Libya: one rowdy neighbour

How do you react when you live next door to rowdy neighbours?

Imagine a house inhabited by a big family where some kids look affable and promising but it is headed by a tough guy: he doesn’t mince his words; he has a huge chip on his shoulder; he picks quarrels and frequently engages in seemingly irrational behaviour. Your neighbour’s notoriety has earned him a prominent place in the news pages.

How does it feel when in spite of the ample gossip, those neighbours who previously ostracized him, now tolerate his foibles and host him to tea parties where they yearn to seal lucrative and sometimes secretive deals. Would you pick a fight or do you appease him? You face a tricky situation where at home your own family interprets your effort to keep the peace as deference and weakness.

Your frustration is driven by one reality: moving home is not an option.

Each year you reluctantly accept the customary invitations to commemorate his ascendancy. You have known him for decades and are fully aware that as long as he is around, you are stuck in a sticky situation.

Nonetheless, deep down you have trepidation: when his successors move in, they may demolish the house and stir chaos. You doubt whether you will be better off with the newcomers and with the structures that may replace current ones.

Such familiar experiences are also faced by states. An oft-cited diplomatic axiom underscores that complex relationships between neighbouring states are influenced by one reality: political regimes may change but we are always going to be trapped in geographic region.

Gaddafi’s Roman holiday
Recently our southern neighbour Colonel Muammar Gaddafi hit the headlines during a meeting with our northern neighbour Silvio Berlusconi. While in Rome, he demanded that the EU contributes €5 billion per year to assist Libya in order to patrol its vast border. He said this would save Europe from becoming “black”. The statement largely irked public opinion. Segments of the European press asked whether Gaddafi was acting like a businessman or a cynical megalomaniac. The Italian left-leaning opposition was outraged.

In Malta commentators were equally livid. The EU needs Gaddafi’s help to control migratory flows in the Mediterranean and the Libyan leader has clearly raised the stakes.His request was deemed to be “blackmail“; “a chess game he continually plays with Italy and the EU”. Most columnists urged the EU to push Libya to ratify the Geneva Convention on human rights.

Yet, Gaddafi is yet again engaging in maverick power politics. He is fully aware that in international relations, states often adopt a realist perspective whereby national interest overrides ideology and moral concerns.

Politicians are worlds apart from the anxieties raised by the media, civil society and other stakeholders. The Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini dismissed critics as “people who know nothing at all, either about foreign policy or Italy’s interests”.

His Maltese counterpart Tonio Borg asserted: “We fully support Libya’s request as it is in the interest of Malta to have our neighbouring country capable of policing adequately its borders.”

Clearly states are looking at national interests whereas we should also consider human rights values.

Relations with Libya need to be contextualised. In our assessments of Libya and Libyans we must be honest and concede that some of the negative Maltese perspectives are entrenched in subtle prejudice against Arabs and Muslims, which Edward Said described as “orientalist” perspectives.

Some people shuddered when Prime Minister Dom Mintoff befriended Arab states and flirted with Muammar Gaddafi as part of a foreign policy that had a clear Mediterranean agenda within the ambit of the Non-Aligned Movement.

In that post-colonial and Cold War scenario, Libya assisted Malta in recognition of its neutrality status. Gaddafi supported Mintoff during the 1970s oil crisis, when Malta was simultaneously locked in a diplomatic as well as a trade dispute with Britain over textiles. Nonetheless, just as Maltese-Libyan relations developed, Libya was busy advocating pan-Arabism and secretly employing its rich financial resources to put some of its anti-imperialist rhetoric into practice.

For instance, it allegedly supported insurgencies, coup d’états and extremist governments, in Sub Saharan Africa. If these claims are true, it may have contributed to some of the problems that beleaguer the continent to date. While Libya was clearly one of Malta’s closest friends, the United States accused Gaddafi of state-sponsored terrorism and labelled it a “rogue state” that endangered international security. In the early 1980s this culminated in US President Ronald Reagan’s strategy of unilateral sanctions and use of military force.

Then Muammar Gaddafi paid frequent visits to Malta and I must have reported his very last visit here in the mid-1980s. His grand entrance at the Libyan-owned Jerma Palace Hotel, surrounded by his female bodyguards, is still imprinted in my memory; as well as the fearful faces of tourists who were hastily checked-out of their rooms and transferred elsewhere.

