The government embarrasses itself once more

When, a week or so back, a businessman friend who is involved in the aid shipments from Malta to Misurata rang me to say the exact same things which were published right across the front page of Friday’s The Times, my incredulous response was: “You have got to be joking. If you would like me to bring this sort of thing to the attention of the public, then you must also expect that I shall rip this rubbish to shreds. So for your sake, I’ll just say nothing.”

That conversation began with the words that I should hold my horses in saying that the government is doing nothing to help in the Libya crisis – nothing military, because of Miss Neutrality’s Skirt, and nothing humanitarian either, beyond checking through paying customers with passports and homes to go to in other countries.

And even that is long since over. “The government is doing a lot,” my businessman friend said. Really, I asked, like what? “Intelligence,” he said. I could scarcely contain myself. “The CIA and MI6 do not need the intelligence that can be provided by Maltese politicians. Please be a little more specific.”

And then out it came: the aid ship, which has been to Misurata precisely twice, was at one time under threat by Libyan gunboats. The captain rang his colleagues in Malta, the colleagues in Malta rang their friend at the Auberge de Castille and the gunboats moved off three hours later.

I drew breath before I replied. My friend does not take offence at a bit of well-deserved ribbing, but still my response does not bear repeating here. Paraphrased, what I said is that there is absolutely nothing to link the disappearance of the gunboats to a telephone call to the Auberge de Castille, that if this kind of Enid Blyton Famous Five behaviour is classed as ‘intelligence’ then the Boy Scouts are running the country, and that it would have made more sense for the captain of the vessel to ring an out-of-hours contact at the US embassy himself, which is what the ‘liaison officer’ at the Auberge de Castille would have done, thereby cutting two telephone calls out of the equation.

It was the same with that tanker which left Greece laden with fuel for Libya. Apparently, a couple of businessmen finding out about it and telling the ‘liaison officer’ at the Auberge de Castille – who is mysteriously without a name or number which others can call if they have ‘intelligence’ to share – counts as the government doing something to “protect Libyan civilians” (the massive front-page headline in The Times on Friday).

This is because the government did its duty in upholding sanctions and raised the alert so that others – the coalition forces we have refused to help – would stop the ship themselves.

I’m afraid my reaction to this piece of information was so scathing that at this point my friend said “All right! All right!” and had the good grace to laugh. Then he told me that the fuel shipment had been arranged by “three Maltese businessmen who should know better”.

Ah, now that’s the story, I told him. Has the government alerted the Commissioner of Police so that they may be arraigned on sanctions-busting charges? Are you going to give me their names so that I can find out?

This is what I want to know, not rubbish about the captain ringing you so that you can ring your friend at Castille and he in turn can ring the US Embassy so that they can do the work. “I don’t know their names.” Right.

So we ended our conversation, but not before I said that what he’d told me actually undermined his stated intention of making the government look like it was doing something. It had the opposite effect of highlighting the screamingly obvious: that there is no information on what the government is doing in the Libyan crisis because there is no information to get out, and not because the government is doing various mysterious things to which we shall not be privy.

The disturbing fact is that the government is sitting about waiting for things to happen and hoping they won’t, but if those things happen, then its planning does not extend beyond saying that others should deal with it.

Let’s take that much vaunted humanitarian work which the prime minister likes to talk about. What exactly is being done about this? Humanitarian work does not happen overnight or without meticulous and time-consuming (and expensive) planning. I gauge that there is no such planning.

If the humanitarian efforts that the prime minister has talked about amount to no more than a nameless and numberless sole liaison officer appointed to take calls from the agents on land of a single rusty private vessel running aid – collected, organised and paid for by NGOs – into Misurata, then it’s time to lie down and weep.

And it’s also time to mock the government for its sheer gall in claiming credit for the work done by volunteers and NGOs, or for boasting that this can in any way be construed as “playing an active role in protecting Libyan civilians since the start of the crisis, even as it projects a neutral stand and keeps a low profile”, as The Times reported on Friday.

