The UNHCR has warned us about a coming deluge of immigrants and such statements are bound to cause unease in the hearts of many. Whether such misgivings are ethically correct or not is hardly the point; what matters is that a large proportion of people living in the Maltese islands do not feel at all happy about the prospect of having even more immigrants being hosted here for an indefinite period. You can dismiss such feelings as a manifestation of ignorance or racism till you are blue in the face but it is a fact.
Meanwhile, thousands are dying in the Mediterranean. It is a complete waste of life, a tragedy of untold proportions. The question is: why do they take the risk? You take such an awful risk when the chances of success, no matter how slim, are vastly better than your present situation, and this goes to show what sort of ‘life’ these people face back home. Surely, they must live in hell, if they are ready to face all the grave perils that the journey to ‘Europe’ entails.
I get the impression that very few Africans, given the chance, would opt to stay in Africa. In the mid-1800s, one spoke of the imperialist “scramble for Africa”, where any European country that respected itself wanted to carve out a piece for itself to establish an empire, even if it was the arid “boxes of dust” (as an Italian politician described Somalia, Eritrea and Libya) which Mussolini went for, really late, when such imperialist aggressiveness was quite outdated.
Now we must contemplate a scramble out of Africa, the continent in which, it is said, life first stirred, is now dying.
The inhumane human traffickers are rubbing their hands in the expectation of gain, and they shall not lack custom so long as men with guns and a mission do their devilry down south
Many factors are conspiring in its death. Rampant political corruption, virulent diseases and the new phenomenon of so-called Muslim jihadist activity are prominent.
I say ‘so-called’ because Isis, Boko Haram and al-Qaeda have nothing Godly or religious about them. They are actually satanic in the purest definition of the word. Their effect is to terrorise and stampede people out of their continent.
These organisations are avidly trying to empty Africa of Africans, and to kill or enslave whoever remains. Their onslaught is one of the biggest heists in history, aimed at hijacking at least one continent. Africa is rich beyond the dreams of avarice but its people have never enjoyed its riches. Both foreign and native devils have relegated its people to abject poverty and endemic misery for generation upon generation.
Now this barbarity has reached Libya and the first effect we shall feel is the opening of the flood-gates for human traffickers. It is hardly apparent to someone who has lived within a stable, governed environment to think that having no government may actually offer opportunities which can never be apparent under a parliamentary system, or, even, under a dictatorship.
I remember during a Christmastide party in 1989 (when the Wall of Berlin collapsed and the Communist regime came tumbling down with it) a house-guest walking away from us all and becoming engrossed in a telephone conversation. When it ended he came up to me and euphorically whispered he had just made a quarter of a million Maltese liri because he had brokered a deal between a Russian general and some African leader.
The general had sold the contents of his weapons depot to the African power-man and my Maltese guest was going to get his ‘cut’. It ruined my evening and my Christmas, as well as my relationship with the man. He could not care less that the money he was getting was soaked in blood.
This is what happens when regimes collapse.
So, small, well-armed gangs are ‘owners’ of unimaginably lucrative sources of wealth in Libya. Does anyone think they are ready to give that up for the idea of a ‘state’? Not likely. I do not believe Libya will have a functional government in my lifetime, unless something really drastic occurs. Certainly, the present wielders of power, who are not politicians, have no inclination to forge a Libyan state.
The Libyan coasts are wide open. The inhumane human traffickers are rubbing their hands in the expectation of gain, and they shall not lack custom, so long as men with guns and a mission do their devilery down south.
Malta, meanwhile, will face the flood and will have to turn the other cheek when organisations like UNHCR accuse us of not providing proper amenities for the refugees.
It is daunting to think that under present provisions, we shall have so many able-bodied foreign men kicking their heels in frustration, so many women and children facing a blank period in their lives. There is little we can offer them, and as their numbers increase our hospitality will become strained.
Difficult times lie ahead.