Colonel Gaddafi still acknowledges he owes his life to Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici.  It has been claimed that in 1986 the former Malta Prime Minister lived up to international aviation obligations (Chicago Convention) when he warned Gaddafi to seek shelter as US bombers were detected overflying the Mediterranean to attack Tripoli.  

With a change of government in 1987, Malta turned its foreign policy direction. This did not alleviate Europe’s uneasiness with the island’s Libyan connections. Michael Falzon cited former Prime Minister Eddie Fenech Adami who revealed that until 1990 the German Chancellor Helmut Kohl rejected Malta’s bid to join the EU because of “Malta’s close ties to Libya”.

In his autobiography The Politics of Persuasion, the late Guido Demarco wrote that Malta distanced itself from Libya in its bid to become an EU member. He asserted: “Joining the EU should not have meant giving the impression that we were turning our back to the Southern Mediterranean. I believe there were several in Libya who viewed Malta’s enthusiasm for Europe as an abandonment of the special relationship the island had had with that country for so many years” (p.329). He lamented that Malta’s international politics should not have taken a one-track approach, when others like Berlusconi, Blair and Schroeder were queuing up to seal deals when Libya was rehabilitated as soon as it terminated its Weapons of Mass Destruction programme.

Malta is closer to Tripoli than Libya’s second city Benghazi. Most Maltese consider Libya to be a land of opportunity. Yet, that now Dr Saadun Ismail Suayeh has been appointed as the new Libyan ambassador to Malta, many of us are expecting valid reassurances.

Some Maltese are concerned about Libya’s nuclear energy plans and BP’s deep-water drilling in the Gulf of Sirte. These are clearly Libyan internal concerns but Tripoli should appreciate that they are security anxieties for its neighbours too.

Above all, most Maltese are worried about irregular immigration and some of us are also very concerned about the plight of asylum seekers in that country. Although the Italian and Maltese governments both defended Gaddafi  after his Roman demands, his comments clearly did not help him to win our hearts and minds ... and in our countries public opinion counts.

Gaddafi and African immigrants
I believe that to be able to assess the current situation we also need to take into account Gaddafi’s foreign ambitions, which helped attract thousands of irregular immigrants to that country.

In the years that Libya advocated pan-Arabism, it actively encouraged immigrants from neighbouring Arab countries to fill vacant employment posts. Then Gaddafi had a change of heart. He abandoned his Pan-Arab discourse because he was miffed that Arabs expressed little sympathy when Tripoli faced international sanctions.

The Libyan leader tactfully suggested a United States of Africa that encompasses migration agreements similar to those of Europe’s Schengen area. The Libyan state-owned radio ‘Voice of the Arab World’ was renamed ‘Voice of Africa’ that encouraged unskilled Sub-Saharan economic migrants. Many Africans were tempted to seek a better future there. This impacted the social and cultural fabric of Libyan communities and growing domestic anti-immigrant feelings soon led to the extradition of thousands of  irregular migrants. 

In spite of international pressure Libya still does not adhere to the 1951 Geneva Convention on the Status of Refugees. Hence all irregular immigrants are treated as economic migrants and not as asylum seekers. In the early 2000s it agreed to cooperate closely with the UNCHR but three months ago this organization was accused of ‘illegal activities” and was expelt from the country. By then Libyan tolerance to human trafficking seemed to have became part of the solution.

Having said this, Gaddafi’s reference to the “influx of starving and ignorant Africans” and other racist statements were surprising because they seem highly inconsistent with his African unity project. In his speech he was clearly appealing to some Europeans’ ethnocentricism in order to press the EU to fund his own efforts against black African migrants.

The European Union is now expected to discuss EU-Libyan migration cooperation in November. Up to now the EU has emphasized the security approach and associates  immigration cooperation with other accords on trade and investment.  Yet, European states cannot divorce their political and economic interests from the human rights dimension. If this happens, as sociologist and columnist Mark-Anthony Falzon observed, Gaddafi will “grow strong turning the key; we ... will grow weak washing our hands of blood”.