It appears that the Maltese government is not quite clear on what the role of the state is, as distinct from the role of an NGO or the voluntary sector. When states speak of involvement in humanitarian aid, this does not mean giving a cheap and easy (one liaison officer) helping hand to NGOs who do all the work and bear all the expense themselves. It means that the state lets the NGOs get on with their job, cutting red tape where necessary, while organising its own aid efforts.

When Britain shipped aid to Libya in recent weeks, it did so on a warship, and the aid was paid for out of state coffers. Whatever British NGOs and aid organisations might have done besides is irrelevant. We did not see David Cameron or William Hague boasting to The Telegraph that Britain is protecting Libyan civilians because a group of businessmen in London had collected donations, rounded up volunteers to collect more, had volunteers load a merchant vessel and shipped the stuff out with a volunteer captain, while a ‘liaison officer’ at 10 Downing Street kept his mobile phone on at night just in case he needed to ring the US Embassy.

If Lawrence Gonzi and Tonio Borg are serious about Malta’s aid effort (and everything shouts out that they’re not because this is one problem that they don’t need, so that Tonio Borg can stick to his routine and go shopping on 31 March with the ‘massa’) then they know what to do, even though they’re trying to fob us off by hitching a ride on the back of NGOs.

A humanitarian exercise at the level of the state, rather than NGOs, involves the army, the Civil Protection Department, state-owned transport and state-owned storage. Soldiers do the loading, stacking, storing and transporting and the state buys and pays for what they stack, store and transport.

How easy it is for the prime minister to say that Malta is only going to play a humanitarian part in the crisis, and then sit back and wait for the voluntary sector to do and pay for it all.

We are now seeing exactly the same thing with medical care. The prime minister announced yesterday that he had put Malta’s general hospital at the disposal of wounded Libyans. That’s a cheap and easy way to look like you’re doing something, but in effect it means nothing. It is the humanitarian aid equivalent of telling somebody “Oh, you must come and stay sometime” when you know they won’t and that you will never have to contend with the annoyance of having them under your roof.

If the Maltese government really means what it says about operating on wounded Libyans in Malta, then it has to go beyond just making this empty and fatuous offer and actually organise it. And that starts with a disaster contingency plan for the hospital itself, whose surgeons, operating theatres and bed-stock can’t cope as it is.

How are the wounded Libyans going to get to Malta, anyway? As return cargo on that rusty vessel which goes out with medicines and baby food while the Castille liaison officer keeps his mobile phone switched on just in case? Has the prime minister corralled a crack team of operatives to get to work on this emergency measure, or are he and Tonio Borg sitting back and waiting for aid organisations to do it for them?

Yesterday, the prime minister was reported as having told The Times:

“There is a person in my office who is acting as the liaison officer to facilitate sending aid to Libya’s worse-hit cities. This is what the government had said from the very beginning: we will continue providing humanitarian assistance where needed, and this is what we’re doing. (…) Risky as these operations are, Malta will continue providing humanitarian assistance to help those in need.”

Excuse me, Mr Prime Minister, but what exactly do you mean by ‘we’?

You speak as head of the Maltese government, not as the CEO of an aid organisation or chairman of an NGO. When you say ‘we’, people take it to mean the government of Malta, the Maltese state, and not SOS Malta or a group of volunteers. But what you have described here is what NGOs and volunteers are doing, and so you have no right to speak for them, or to say ‘we’, still less to give the false and deceitful impression that your government (or ‘Malta’) is doing something.

If the best you can do is ask one person in your office to take calls from those who are doing the real work, then if I were you I would conceal the fact and not seek to show off about it.

You miss the point, Mr Prime Minister, that volunteers and NGOs do not need the government’s say-so to provide aid, that they were not waiting for your declaration that Malta would provide humanitarian assistance so as to get going and do it. Even if you had said nothing at all about Malta providing humanitarian assistance, they would still have done it, because that is what they exist to do, and more to the point, because they are not ‘Malta’.

This article is published in The Malta Independent on Sunday today.