Here's another brilliant strategist
Libya: Joseph Muscat doesn't wish to politicise the issue
The Sunday Times, today
Muscat calls for ceasefire in Libya
Christian Peregin
Labour leader Joseph Muscat has called for an immediate ceasefire in Libya “to facilitate the necessary changes”, adding that the behaviour of the Gaddafi regime is “unacceptable by any standards”.
However, when contacted by The Sunday Times Dr Muscat did not go as far as to explicitly say that Muammar Gaddafi should step down or that he had lost his legitimacy to govern.
An editorial on the Labour Party’s news site Maltastar.com on Friday criticised Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi’s heightening condemnation of the Gaddafi regime, saying: “There was a U-turn on foreign policy with Gonzi rushing to say Gaddafi was finished, without having the foresight to consider the implications.”
However, when asked whether he stood by this assessment, Dr Muscat said he would refrain from politicising this issue “since it is an extremely sensitive one for geo-political reasons”.
Speaking to The Sunday Times, Dr Muscat said the future of Libya was “solely in the hands of the Libyan people to decide.
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It’s incredible that anyone could read the situation so wrongly. But the leader of the Opposition is in good company. He sits with the foreign minister on this one.
Right, a ceasefire. Everyone stops shooting. Then what? Gaddafi stays, the rebels get rounded up and tortured, and everything goes back to ‘normal’.
If the rebels don’t stop shooting, legitimate action can be taken against them for breaking the ceasefire. And that means that whether they stop shooting or whether they carry on, they just can’t win.
When Joseph Muscat and Tonio Borg say that a ceasefire will make possible ‘regime change’, they have to explain how, and what they mean. Otherwise we shall have to conclude that outside their immediate sphere of competence, they are not bright at all.
Three weeks into the crisis, the leader of the Opposition has unzipped those lips to tell us that the behaviour of the Gaddafi regime is unacceptable by any standards. Gosh, you mean even by Labour’s? Wow. Thank you, Joseph, but we had noticed and weren’t really waiting for you to trot along now and point it out.
But it’s not entirely unacceptable by the Labour Party’s standards, it seems, because Joseph Muscat doesn’t think that Gaddafi has lost his legitimacy – did he ever have any? – or that he should step down. Well, it shouldn’t come as entirely a surprise that Labour thinks it perfectly OK to keep running the show after gunning your people down.
And now he’s not going to say more, because he doesn’t want to “politicise the issue” – come again? – because for geo-political reasons it is sensitive. Drop the geo, and just keep the political.
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Daphne, I would like to ask you to elucidate one point.
You are making an extremely intriguing argument, here, on the legitimacy of Gaddafi’s government.
But didn’t almost 42 years of recognition by the international polity ultimately end up giving legitimacy to Gaddafi’s government?
Is legitimacy accorded only to Western-style liberal democratic systems?
[Daphne – We’re going to have to define legitimacy before we can start talking. There is legitimacy under international law and there is moral legitimacy. The way I see it (moral legitimacy) anybody who rules his people against their will has no legitimacy.]
Ok.
I tend to prefer – as perhaps by now it is self-evident – legitimacy under international law.
But let us be careful. You are using your blog to try and sway public opinion in favour of moral legitimacy. That legitimacy might not necessarily be in our country’s interests.
[Daphne – I don’t ‘use’ this website for anything. I write because I write.]
Legitimacy ceases the moment some action contrary to its definition takes place. The Gaddafi regime became ‘legitimized’ due to inaction or inability of the countries constituency to do anything about it for four decades.
This skewed ‘legitimacy’ was scuttled the moment the masses showed publicly and fearlessly that they did not want the present leaders to continue to step on their most basic human rights and when the first bullet was fired at the demonstrators .
In the absence of democracy for 42 years, the protesters had no other means to get their message through to the regime and the rest of the world other than taking to the streets. They would certainly have preferred to show their displeasure had an election of sorts existed but such a luxury does not exist under dictatorships.
Where did you get the idea that Tonio Borg was not “stupid at all”, Daph?
Also, where do you get the idea that Tonio Borg was/is a human rights specialist?
[Daphne – He is.]
What cases do you know of that he filed in Court, when he was a practising lawyer? This was only a subject he lectured in, and not one he practised. Furthermore, his knowledge of the topic is limited to the Malta scene and does not extend internationally.
He was always a spineless individual, as evidenced by his days as Minister for the Interior, where he was totally incapable of keeping any of his subordinate Commissioners of Police in check. A piddly local Chief of Police, let alone some foreign tyrant – what on earth are you talking about, Daph?
I think you are a spineless lawyer, willywonka.
Mulej harisni mil-hbieb, l-ghedewwa niehu hsiebom jien.
How exactly am I spineless?
You’re hiding behind anonymity.
You don’t need a lot of courage to tell ‘a spineless individual’ in his face that he’s ‘spineless’. If you don’t tell him then you will prove to all and sundry that you are more spineless than ’spineless Tonio Borg’.
Cowards die many times before their deaths,
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Wonka where are you?
What sort of democracy do our leaders believe in?
Is this fence sitting an indication that our leaders do not find it absolutely unacceptable that a government kills its own people to maintain absolute control?
One gets a feeling that, with our class of politicians, it is OK while it is all plain sailing, but when things get tough, they just do not know how to handle things.
If the Gaddafi regime is not deposed now, we will have to deal with his three sons, who are as crazy as him, for the next half a century.
I’d say that any leader who does not recognise that Gaddafi is illegitimate, is an illegitimate leader. And that, too, is by any standard. But especially by western standards.
By the time the No Fly Zone becomes effective, Gaddafi will have reached Benghazi. Then what? Will it be back to business as usual with the tyrant, as if the horrors we witnessed these last few weeks on TV never really existed?
Go to Libya and ask the common person “who is the prime minister of Malta?” 85% will reply MINTOFF!
That’s why these cowards in the Labour Party are so obsessed by Gaddafi.
Labour’s attitude towards Gaddafi reminds me of their position regarding thugs. They were never really convinced that political violence is wrong, only hiding away the thugs (Sant’s supposed ‘clean-up’) when it was electorally expedient to do so but never actually condemning the violence – never even admitting that there had been violence.
Because Gaddafi is now so universally unpopular, Labour attempt to distance themselves from him but stop short of actually condemning him outright or saying he must go. They have, in fact, criticised the PM for saying that his rule was over.
How would such a condemnation “politicise” the issue, which, in any case, is essentially political?
Business with Gaddafi must be worth an awful lot of money to these people for them to be fannying about like they are.
Any clues how much money?
The silence of the(P)Lambs!
When Labour governed against the people’s will in 1981 to 1987, that was an illegitimate government.