No one writes to the colonel

They say that fact is stranger than fiction. If you take time to think long and hard about it you will conclude that fiction is the mere rearrangement of facts by an author like Gabriel Garcia Márquez who wrote No One Writes To The Colonel in order to render them coherent, intelligible and, above all, unforgettable. Real life is buffeted hither and thither by the winds of circumstance and is not "edited" by one creative human brain for the delectation of others, therefore, to make up an unputdownable story, epic or saga one has to take a detached view and try to piece it all together like a complicated jig-saw puzzle. Too often we forget our past, either because we do not know it or we feel it is irrelevant. There is no present without the past and no future without the present. They are all inextricably linked.

Our national relationship with nearby Libya is a case in point. We have this love-hate relationship with Muammar Gaddafi who, despite the onset of years, seems to be extremely well preserved and whose unpredictable antics are tolerated with resignation by the great and the good who, after grumbling, vilifying, execrating and damning him, will, like Tony Blair and Nicolas Sarkozy, among others, have had their picture taken shaking hands with this capricious maverick whose most telling attribute is that he sits like Smaug the Dragon on a gynormous treasure of black gold.

Since the establishment of the Jamahiriya in the 1970s, former PM Dom Mintoff was quick to embrace the inevitable. Before then, in the days of the ancien régime led by Ġorġ Borg Olivier, our relationship with King Idris and his Italianate court was at its height.

Libyans were a byword for courtesy and style and above all untold riches which with Malta in the full swell of the Boom went very well with the mood of the times.

When King Idris and Dr Borg Olivier were toppled the world went all awry and the news from our second largest neighbour caused as much dismay as the shenanigans with which Mr Mintoff went about achieving his electoral promises and other animals!

Over the last four decades our relationship with our powerful yet quixotic neighbour has been swinging like a pendulum from scorching to lukewarm and to icy.

The great love affair between Dom and Muammar that rather disconcerted most people was not carried on with the same ardency by his successors and yet the relationship had to be maintained even when we heard the US fighter jets fly over us to bomb Col Gaddafi into line. What choice did we have? Libya can swat us out of existence like some pesky fly with a mere shake of its little finger.

Therefore, this is why whenever a delegation, this time led by the President himself, flies over to visit, the warm embraces and Cheshire Cat grins belie a dialogue that can only be described as equivocally dicey.

Although various topics were discussed the one that seriously troubles most people's minds, illegal immigration, was not touched upon at all; that is unless it was deliberately not reported. Disputed stretches of water and oil exploration play second if not third fiddle to the immediacy of the common knowledge that Col Gaddafi has apparently declared that he is all for the islamification of Europe.

With this aim in mind he exerts no pressure to control his long coastline. The EU knows this, Frontex knows this and so do you.

The migration is reaching epic proportions as like salmon swimming, leaping and struggling upstream in an almost suicidal urge to spawn, these desperate men, women and children are robbed of everything they own and are set adrift in the vastness of the Gulf of Sirte to float to Europe in a hit or miss bid for what they think is freedom.

We all know this, so does President Fenech Adami, so do Mr Sarkozy's Mediterranean buddies, so does Col Gaddafi and so do all of us too.

Yet, we rant and rave about how we can sustain this seemingly inexhaustible stream and how we must stop them in mid-ocean irrespective of the fact that in doing so they may possibly be condemned to a cruel death. Pangs of conscience cease to exist as likewise immigrants cease to be regarded as human beings but as statistics to be culled at any cost.

They are mere innocent pawns in a deadly game over which we have absolutely no control.

So, while we still can visualise that questionable photograph of the colonel and our President in ardent embrace, think again before questioning the whys and wherefores of pussyfooting political expediency.

It is something that neither you nor I will never ever be able to understand.

kzt@onvol.net