There can be no doubt that every effort was made by our representatives in the EU Council of Ministers to secure an adequate sharing of responsibilities with our EU partners on the issue of migration. They must have done their utmost but they still failed miserably.
It has been a tremendous slap in the face for Malta to be told that it will be on its own facing the tide of migrants crossing the Mediterranean. Knowing that nothing further will be gained from here to the European Parliament elections in June, the government has attempted to paint the defeat as some sort of victory. PN apologists of every shape and form continue to knock a square peg into a round hole by claiming that something has been gained in the final draft of the Immigration Pact. Malta has been humiliated and its dire predicament ignored. The migrants' predicament has been ignored.
That our government is afraid to say so is bad enough, that its apologists feel obliged to give the matter a rosy complexion is simply absurd.
How can we celebrate the fact that we have been left to rely on the gracious condescension of those of our fellow EU member states to share responsibility on the migration issue, if and when they deem fit on a voluntary basis?
This was a time for our political leadership to call on us as citizens, not partisans, for support in opposing the EU stance. Labour leader Joseph Muscat made it easy for the government to do so by promising his party's support. The Greens would also have been on board. It was more than a PN government could handle. It would have been obliged to acknowledge the utility of cooperation with the other side.
Instead, Dr Muscat has been slapped down and told to propose alternatives. From here to June the PN will insist that it won when it was drubbed, sustaining the myth through spin and fabrication.
Propose alternatives to what exactly? On the issue of migrant mobility, Malta has gained nothing new at all. The voluntary assistance of other member states was possible or otherwise regardless of the negotiation of any pact.
Our partners in the EU should be made aware of the fact that, if the tension between laws and reality becomes too much, it is the law which cracks up. Our commitment to international treaties and to the obligations of membership have a natural and legal limit: ad impossibilia nemo tenetur. The EU cannot oblige Malta to do the impossible. We should be sabre rattling very loudly about this. We could at least murmur about the zanier options to wake up our partners to the situation we face and to the solid phalanx we form to confront them. A number of options exist, all in violation of our EU and international obligations, to make Malta a priority route for African migrants to the rest of the EU.
This little place cannot accommodate the hopelessness and the desperation of refugees from the chaos of Africa, much less the naïve optimism of adventurers and opportunists. We know it and the migrants know it. The EU has the potential to make a difference in Africa. It does not appear to have the energy or the will to make a difference in Malta.
Instead of the pathetic sham of pretending that Malta got its way in Brussels to hoodwink the PN faithful until the EP elections, our representatives should have made it clear that the EU was defaulting in the face of a crisis, a crisis much deeper and wider than the one Malta faces. Helping Malta face its own crisis is not enough. For us to whinge about our own predicament in isolation weakens our case.
We have a voice in the EU and we should use it for Africa. Regardless of our minute size, we have equal responsibility with other member states. Knowing first hand some of the consequences of neglect of African affairs only heaps up our obligation to wake up the EU to its own responsibilities.
Instead of viewing the fiasco of the Immigration Pact as a threat to the PN's aspirations in the June EP elections, we should use it as a catalyst to escape our eternal parochialism and to make it a cornerstone of our foreign and EU policy to champion good governance in Africa at every opportunity whenever we sit down at the counsels of the great and powerful. The EU's slap in the face should wake us all up to the fact that we are in the same boat as the migrants. We should be grateful.
Dr Vassallo is a committee member of the European Green Party.
hcvassallo@kemmunet.net.mt