I suppose we must thank God for giving us the cavaliere as a next door neighbour and, possibly, just a little less for giving us the colonel as well. Like piggies in the middle, we Maltese have to keep on good terms with these two giants; one to the north and the other to the south, lest we find ourselves between Scylla and Charybdis as we did last year. Together, these two powers have achieved what the EU could not: stem the tide of illegal immigrants. When I say stem I do not mean reduce but stop altogether, apart from that blip a few weeks ago when about 54 slipped through the net and were divided into two, half were brought here and the other half were sent back to Libya.

I am not going to discuss the contents of the Berlusconi-Gaddafi agreement. Nor am I going to echo the concern of the humanitarian organisations about conditions in Libya for, as someone wrote lately, our own conditions here with regard to the detention of illegal immigrants is nothing to write home about. Nor am I going to venture where Simon Busuttil seems to be heading, which is trying to obtain a separate deal for Malta with the EU. No, none of that, but, once again, despite the fact that many “commenters” online have told me that it is inaccurate, I refer to The Times online poll where an overwhelming 81 per cent voted that the illegal immigrants should be taken back to Libya. This poll was taken in the wake of that mere handful, 27 souls, being taken in for the whole of 2010. So effective is the Libyan dam that, despite the flat calm weather, not a minnow has slipped through the net, which shows how effective the power of money is.

Italian governments come and go with alarming regularity while the colonel has been in power since 1969 as Brotherly Leader and Guide of the Revolution which, believe it or not, is his official title. Although at present all seems rosy, all it will take is some crisi di governo and the cavaliere will have to step down for a time, till, as is his wont, he reinvents himself and stages a comeback.

What concerns us in Malta is whether this agreement he has made with the Leader and Guide is binding on successive Italian governments or not as we really cannot afford to go through what we did when Italian Home Affairs Minister Roberto Maroni, playing to the gallery, used Malta as a political springboard in 2009 claiming that because of the size of our territorial waters we should have taken in 40,000 immigrants, which to anyone who knows where and what Malta is, which it seems the average Italian doesn’t, is the height of absurdity.

That is something that as a Maltese citizen I will neither forgive nor forget as it was nothing but an attempt to highway rob us of our colonial patrimony. That nobody in Brussels turned a hair is also an eye-opener. In situations like this, despite our much vaunted membership, we are on our own.

I am quite sure that, in the past year, much has been done in Brussels, Valletta and in our embassies overseas to ensure that this will not happen again should the oodles of money being paid by the Italian taxpayer to compensate Libya for its having once been a colony of the Regno d’ Italia have to stop for one reason or another. In fact, I would rather sacrifice our neutrality and rejoin Nato. You see, to be neutral we have to be as rich as Croesus like Switzerland, which, despite all Alfred Sant’s trying, we are not and will never be.

Morally, with regard to illegal immigration, I feel we in Malta take an attitude rather like that of the Empress Maria Theresa at the Partition of Poland in 1771 who, despite shedding copious tears at the plight of the Poles, made sure she got the largest and richest slice of the cake. While saying we are sorry for and should help refugees we would rather they stayed put in Libya and could not give a tinker’s toss about what happens there. We just are not interested to know if these people are tortured or not as is being claimed. Whether human rights are being transgressed as a result of the Berlusconi-Gaddafi agreement we couldn’t care less as long as we are assured that no more black people will be swelling our population any longer.

I would be a hypocrite were I not to admit that the disappearance of illegal immigration is not a relief, however, rather like an incident I once had in India in the hills between Ajmer and Pushkar, my conscience will not rest. As we were driving round these hairpin bends, I noticed that a jeep had gone off the road into the fields about two storeys below and that four bodies were sprawled and spread-eagled about the upside-down vehicle. I asked our Indian driver to stop but he just stared ahead and went all deaf on me. I was fuming. I was upset and angry. I shouted and remonstrated. This was monstrous. Maybe those people in that field were still alive.

Till we arrived on the outskirts of Pushkar almost two hours later, Suresh did not speak. When he did, he said he had orders to do what he did, especially where tourists like me are concerned as, should we have reported this incident, the bureaucracy and red tape would have kept us stuck in Pushkar for months if not years on end. This is why he was forced to take the course of the Three Wise Monkeys. However, even now, five years on, that fleeting glance over the parapet still haunts me and I still occasionally wonder whether any of those poor people survived.