When we were in love with Gaddafi

For over three years, thanks to the willingness of the European Union and the Italian proxy, Malta relied on Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi to keep asylum seekers and economic migrants away from the EU’s southern frontiers.

Secretly, everybody in diplomatic circles knew that Libya’s leader was behind an organised ‘assault’ on Europe’s frontiers. After opening Libyan borders to African migrants, Gaddafi was hosting some 2 million non-Libyans who were looking for a livelihood that did not exist in his country. So there began an organised network of trafficking and human smugglers, Libyan police and army placed as far as the Chadian border, to send asylum seekers and migrants into Europe.

Chaos and bedlam were the preserve of the Libyan leader. Like his ‘government-less’ state led by so called ‘peoples’ committees’, he exerted this flair for disorder on the world stage to extract money from Europe – as he boasted this week in a public address.

The breakdown of African states left rudderless after the end of the Cold War, prompted a new crisis for Europe. Migration from these failed states was proving to be electorally destabilising, and post-fascist parties like the Alleanza Nazionale, the Austrian Freedom Party (its former leader Jorg Haider was a good friend of Gaddafi), the Italian Northern League, and the anti-immigration parties of Pim Fortuyn and Geert Wilders were suddenly winning legitimisation in coalition governments.

The short-term gains of realpolitik dictated that dealing with Gaddafi was a must.  Publicly, nobody would antagonise the unpredictable and maverick leader. He held the keys to the gates of Africa; from his vast country’s borders, thousands were chancing fate by crossing over into Malta and Italy.

No longer the Mad Dog of the Middle East, Gaddafi had enjoyed an overnight rehabilitation by British prime minister Tony Blair after repudiating his weapons of mass destruction programme. When police in Geneva arrested Hannibal Gaddafi, a son of the Libyan leader, on charges of mistreating two domestic employees, Gaddafi responded by urging jihad against Switzerland, a trade embargo, and a visa ban on all European citizens. Convinced that the Swiss were to blame on the dispute with Libya, the European Commission piled pressure on Switzerland, after Malta announced its intention to defy Switzerland’s request to its 24 Schengen partners to keep 188 Libyan officials on a visa black list.

This vile deference to Libya seemed to persist even in the face of diplomatic snubs like leaving Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi wait for three whole days in Tripoli before summoning him just as he was boarding the plane back to Malta.Or when in 2005, Seif al-Islam Gaddafi unilaterally declared Maltese fishermen’s historical fishing grounds were now a Libyan ‘fishing conservation zone’. The reason: allow access to his tuna farming company RH Marine Services to exploit the region with the Fuentes Group, the Spanish giant who also has Maltese interests.

Libya was also a business park for so many Maltese interests. To mind comes the brief encounter the journalist Karl Schembri had with minister John Dalli during a government visit to Tripoli.‘You keep writing the same old stupidities,’ he told him when asked about Gaddafi’s makeover by the West. “To him, it is just useless chatter that will only undermine Malta’s efforts to keep good business relations with Libya.”

Even now, Dalli finds it hard to condemn Gaddafi as easily as his boss, Jose Barroso, has done earlier this week – telling a Maltese audience that nobody had the right to tell the leader when to step down. Maybe his deep understanding of Libya, and long-standing business links, put him in no position to be self-righteous about the Libyan dictator.

Even sensitive environmental and security issues, such as France’s generous offer of a nuclear energy plant, remained untouched. “We didn’t think it was a question to go into at this point in time,” then president Eddie Fenech Adami replied when asked whether the subject was raised at all during his visit to Gaddafi in 2005.

And yet, we only found out through Wikileaks that in 2009 Malta was a step from a potential environmental disasterwhen Gaddafi left highly enriched uranium on the tarmac of the Tajoura nuclear facility, close to cracking open and leaking radioactive material into the atmosphere. The reason: he had suddenly went back on a promise to dispose of the weapons-grade uranium, out of umbrage for being forbidden to pitch his trademark Bedouin’s tent outside the United Nations in New York. The foreign ministry was unimpressed with the revelation, of course, saying it would not comment on ‘unverifiable facts’.

A ‘worthy’ humanitarian crisis

Undoubtedly, the power of 24-7 transmission of warmongering and the vanguard of social media in the hands of the powerless, goes a long way to ‘popularise’ causes, liberation movements, and refugees in wars usually sponsored by benign Atlantic partnerships against dictatorships – Vietnamese, Somalis, Iraqis – as against asylum seekers depicted as welfare scroungers or invaders.

Overnight, the uprising against Gaddafi and his brutal repression via aerial bombardment gave the European Union the necessary pluck to sever relations and morally attend to the humanitarian crisis on its doorstep. Suddenly, thousands of European, American and Chinese economic migrants (by all means legal, yet migrant workers who sought their fortunes in Libyan oil fields and the burgeoning tourism industry) now became ‘evacuees’; the asylum seekers Europe paid Gaddafi to keep inside his country and his inhumane detention centres – all in the name of a migration policy that never existed and never worked – would have to be saved by Europe, the architect of the infamous pushbacks.

The new crisis prompted a wave of solidarity for what was happening in Libya by the Nationalist and Labour parties, after having mounted a hawkish defence of the Italian pushbacks and other grandstanding plans to repeal immigration.

