Unobtrusively nestled at the bottom of page 4 of last Friday’s The Times was a report called Malta And Libya’s Oil Waltz in which talks concerning offshore oil drilling in the contested territorial areas have been likened to a waltz with two steps forward and one step back, which, if my calculations are correct, do indicate some sort of vague progress.

I frankly cannot see either of our ever so friendly neighbours letting tiny Malta get away with a windfall like that predicted by geologists, namely no less than a billion barrels of oil! While Malta and Libya waltz, or optimistically think they do, Italy and Libya are engaged in a Lobster Quadrille that holds the entire continent of Europe in thrall. In this context, Malta is like a pestilential prawn trying to cut in that, at any given moment, can be snapped in half by the lobsters’ pincers.

In recent memory are the shenanigans about illegal immigration performed to the gallery of the Italian electorate by Italian Home Affairs Minister Roberto Maroni that made Malta out to be venal and self-seeking, with territorial waters far in excess of its size and with expectations that Italy was increasingly reluctant to fulfil. In fact, Senator Maroni declared that by rights Malta should take in 40,000 immigrants, a tenth of its population, to ease the then rather fraught situation in Italy where the phenomenon, like in all other European countries, causes immense social and economic problems.

We may today look at that disgraceful episode as a thing of the past but in reality is it? It has yet to be seen how long the Cavaliere and the Colonel can continue to be locked into this complicated quadrille and what will happen if for any reason the agreement fails. Should Silvio Berlusconi’s government fall, and as we know, Italian legislatures tend to be short-lived, there is no guarantee his successor will accept the Colonel’s dancing rules and costs, which, although appear colossal, must obviously be cheaper in the long run than to face the problems caused by increased and unchecked flotillas of asylum seekers plying the Mediterranean.

This is why the Colonel must be treated with kid gloves and no matter how we try it will be impossible to come to any agreement with him unless there is a very large cut that goes his way. Therefore, whether in a waltz or a quadrille, a minuet or a tango, there is very little chance of getting either lobster to recognise Malta’s territorial claims, a legacy of its colonial past, unless these are endorsed by Nato. To do that, Malta has to bury its much vaunted but in effect worthless neutrality clauses in some hole at the Addolorata forever and join Nato without further delay, if they will have us that is.

Although we like to see ourselves as some sort of indispensable catalyst between the European mainland and North Africa, events however have proved we are nothing of the kind and, in a question of money, megabucks in this case, the bigshots are perfectly capable of catalysing themselves without us.

This makes me pretty sceptical about our ever being in the questionably enviable position of having oil wells gushing black dollars by the barrelful at our disposal. We are but a very peripheral player on the global chessboard, not even a pawn, and while this great ideological battle is being enacted, which revives all those disagreeable memories of crusades and jihads, the real stakes are financial and have nothing to do with religion at all. Sadly, religions allow themselves to be used as a causus belli whether actively or by omission.

The politically engineered divide between the cross and the crescent has been widening and deepening dramatically. When the present Pope was elected, I had written that his greatest challenge would be to effect a reconciliation between Christianity and Islam, continuing in the footsteps of his predecessor with regard to the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989. Possibly because the Catholic Church is sadly fraught with internal problems and possibly because this retiring and introvert octogenarian scholar is not up to the job, the situation has worsened.

In Egypt, where Muslims and Coptic Christians have lived in relative peace for 2,000 years, the Al Qaeda have instructed their members, by readily available video, precisely how to blow up the ancient Monophysite Coptic churches of Egypt with the rider that they should wait till they are full of people to cause maximum mayhem. Despite this, on January 7, which marks the Coptic Christmas Day, Egyptian Muslims attended the services in an unprecedented show of solidarity with the Coptic minority under threat proving that the vast majority of the Muslim world does not sympathise with Al Qaeda or its methods.

It is precisely because Libya does not tolerate this religious fundamentalism to flourish, or rather, fester, within its borders, that, despite its maverick foreign policies and questionable internal ones, it is tolerated by the superpowers.

The importance of would-be, could-be Islamic states like Libya, which remain staunchly secular in a post 9/11 world, cannot be underestimated. The last thing the West would want is the North African states to become barely veiled jihadists like Iran, which is why, like it or hate it, the vagaries and eccentricities of a leader like the Colonel must be pandered to and his utterances, even when issued from a tent in the middle of the Eternal City, have to be swallowed stoically by the politicos despite the public outcries of disgust.

kzt@onvol.net