Maria Camilleri, the former Labour member of parliament who for many years has been head of the Muslim school which was set up with funds from Muammar Gaddafi back in the Golden Years, has been made the prime minister’s ‘special envoy’ to Arab countries. This is like making somebody a special envoy to ‘the English-speaking world’: it doesn’t make sense because all Arab countries are different and the only things they have in common are religion (largely irrelevant for a special envoy) and language. But one gathers that this is largely a ceremonial post because a special envoy who is a full-time headmistress doesn’t have much time to be an envoy.
Ms Camilleri made the news when she turned down her €34,000 a year envoy’s salary, saying that she doesn’t need it because she has her school salary. Well, quite frankly, it is not a question of her not needing it, but whether she would be doing something to earn it. If she is earning a full-time salary from her school position, then there is no way she has the time to earn her envoy’s salary. A school headmistress has no business accepting a job as the prime minister’s special envoy to the Arab world, and the prime minister has no business making that kind of appointment.
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The Jesuit Refugee Service has had a book published, Beyond Imagination, which documents the experiences of asylum seekers who have been washed up in Malta. At the launch, Goitom Yosief, who works for the JRS, spoke. He had fled Eritrea when he was 26, he said. He ended up in Libya and that was a terrible experience. “From what I have seen while being in Libya,” he told his audience, “it is much worse than being sent to my country.”
People believe that African immigrants can work in Libya, Yosief said, but they can’t. Even before the ravages and turbulence of the civil war, they were attacked, subject to robbery, and even going to the shops was dangerous. Even Libyan citizens had no rights under Gaddafi, let alone African migrants. And now there is near-anarchy, which makes migrants even more vulnerable.
Katrine Camilleri, the Jesuit Refugee Service’s director, said that her organisation cannot make it clear enough to the government of Malta that it must refrauin from doing anything, directly or indirectly, which will cause migrants to be returned to Libya “until the situation there has drastically improved and the Libyan government puts in place effective measures to safeguard human rights and guarantee access to protection in practice”. That will be a long time coming. Libya shows no interest, even now, in guaranteeing the rights of its citizens, let alone of migrants.
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We have been told with much fanfare that the famed guitarist Brian May is to give a concert in Malta as part of the national celebrations to mark the four anniversaries (three of them spurious) this year. Why on earth has this concert has been billed as part of the official celebrations?
From my perspective, as I look at the promotional advertisements telling us where we can buy our tickets, it looks like just another big-league concert of the sort that we get in Malta every couple of years or so: Elton John, Sting, that kind of thing. How is this one different? It’s going to be organised in the same way, and we are going to have to pay to go in the same way. A concert that is part of national celebrations is a big, public concert held for free. Except that it would have to come out of the public purse, of course, so it wouldn’t really be free, but that’s not the point. The point is that a popular concert for a national celebration should be wide open to all-comers and not just to paying guests. Otherwise, Brian May might as well have come over next year, giving that we are going to have to pay to see him. I’m quite sure it makes no difference to him.
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