Plums, oil and a sense of history

Like Henry Frendo, I was appalled by the declaration made by that young man from Graffitti who was carrying a poster showing our Prime Minister being greeted by Muammar Gaddafi in Tripoli only a few weeks ago. Being part of a pressure group like Graffitti does require a modicum of background knowledge of the causes they are trying to promote or the issues they are protesting against. One cannot rebut very valid criticism by saying that all you care about is what happened in your lifetime. That is ludicrous. Our paltry lifetimes are but infinitesimal compared to the march of history. This is why there is such a thing as history. To know where we are going we must know from where we are coming. I do hope the young man in question has thought things over and realised the poster in question was simply inappropriate.

The reasons why it was so are various, however I will cite but one. There is not a shadow of doubt that the visit to Col Gaddafi took place with no other aim than to protect Malta’s interests. The Prime Minister was the last politician to visit the colonel before all hell broke loose. He was merely the last in a long queue of prime ministers who, during four long and trying decades, had had to stifle their personal antipathies and humour not only the bizarre dress sense and convoluted protocol of Col Gaddafi but also pander to his paranoia. A man whose country is in a state of vicious civil war and still believes the people love him reminds me so uncomfortably of Emperor Nero in his last hours, without, of course, the irrepressible charm of Peter Ustinov.

And why do these heads of state have to do this? Oil – black gold is a determining factor in the world today and Col Gaddafi is sitting on oodles of it. He has, throughout his sojourn as whatever he wants to call himself in Libya, systematically stymied any attempt by Malta to exploit the oil wells in the Medina Bank, which falls within the territorial waters belonging to Malta because of its colonial past. Between Silvio Berlusconi and Col Gaddafi, Malta has had to dance a rather delicate lobster quadrille of cajolery and cooperation and if Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi saw fit to fly over to Tripoli I have no qualms at all about his reasons for doing so. Neither the Colonel nor the Cavaliere are nice people to have as neighbours, which is why we have to see what we are going to do to defend our interests.

With the price of oil escalating as it is, it will soon reach the level where it would be financially viable and above all profitable to drill in the deep seas in our territorial waters. Nato operates its own oil depots in the Mediterranean and, because of the vast reserves that are said to lie beneath the western Mediterranean, Malta could, as things stand today, easily negotiate a deal with Nato and we would never ever have a repeat of that shameful episode we had a couple of years ago with Italy acting the big bully and cold-bloodedly splattering our good name with mud.

Unlike Egypt and Tunisia, the Libyan plum is taking far longer than expected to fall off the tree. The Gaddafi regime is in fact far stronger and deeper rooted than those of his neighbours as in Libya there was not even a vague pretence of having anything remotely resembling democracy. Last week, we were all under the impression that Col Gaddafi would be bowing out of history’s stage on which he has strutted long enough in a matter of days, even hours. However he is, as I write, still there.

Could it be that the international media was exaggerating the strength of the uprising in the hope the Colonel would oblige? If so it has had the opposite effect as he refuses to be dislodged. Now Hugo Chavez in faraway Venezuela is trying to persuade the Benghazi-based rebels to mediation, however, this has been scornfully refused and no wonder. Col Gaddafi has shot his mouth off about what has caused the rebellion in too quixotic a fashion to merit anything remotely resembling mediation. Things have gone too far.

Malta today is at the ready to send all sorts of aid to Libya, which is as it should be. If our Grand Harbour is full of warships these have been used for humanitarian purposes. Every country on the planet apart from Venezuela, which has its own oil reserves and is too far away from Libya to be affected by the colonel’s excesses, wants to see the back of him.

His tantrums and peculiarities combined with his sinister reputation and association with terrorism not to mention his methods of repression have put paid to any sympathy he might have had in his present predicament.

He has visited Malta a few times and came over in a manner that certainly did not ingratiate him to any of us Maltese.

Nobody apart from Dom Mintoff sung See the Conquering Hero Comes and we were, one and all, far more inclined to look the other way in resignation while all the posturing was going on.

We have had more than our fair share of Col Gaddafi’s vagaries and the sooner he retires to Caracas the better. That will only happen if he is extremely lucky. He does not fly, as far as I know, so knowing our luck he might sail here requesting asylum. What do we do then? Being a member of the EU has nothing to do with this sort of crisis and the EU will not solve it in 25 days let alone 25 minutes that will be the maximum time Col Gaddafi will be prepared to wait before he starts blasting…

kzt@onvol.net