The plight of ‘evacuees’ prompted extraordinary meetings of the European Parliament’s civil liberties committee. Green MEP Judith Sargentini noted the “cynicism” of the moment, seeing the European Commission preparing a €25 million budget for the evacuation of the migrants and asylum seekers from the man who until last week was guarding fortress Europe itself (against payment of course…).

Of course, the regional impact on Europe was clear. The Libyan implosion placed migratory pressure on the Tunisian and Egyptian borders. Was Europe next and were we prepared to take on the influx? Secondly, Libya’s oil fields – 80 millions tonnes exported to the EU alone – and fertile coastal tourism would still be up for grabs in a post-Gaddafi scenario.

What’s missing in this humanitarian crisis is the cultural affinity with Libyans and Africans, unlike that of the recent crises of the 1990s in the Balkans. “The flight of some 900,000 refugees from Kosovo sparked the revival in Western states of something exceedingly rare: the phenomenon of the popular refugee,” Dr Matthew Gibney, of Oxford’s Refugee Studies Centre writes.

“The media, previously concerned primarily with unveiling refugee welfare scams and illegal migration schemes, sympathetically related the desperate experiences of those forced to flee… Longstanding rhetoric on the need to deal with ‘root causes’ gave way to practical measures as NATO acted to end the humanitarian crisis, albeit through the pursuit of a controversial bombing campaign.”

The widespread media coverage of Libya in the last week – the kind we haven’t had on Sierra Leone, Eritrea and Ethiopia, Darfur, Liberia in the last decade – has rightfully increased the awareness of Libyans’ suffering. But this on its own has not whetted ‘Europe’s appetite’ as Commissioner Cecila Malmström conceded this week, for the relocation of migrants and asylum seekers from Libya. The truth, as Gibney puts it, is that most African refugees “are enigmatic to Europeans” whose lives are perceived to be so different and alien that their plight will never be close to that of ‘fellow’ Europeans like the Kosovars.

Overhauling asylum policy

Why then has Europe failed to cultivate this same response to the asylum seekers leaving Libya, devising a pushback strategy to keep them inside the north African country?

One of the clues is the fixation Europe has with organised and legal flows of immigration. MEP Simon Busuttil, a rapporteur on the common immigration policy and Libya, was recently asked on Radju Malta’s Ghandi Xi Nghid whether he wanted to ‘seal Europe from immigrants’. “No, I want to close the illegal routes,” Busuttil answered, saying Europe was working on a green card on the same lines as the United States, and a resettlement programme from Libya to the EU.

On the contrary, mixed flows – carrying both asylum seekers and economic migrants – tend to be irregular and disorganised, creating strain on host  countries like Malta, and generating spurious claims for asylum just to extend their stay in Europe, albeit in closed detention centres. Their ‘electoral displeasure’ is also a factor: even ‘progressive’ Labour sought to exploit this in its hawkish 20-point plan, proposing that Malta should threaten to suspend its international obligations.

But until the desertion of Gaddafi’s fighter pilots to Malta last week, the Libyan dictator’s human rights record was of little import to the EU. That the UNHCR was expelled from Libya was no reason to sever ties – after all the pushbacks were in full force. Gaddafi’s €5 billion ransom to keep his borders guarded was met with the acquiescence of Silvio Berlusconi (to whom he imparted the arcane sexual secrets of the bunga-bunga).

Malta welcomed the pushbacks, which breached the Geneva Convention, described by Maltese home affairs minister Carm Mifsud Bonnici as “an important step in the direction Malta had been advocating for a number of years.” Even Simon Busuttil called the Italy-Libya patrols, hot on the heels of a €20 million gift from the EU to Libya, “welcome news... Let’s hope it works.”

It did work. Busuttil noted on Radju Malta that arrivals had dwindled to a mere 50 in 2010 from the 3,000 of recent years. But he cynically observed that the closure of the Malta-Italy route had now opened up a route into Greece; and in a roundabout way, he pinpointed the lack of solidarity of the European member states at the start of the 2000s, as the reason for the pushback option. “What we need now is a common immigration policy,” Busuttil said.

In this sense, Busuttil is right. The unfair Dublin Regulation meant that member states controlling the EU’s external border had to take back asylum seekers and other immigrants that had migrated onwards to other EU countries. Italy had no qualms in passing the buck to Libya to guard the border. 

But this realpolitik stance betrayed the hypocrisy of European member states. Human rights groups were already reporting atrocious racist violence against sub-Saharan Africans in Libya, who are confined in overcrowded detention centres where they are exploited, beaten, raped, and abused. The pushbacks denied genuine refugees the right to seek asylum in Europe.

Has the EU, and the prime ministers who eagerly denounced the Gaddafi atrocities now, only just realised the dismal human rights record, corruption, and authoritarian reality of Libya?

If there is a lesson in the Libyan implosion, it is that European countries should not collaborate with regimes that violate human rights. On this aspect alone, Malta has been too willing to cooperate with Gaddafi – not just Lawrence Gonzi, but even Joseph Muscat, who secured himself a 90-minute audience with Gaddafi in 2010. If Europe forges ahead with a common immigration plan, it should include an overhaul that paves the way for the suspension of the Italian pushbacks and the Dublin regulation. But not without a change in the way our political leaders and MPs perceive the right to seek asylum.