It has not been a good two weeks on the international scene: Libya in falling apart (in our own back yard), the war in Gaza continues to claim many innocent Palestinian civilians, Russia persists in causing trouble in Ukraine, Iraqi Christians have been forced by Isis to flee their home town of Mosul and the Ebola virus outbreak is still not yet under control in West Africa.
Wounded Libyans are already being transferred to Malta for treatment, and on Monday, Martin Galea, a former Armed Forces of Malta captain working in Libya, returned home after being held in captivity for 11 days by a militia in Tripoli, highlighting the level of lawlessness in that country today.
Rival militias, secularist and Islamist, are fighting for control of territory with various criminal gangs taking advantage of this volatile situation. Should Libya become a failed State this would without doubt have negative consequences for Malta, notably massive migration flows and a loss of Maltese investment in the country. Furthermore, a failed State would inevitably mean certain parts of Libya being controlled by Islamists, some of whom (but not all) are linked to al-Qaeda.
Although the situation in Libya does look very bleak, I very much hope that the international community has not given up on this country. Every effort must be made by the EU, Arab League and the US to get the different militias to speak to each other in an attempt at nation-building and reaching some sort of compromise. An international force of UN peacekeepers should also be considered, ideally made up of soldiers from the Arab League or Muslim countries.
Israel’s land invasion and bombardment of Gaza, which has so far killed over 1,200 Palestinians, most of them civilians, (Israel has so far lost 53 soldiers and three civilians) is also very worrying and shows no sign of abating.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has justified his country’s military action by saying that no country would tolerate its citizens being subjected to rocket fire. However, such an argument is difficult to defend when one considers that so many Palestinian civilians, including children, are being killed in response to rocket attacks that have so far killed three Israelis.
Last week’s bombing of a UN-run school housing refugees in Gaza, which killed at least 15 people, mostly children, was the latest atrocity committed by the Israeli military in this conflict. Israel’s response to the Hamas rocket attacks is totally disproportionate and could well be considered a war crime. How can anyone defend the indiscriminate targeting of civilians and the destruction of Gaza’s infrastructure, leading to more misery for the 1.8 million Palestinians crammed into an area twice the size of Malta and subjected to a blockade since 2007 by Egypt and Israel?
The rocket attacks against Israel by Hamas, which rules Gaza, are to be condemned, and so is Hamas’ tactic of placing its arms depots close to civilian areas, but Israel’s continual indiscriminate bombardment of this enclave can never be justified. Israel has a right to defend itself but certainly not in this brutal fashion.
An immediate ceasefire needs to be brokered, and the US, which is the only country Israel listens to, must exert more pressure on Netanyahu to stop this mad war which is so self-defeating and which has turned world opinion against the Israelis. Those countries with influence over Hamas, such as Turkey and Qatar, must redouble their efforts at convincing the Islamist group to stop the rocket attacks against Israel.
Once a ceasefire is in place, the international community will need to work hard at convincing Israel and Egypt to end the unjust blockade of Gaza, which is nothing but a cruel collective punishment against the Palestinians for living in Hamas-controlled territory.
In another development, the US and EU have decided to widen their economic sanctions on Russia in response to the downing of Malaysian Airways Flight MH17 in eastern Ukraine and Moscow’s destabilising role in this conflict. The sanctions are targeted at banking, energy and arms companies, and whether they will convince Russian President Vladimir Putin to change his behaviour in this war remains to be seen.
However, the world cannot ignore the fact that all the evidence points to pro-Russian separatists being responsible for shooting down the plane with a Russian missile (probably believing it to be a Ukrainian military flight), which resulted in the death of 298 people, half of them Dutch.
Furthermore, the behaviour and lack of cooperation by the Russian-backed separatists at the crash site of the downed plane as well as the fact that Russia has continued to supply the rebels with heavy weapons made further measures against Moscow inevitable.
Unfortunately, this new low in relations between Russia and the US and Europe is bound to affect overall relations between Moscow and the West. The two sides need to cooperate on a whole range of issues, such a nuclear disarmament, Iran’s nuclear programme, Syria’s chemical weapons, the fight against terrorism and climate change, to name a few.
For the past three years the Syrians have been going through what the Gaza Palestinians are enduring at the moment
US President Barack Obama has said this is not the start of a new Cold War, and I hope he is right. However, US government claims that Russia has violated the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty – a key arms control treaty which bans medium-range missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 km – by testing a nuclear cruise missile, is certainly worrying.
In the meantime, the terrible conflict in both Syria and Iraq carries on. For the past three years the Syrian people have been going through what the Gaza Palestinians are enduring at the moment, yet there is sadly little international outrage; it is as if the international community is at a loss at what to do in this conflict. War crimes have been committed equally by the horrendous Assad regime as well as the fascist Isis jihadists, with the Free Syrian Army, long neglected by the West, squeezed in the middle.
In Iraq, Isis continues to spread its reign of terror; its latest war crime has been to force the remaining Christians out of Mosul. After painting their houses with ‘N’ for Nazarenes, Isis then offered the Christians three choices: convert to Islam, pay a protection tax, or be put to death. The Christians consequently fled, ending a historic presence there that had lasted for over 1,600 years, and highlighting just how serious the situation in Iraq has become. France has offered these Christians asylum, a welcome development, and other countries should follow suit.
On top of all this, the United Nations said that 729 people in West Africa have died of Ebola since February – 233 of them in Sierra Leone, which has now declared a public health emergency. Tough anti-Ebola policies have also been introduced in Liberia, where schools have been closed and some communities quarantined.
Eyebrows were raised when a Liberian citizen died of the disease in Lagos, after flying to Nigeria. The implication is clear: if the virus is not contained in Lagos, the seventh fastest-growing city in the world, with a population of nearly 20 million, it could go global.