A photo on the front page of the Times of Malta (July 5) with the caption ‘Safe Hands’, depicting migrants saying goodbye to an aid worker as they disembark from the Open Arms aid boat after arriving at the port of Barcelona on July 4 following rejection by Italy and Malta, cannot but arouse, in all with a human heart, a sense of sadness and disappointment.

The migration problem has become, no doubt, an overwhelming one and, as the Democratic Party has rightly pointed out, “Malta cannot singlehandedly solve the massive migration challenge”. But although the onus is on the European Community as a whole, and a way has to be found to get all members to participate in an action plan, one cannot, in the meantime, simply wait for a unilateral solution when confronted with human tragedies.

Minister for Home Affairs and National Security Michael Farrugia, speaking during The Malta Independent’s online interview programme ‘In Depth’, insisted that burden sharing should be mandatory and not voluntary. We all agree that once we belong to a Union based on common values and principles, all should abide by the rules and the burden should not be shoved on to a few members only.

The problem arises when we, as a nation, are confronted with a tragic humanitarian crisis, as we have been recently, and rather than taking immediate action, we refer to the code of rules and stick to the rules, no matter the consequences. 

International laws do not absolve us from our moral obligations. Why should we, as a Catholic nation, not be the ones who take the lead when it comes to moral responsibility?  Why should we hide behind rules and regulations in order not to get morally engaged?

A very inspiring and informative book to be referred to by all politicians, especially in such tragic and confusing circumstances, is the one titled Moral Disengagement – How people do harm and live with themselves, by Albert Bandura.

The book refers to people who “absolve themselves of blame for the harm they cause by displacement and diffusion of responsibility; they minimise or deny the harmful effects of their actions; and they dehumanize those they maltreat and blame them for bringing the suffering on themselves”.

We have enough room to shelter more than 42,000 foreign nationals and we don’t have place to accommodate 60 migrants in distress

It is interesting to note, in our case of asylum seekers, how NGOs are being blamed for not adhering to international laws. Rather than praising them for their life-saving voluntary work, we blame them for being law-breakers and call them irresponsible.

While arguing who is at fault, rather than concentrating on the victims – the plight of the asylum seekers – we focus on procedure, regulations and national security. We disengage ourselves from the real problem in order to absolve ourselves from any guilt.

Let those responsible never lose sight of who is at stake in these tragic situations.  While Italy and Malta kept arguing over who was legally responsible for taking in a migrant vessel, Spain, for the second time in a few days, courageously fulfilled their moral obligation.  Spanish lawmaker Javier Lopez exclaimed that the boat’s arrival was a reason to “celebrate life”. With the Maltese government’s decision to shut its ports to migrant NGO ships, which have been rescuing thousands of distressed human beings, we are starting to reason like Italy’s right-wing Interior Minister, Matteo Salvini, irrespective of the tragic consequences involved.

We have enough room to shelter more than 42,000 foreign nationals working in Malta and we don’t have place to accommodate 60 migrants in distress.

Though our resources and infrastructures are limited and we are aware that we cannot rely on foreign workers indefinitely, we still employ them and accommodate them because of their positive impact on our economy. In this case there are no constraints on the foreign workers. But when it comes to migrants fleeing in distress from war and persecution, we raise our voices and create barriers. We speak about our limitations. We discriminate.

Let us by all means sit down and plan the right way forward. Let regulations be followed and adhered to but let us not close our eyes and harden our hearts under the pretence that we are following international law, in order not to get morally engaged.

Let us never stop being compassionate, for as Bandura states in his ‘golden’ book, “The values and moral standards to which people subscribe, and the social systems they devise to oversee the uses to which their technological power is put, will play a vital role in what people become and how they shape their destiny.”