it could do, with its limited resources as a small country, when it could do it, and that did not shy away from tough decisions.

We all knew the end of the Gaddafi regime was inevitable, even so long before the fall of Tripoli and this week’s brutal end to a brutal dictator − some say deservedly but that judgement would be best left to a higher power.

At any rate, that inevitability finally occurred this week − and not a minute too soon. For every minute that the dictator continued to evade his seekers was another minute in which more Libyan blood was spilt. At long last, the killing will now all but stop.

The spectacular rebellion of Libya’s Arab Spring and this week’s inglorious demise of the man who ruled Libya with an iron-fist and eccentric personality cult is now over, and Libya’s interim leaders are expected to declare full liberation from the Gaddafi regime today.

Gaddafi had taken power in a bloodless coup in 1969, but bloodshed was the only way to remove him and his family from power. Had he read and understood the writing on the wall, and had he taken the route of Tunisia’s Zine El Abidine Ben Ali or Egypt’s Muhammad Hosni Mubarak, a great deal of bloodshed and loss of life, including his own, could have been averted.

There were several risks associated with the stance the Prime Minister took that day, and the Maltese people should be proud of that stance. The country has no real military might to speak of, yet the courage of its morality demonstrated by that statement will stand the test of time and will not be forgotten.

That same evening he announced that Malta had implemented UN sanctions against Libya, but the boldest action announced that night was when he told how the government had turned away a Libyan plane carrying pilots sent to take back the two Libyan Air Force Mirage fighter jets left here by defecting pilots, which would, had the government been made of flimsier stuff, been used to bomb rebels and civilians.

Indeed, Malta’s militarily-silent role in the Libyan conflict belies the multiple risks taken, and the mettle of a small country doing all that it could for its neighbours − the mass evacuations, refusing Gaddafi’s requests to mediate, the British Hercules missions from Malta, and the Libyan evacuations from Tunisia to Benghazi and Misurata − these are not acts that will be forgotten easily or quickly.

As Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Tonio Borg puts it in an interview in today’s issue: “Although the Prime Minister had been criticised, mainly in Parliament, over the statement having been premature, and that we should have been more cautious, what we actually did was to state the obvious. And the obvious was that we couldn’t be neutral in everything. You lose your legitimacy when you kill your own people – including women and children, just because they protest against the government − and now we’ve discovered he was killing many more than we had previously thought.”

That was the message conveyed that Sunday night and that was absolutely the right track to have taken.

Malta, it turns out in the end, is standing firmly on the right side of history, and, perhaps more importantly, on the right side of morality.