What has Muscat conceded to Renzi in return?

Published: April 22, 2015 at 7:14pm

formal agreement

Look at the prime minister’s tell-tale furrow as he tells Mark Micallef of Times of Malta that there is “no formal agreement” between Malta and Italy under which Italy takes all the migrants and Malta takes almost none.

No formal agreement. If there were no agreement, he would have simply said that: “there is no agreement”.

That there is an agreement which is not “formal” (formal bilateral agreements are recorded formally in writing and attended upon by senior diplomats and civil servants) is borne out by his next words: “Italy has understood our limitations and we are cooperating in a more meaningful manner…I think Malta and Italy have realized, and this has been the case for the past one and a half years or so, that there are different and better ways of cooperating”.

People whose focus is narrow, single-minded and obsessive will say ‘thank God for that – u kemm hu clever Joseph’.

Those with their heads screwed on right will ask the obvious question: what and how much has Malta ceded to Italy in return?

Italy is not doing something for nothing. In return for having Italy pick up all the migrants that Malta should be picking up, Muscat and his government will have ceded enough to the Italians to make it worth their while.

But we’re not being told what that is. The Opposition should pick up the matter in parliament.

Didn’t you think it was suspicious that whereas boatloads of immigrants were rescued regularly by Maltese forces and brought to Malta, there has been no such news roughly since the pushbacks debacle in the summer of 2013?

It wasn’t that they weren’t leaving Libya, because they were drowning and being rescued all around us – by others.

A few months after the European Court of Human Rights prevented Muscat from pushing back a group of migrants – the last large group to wind up here in Malta – 600 people drowned when two boats went down off Lampedusa. That was in October 2013. Since then, Italy has been rescuing all the migrants it can while Malta does almost nothing.