You have to hand it to him, our Prime Minister, he really knows how to pull a good PR stunt, drama and all. Last week, a Hong Kong-registered merchant vessel, on its way from Guinea to the Ukraine, requested medical assistance from Malta. We said no. There was a crew member on board who was sick, maybe from Ebola and maybe not. Our government sent out a patrol boat to stop them from getting anywhere close and told the ship to be damned and go somewhere else.
Prime Minister Joseph Muscat gave his version of the story flanked by his Deputy Prime Minister, the Justice Minister, the Parliamentary Secretary for Health, the head of the civil service, the Attorney General, the CEO of Transport Malta and a deputy commander of the Armed Forces.
He pulled all the plugs on this one, just to tell us he said no to a request for medical assistance from Malta.
A few miles away up north, they handled the case differently. The Sicilian authorities called in the Rome-based Centro Internazionale Radiomedico, an organisation that offers medical services for free to mariners, of whatever nationality, who do not have a doctor on board.
They contacted the ship and in no time established that it was not Ebola. The poor seaman was taken to a hospital in Sicily. There was no fuss and no grandstanding by anyone with an oversized ego.
If the comments board on Times of Malta’s website are anything to go by, Muscat has achieved exactly what he set out to do: the illusion that he is a strong man of decision who would not put his country at risk. His poodle of a newspaper l-orizzont put it in bold letters on its front page: ‘Malta refuses Ebola risk’. But Malta did not refuse a ‘risk’, it refused a man in medical need.
In just less than a hundred years, Malta has moved from being the Nurse of the Mediterranean to the Hound Dog of the Mediterranean.
Muscat said the decision was morally correct. If the Prime Minister were my friend, I would send him a dictionary for Christmas. There was nothing moral about such a decision. You can call it legally correct, pragmatic, erring on the cautious, but certainly not moral.
It was actually immoral and cold and callous, certainly nothing to be proud of and nothing to call an “informal editorial conference” to boast of your latest pushback stunt. Bullies are not heroes.
Nowhere in the media reports does Malta appear to express any sense of regret at not being able to help the sick crewman. There was no expression of humanitarian solidarity; we just abandoned the crew to their fate because, as the Prime Minister explained the day after, “we cannot endanger the lives of a whole people to help the few”. Where do you begin with this man?
Did Malta offer to send a medical team on board the ship? Doctors the world over, Malta included, take the Hippocratic Oath.
Was there no doctor willing to go, or did government never bother to ask because the only audience it had in mind was a local one?
According to Health Parliamentary Secretary Chris Fearne, Malta has a contingency plan to tackle any potential Ebola case and has had a system in place at Matei Dei Hospital since May.
Well, this was one contingency for which Malta was not prepared because according to the Prime Minister, we couldn’t help the ship “because we cannot give from what we do not have”. Other countries, he said at that sham press call, were “definitely” better equipped.
That means we’re either not prepared to share the limited resources we have at the hospital, or we just couldn’t be bothered to help our neighbour in need.
In just less than a hundred years, Malta has moved from being the Nurse of the Mediterranean to the Hound Dog of the Mediterranean
The irony of it all is that the Prime Minister was boasting of how Malta had shrugged off all responsibility for the plight of a sick seaman at a speech dedicated to the 1964 independence, an event his bully predecessor Dom Mintoff denigrated for so many years.
Malta as a State may be 50 years old, but with this kind of thinking when it comes to humanitarian aid and Malta’s international responsibility, Muscat’s independent Malta is still in primary school. Malta-first-and-foremost Mintoff would have been so proud.
Equally ironic was that a day after, the Armed Forces were involved in a rescue operation after the captain of a fishing vessel requested medical assistance. The vessel was 116nm south of Malta and the captain had suffered burns to his leg. The army rescued him. He was Maltese, a human being, just like the Filipino sailor.
It is difficult not to draw parallels between last week’s Ebola stunt and that equally staged event where Muscat turned up at the airport with an entourage to welcome back oil worker Martin Galea, who had just been released from kidnapping in Libya. Galea had only enough time to thank the Maltese consul for saving his life. Muscat hijacked the rest of the event, but got egg on the face soon after when the true sequence of events was revealed.
It is unlikely that will happen in the case of the poor Filipino we were prepared to leave to die. Muscat has scored political points by appealing to that same selfish myopic mentality that has brought him to power. This is populism at its worst.
The saddest thing about the Filipino incident is that we all know where this could go. As the Ebola problem spreads, it is just a matter of time before it will be associated with those poor migrants coming from north Africa in search of a better future somewhere in Europe (and definitely not Malta as immigrants at the Marsa open centre told European Home Affairs Commissioner Cecilia Malmström).
Muscat shall be able to argue that he is “morally and legally” correct to push them back come next summer since, as he said, international conventions oblige countries to help individuals in need of assistance, but there are specific exceptions if the country’s health systems or national security were at risk.
That would be exactly the same argument put forward by the right-wing political group Imperium Europa in their political spot on television in the European Parliament election campaign.
The advert, which was eventually pulled off the air by the Broadcasting Authority, had linked the migrants to infectious diseases and criminality. At that election, Imperium Europa polled nearly 7,000 votes.
In the wake of that stunning election victory for Labour, the ever-populist Muscat cast his eyes on that most immature and narrow-minded portion of our electorate. He said he would try to convince those who voted for smaller parties to “come on board” and that his government had taken note of their message and would strive to meet their aspirations. And so he shall.
Muscat was right on one thing when he analysed the EP election result: Labour has changed Malta’s political landscape. Labour has thrown all principles and ideology to the wind and now appeals to the worst elements in human nature – egoism and greed. There is actually no political landscape left, only opportunism.
There are arguments both in favour and against extending assistance in situations such as that which arose with the ‘Ebola’ ship. Muscat opted for the pragmatic, and one may come round to accepting his arguments.
But for Muscat to have the gall to say that populist stunts like that pulled last week at the expense of a sick seaman is a “moral” decision, then that really takes the cherry.
This is not morality; this is rot.