UPDATED: Double standards and lack of respect for the electorate

Omar Fathi bin Shatwan (left) and former minister John Dalli signing the minutes of the Malta-Libya joint commission meetings in 1989.

Foreign Minister Tonio Borg confirmed to Malta Today this morning that Libya’s former oil and industry minister Omar Fathi bin Shatwan has been in Malta since Friday, having got here on a fishing-boat.

A fishing-boat, indeed. Can we have the name and number please, because the way things are panning out, we’re going to have to suspect that it was the Jolly Roger, with or without a cargo of green soap, or a related vessel.

It’s so damned obvious that this whole thing was sorted for Bin Shatwan by his little friends in the Maltese government, and perhaps even his little friend from back in his oil days, now in the European Commission. For some time, Bin Shatwan was chairman of the Malta-Libya Mixed Commission.

What makes it most obvious is the fact that they tried to hide it, as though you can hide this sort of information nowadays. Ridiculous.

When was the government planning on telling us, or was it planning on not telling us at all?

I just cannot believe these people. Their attitude towards showing the electorate basic respect by communicating public-interest information is shockingly deficient. Maltese politicians still operate in the darker days of embryonic democracy, when those who ran the country felt entitled to keep information to themselves. Ghadhom jahsbu f’termini ta’ ‘mhux fl-interess tal-poplu’.

Well, it doesn’t work that way in the 21st century, with full-on networked media and the internet.

The foreign minister and the prime minister were utterly foolish not to announce the information last Friday, or at least at the prime minister’s press conference three days later. If they were worried about how they were going to tell us, because it looks bad, then that should have told them something important: that they shouldn’t have done what they did, or that they should have done it differently.

Their first loyalty should not be to Gaddafi’s ex oil minister, who sold them cheap oil and perhaps did a bit of schmoozing with Johnny Dalli during his 16 years as Maltese minister responsible for those sorts of relations with Libya. Their first loyalty is to the people of Malta, who should have been told.

The foreign minister and the prime minister must have known, and if they did not (because sometimes I think they operate in a parallel universe) they should have been advised accordingly, that the news was bound to emerge somewhere in the Maltese or international press. And that would make them look deceitful and colluding, like they were trying to hide something.

That is what has happened now.

Tonio Borg, when cornered by Malta Today after the Associated Press broke the news on the international wires last night, said that “the Maltese government immediately granted humanitarian protection to Shatwan, given that he was fleeing a dangerous situation in Misurata.”

But he told The Times that Bin Shatwan asked for a visa while he was travelling to Malta on that good old fishing-boat, and that the government granted it immediately “on humanitarian grounds”.

Shatwan is not the only one fleeing a dangerous situation in Misurata, but all the others have been carted off and locked up. He wasn’t a Libyan government minister when he got here. He hadn’t been a government minister since 2007. He was a private citizen who had no special status except that of once having served Muammar Gaddafi and of being good terms with key politicians in Malta, and chairman of the Libya-Malta Mixed Commission.

As they say, it’s not what you know, but who you know.

“We immediately granted him protection and he is now a private citizen in Malta,” the foreign minister said. Unbelievable. He seems to be suggesting here that no further questions will be allowed because the man is a “private citizen”.

Dr Borg’s attempts at sophistry will not change the fact that it is the Maltese government’s own actions which have stripped Bin Shatwan of any right to shelter from the media – not that he seems to want it, given that he spoke volubly to the Associated Press, and not that he had it to start with, having served Muammar Gaddafi for so long.

“I think the regime is just going mad,” Bin Shatwan said to the reporter from AP. “Col Gaddafi has changed. No one would kill people in the streets in this way. Not even Hitler did that.”

Colonel Gaddafi has changed! What all people of common sense and good will can see is the same old Colonel Gaddafi, now shorn of all restraint. I trust we are not now going to see a flood of Gaddafi collaborators trying to save their skins by telling us that Gaddafi has changed, that he was not like this when they worked for him. They might find an echo of their sentiments among Maltese politicians, who have the exact same moral issues to deal with from their past close links to him, but nowhere else.

By sneaking him in, trying to keep his presence in Malta a secret, and whizzing out a visa while he was en route from Misurata, when by his own admission he has not seen or spoken to Gaddafi since 2006, the government has made this a public interest issue.