Many of us who remember the Malta of the 1980s will also recall the nasty things we used to think and say about Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.
We thought of him as a buffoon at best; more likely a sinister dictator who certainly was not someone you wanted to see your elected leaders hobnobbing with.
The times, they have changed, and the Colonel he is now fully rehabilitated. He periodically tours European capitals and gives speeches at the UN, and is even known to indulge in a round or two of hand kissing.
The compliment is returned by many. Silvio Berlusconi seemed rather radiant in his presence in Rome on Monday, and on Wednesday our own elected leader was in Libya toasting some Great Revolution or other.
If for some in Malta this is the occasion for a smug ‘we told you so’, for me it’s rather like being on the road to Damascus in reverse gear.
We were right to despise Gaddafi in the 1980s and we were more than right to pour scorn on our toadying leaders. (The corollary, despising Libyans generally, was both stupid and unfair.) Nothing proves the point like his latest performance in Rome.
It was typical of Gaddafi’s trips, which have become a sort of ritualised mockery of his hosts (‘a circus that humiliates us’, La Repubblica put it). He discussed religion and politics with a very select group of women and told them to bring forth Muslim children only. For the Colonel it seems, any woman not in uniform is a pair of ears connected to a womb.
Let him wallow, one (not me) might think. But there was something Gaddafi said which we, citizens of Malta today, would be criminal to dismiss.
Presumably to get some of his money from the Lockerbie mise en scène back, he asked the EU for €5 billion a year to stop African migration through Libya. He also said that Europe “could turn into Africa” and warned us of an “influx of starving and ignorant Africans” and a “barbarian invasion”.
All rather rich coming from someone who has in the past styled himself a pan-African champion.
It is not, however, Gaddafi’s dented image that worries me. Rather, I find myself deeply troubled that we – and I mean here the EU generally and Italy and Malta in particular – can be so glib about sending boat migrants back to Libya – a country ruled by a pathologically chauvinistic dictator who speaks (heaven knows what he thinks) of groups of people, Africans in this case, as vermin to be controlled.
If that rings a bell, so it should. One would have thought we learnt the lesson 50 years ago. The 1951 Geneva Convention was in part intended to prevent history repeating itself. No longer would people on the move be forcibly returned to places where they would be downtrodden, tortured, and possibly killed.
Of course, the Colonel, who seems to have the leisure of swanning about Rome and ogling 500 women paid to be gnocche for the day, has no time for such trivia as international paperwork. Libya has never ratified the Geneva Convention. Gaddafi probably thinks the UNHCR is a hostess agency – the real thing he summarily and inexplicably expelled from Libya a few months ago.
Even if a number of economic migrants do manage to work and scrape together some savings in Libya, there can be no escaping the truth that for many sub-Saharans the country is a cleaner version of hell.
In 2009, JRS-Malta published a wonderful piece of investigative writing called Do They Know? It’s a testimonial to the lives of asylum seekers in Libya, painstakingly pieced together over a number of years with an emphasis on consistency and verifiable facts. (Those who think JRS are idealists, do-gooders, and liberal-hegemoniacs can enjoy their carping cave.)
The record is dismal indeed. Libya has absolutely no formal procedures for dealing with asylum seekers. In the absence of structures and policy, decision-making is completely arbitrary. International organisations are booted around or out, and asylum seekers have no rights and no access to recourse at law.
The result is an ongoing humanitarian disaster. Libya’s detention camps are known for their terrible conditions. This includes ‘model’ set-ups such as that at Zleitan where many forcibly-returned asylum seekers, presumably including the ones we turn back following ‘sorting’ at sea, end up.
I quote from the JRS booklet: “Among the guards’ preferred instruments of torture are electro-shock stun weapons, which cause severe pain and temporary incapacitation. The guards also indulge in brutal beatings, with sticks, with wires, with their fists, including hitting detainees on the soles of their feet”. The bitter cherry is, some detainees die.
These are the places we are sending people back to. I say ‘we’ because I am talking elected leaders, not dictators. EU, Italian, and local politicians have been remarkably cheery about the whole business. In their moments of highest morality, they seem to think of forcible return to Libya as a kind of necessary evil. Last June, BBC News reported that the EU’s response to the expulsion of UNHCR was that it was “regrettable but understandable”.
The Commissioner for Human Rights of the Council of Europe, for one, begs to differ. He has expressed his “disapproval of bilateral or multilateral agreements for the forced returns of irregular migrants with countries with long-standing, proven records of torture”.
But then I suppose the Commissioner is another idealist, do-gooder, and liberal hegemoniac. Whatever he might be, I know which version to believe. The evidence is hard to miss. It tours Europe with a retinue of absurdity and a trick box of depravity, sexism, and racism.
Gaddafi is the man our leaders have elected head porter to Europe’s hell gate. He should grow strong turning the key; we, on our part, will grow weak washing our hands of blood.
mafalzon@hotmail.com