Birds without wings

It was bound to happen. Since the events that happened last January in Safi Barracks and all the hoohah that they caused, the demonstration in Valletta was a natural consequence. I am surprised it did not happen sooner. Despite the lip service paid to remedy the situation we have had no reassuring results from the official bodies with the result that it appears that more and more people are taking the law into their own hands and jumping to conclusions and opinions that foment and spread the worst type of xenophobia known to man; racism.

The clash with Fr Mark Montebello and Moviment Graffiti simply showed that there appears to be no apparent middle road. There is no equitable solution to put people's fears at rest; if there is one, will whoever it is who has this solution come out with it before more damage is done? We had one movement with extreme views demonstrating and another with equally extreme views counter demonstrating. The result was mayhem.

The illegal immigrant problem has long been one of national proportion and does indeed pose a very real threat to our way of life. Alien skin colour, alien religion and alien ways in small quantities have never bothered us much as a nation before but at this juncture when we see more and more of them on our streets, in our shops and on our buses, the once piquant diversity has become an over-seasoned dish that very few of us can actually digest. From the opinion polls that have been held it is very clear that the average Maltese is scared and that is to be taken very seriously indeed.

The two bodies which should be guiding us as to how to cope with this very grave problem, namely the government and the Church, have been oddly reticent and, coming to think of it, unless he thinks he will do a Michael Howard a month before the election, so has Alfred Sant and the Malta Labour Party. While we are taught that our fundamental Christian belief should be to love our neighbour as ourselves, because of mismanagement and mutual lack of understanding this overriding dogma has been thrown out of the window. We are now professing extreme un-Christian beliefs and ideologies because we intend preserving what we think is our God-given right for ourselves and our children and grandchildren to live in a hiatus; an unchanging, charmed and privileged utopia of our own imagination.

With the powers that be showing their ineffectualness day after day it is inevitable that right wing parties should gain more and more supporters. In fact, had there been no illegal immigrant problem, Norman Lowell and his friends would have remained the national joke that they were a couple of years ago when one went to their political meetings in the same holiday vein as one used to go to Spiru Sant's and Il-Farfett's a decade ago. Today it is the opposite. People are starting to believe the very dangerous spiel that right wingers use to spread fear whether existent or not, one of the most absurd being that many people are not eating lampuki because they have been told that these wonderfully tasty fish have been feeding on the drowned bodies of immigrants who didn't make it. When one reaches absurdities like this we have truly hit the bottom and I cannot for the life of me imagine how we can be extricated.

What we cannot seem to grasp as a nation is that we form part of a very troubled world and, much as we would like to, we cannot separate ourselves from its woes. For millennia we Maltese have lived in a sometimes deprived but protected environment. Our history, for those who care to know it, has brought in various racial influxes, including an Irishman named Lowell, a couple of Spaniards named Cardona and Galizia, an Englishman named Beattie and a Tunisian named Zammit to actually form what is today understood to be the Maltese nation.

We are under the impression that we are the centre of the universe and that the rest of the world owes us a living.

I am quite convinced that hardly any of the immigrants actually planned to come here to start with. It makes absolutely no logical sense. We Maltese, who have ourselves been emigrating for the last couple of hundred years, never chose Lampedusa or even Sicily as our land of milk and honey but Australia, America, the UK and Canada. Had all the Maltese who still consider themselves to be Maltese all to come back to Malta it would sink for apparently there are far more Maltese overseas than in Malta!

I have just finished Louis de Bernieres' latest novel Birds Without Wings. Set before, during and after the Great War, the story focuses on the fortunes and way of life of a little village community in Anatolia with a running counterpoint showing the rise of Turkish nationalism and Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. For hundreds of years the Byzantines and the Turks lived together in little communities all over the ex-Ottoman Empire.

Contrary to popular belief, the Ottoman Empire practised religious tolerance. They spoke Turkish but prayed in either Greek or Arabic which none of them understood. Muslims invoked the Virgin's intercession as much as Christians practised Muslim mores.

With the fall of the Ottoman Empire came distrust and hatred along with its attendant woes, ethnic cleansing and displacement. Whole communities of millions of Greek-speaking Turkish Muslims were transferred to Turkey from places like Salonika, which had become Greek, while an equal number of Turkish-speaking Orthodox were expelled to Greece. Neither community was made welcome in either place and the Cypriot question is, today, 100 years later, a direct consequence of this.

De Bernieres' little village was one such victim; lovers torn apart and long standing friendships destroyed; once close neighbours became suspicious of each other and both the Imam and the Papas were powerless to stem the tide of misunderstood rabid nationalism which in the end destroyed so many millions of lives.

Since 9/11 and the knee jerk reactions that it provoked our world has changed drastically. It will be as momentous an event in the future history of the world as the assassination of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand in 1914.

Being a microcosm of Greater Europe, reactions in Malta may seem to be a storm in a teacup but the Frances, Germanys and Italys of this world had better look out as what happened on October 2 in Valletta will become a conflagration in Paris, Berlin and Rome before they know it.

Since the beginning of time the people of the world have emigrated. The Jews sought and are still seeking the Promised Land while, with the weakening of the Western Roman Empire, Huns, Visigoths, Vandals, Tatars and Mongols, to name but a few, invaded Western Europe.

So many times in the history of the world have people been forced to get rid of whatever they owned and be marched off to another country. Malta itself has, in its recent past, sent its best and brightest sons and daughters to the ex-colonies because of lack of opportunity and jobs; so, immigration is nothing new and it will go on and on till the world's end.

The African exodus is a new phenomenon that nobody seems to know how to stop or control. Our little protected world is being threatened as never before with an invasion by stealth. Luckily for us, opportunities and jobs for immigrants in Malta are hardly what they bargained for and many will soon be on their way again to pastures new. We live in troubled times and we cannot expect to go on living as if nothing has happened. In the words of the Prince of Salina "things must change in order to remain the same".

It is when The Hemicycle in Brussels is starting to fill up with coloured delegates that I will start being seriously alarmed but, there again, I will probably be long in my grave long before it does.

kzt@onvol.net