If people are shot and killed, ill-treated and abused, where we can’t see them, have they really suffered and died?
Joseph Muscat – ever the positive person, and still hostile to the idea of EU team-playing
Joseph Muscat has issued an ultimatum to Malta’s fellow members of the European Union, and he has issued it in the spirit of an outsider, not of a team-player, which reflects his long-time alienation from the concept of EU membership.
One wonders exactly where he issued this ultimatum, given that video footage of the EU Council’s ‘family photograph’ shows him isolated – not so much because he was ignored, which is actually a negative form of attention, but because he was overlooked and unnoticed.
Muscat speaks of ‘building a cemetery in the sea’, and makes as though he gives a damn about people dying, but then tells us that what he actually wants is to have patrols along Libya’s coastal border, to stop people leaving.
So, in other words, he doesn’t care what happens to them. He just doesn’t want them dying on his doorstep and making a mess which he and his Homeland Security Minister have to clean up.
His solution to the immigrant problem is on the lines of ‘if a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound?’. If a desperate family of immigrants, who have trekked for thousands of miles usually in horrific desert conditions, find themselves trapped in Libya and we can’t see what has happened to them, have they really suffered and perhaps died?
You can’t adopt the Mexican/US border approach in these conditions. Aside from the fact that those trying to get across the border from Mexico to the US are Mexican economic immigrants and not asylum seekers, they are by definition in their own home country when they are pushed back. Families of Eritreans or Syrians in Libya are in a completely different position, and decent, civilised people do not wash their hands of the problem, caring not a jot that it creates a bigger hell for them as long as it does not inconvenience us.
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Somebody’s trying hard…
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=739185262773962&set=a.471940862831738.125910.128646400494521&type=1&theater
Excellent comment, Daphne. Concise and the absolute truth of the whole issue. Sadly the bulk of the great unwashed will NEVER see it this way.
If Joseph Muscat thinks he’s suffering, how does he imagine it feel to lose a wife, daughter and two grandchildren, and seven other children too?
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20131025/local/funeral.491893#.UmrAo8saySO
Unless I am mistaken, Muscat is not exactly proposing to adopt the USA/Mexico border methods. The methods used there are implemented by the US.
Muscat is proposing that the UN should police Libyan ports.
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20131024/local/pm-says-un-force-should-police-libyan-ports-to-stem-migration.491701
I am not an expert on foreign affairs, but isn’t this suggesting interference with the sovereignty of Libya?
Joseph Muscat decided to be prudent when the UN approved intervention in Libya to protect Libyans from the atrocities of Gaddafi. If I understand well, now he wants the UN to interfere in Libya to perpetuate the atrocities against non-Libyan migrants by keeping them locked up in Libyan territory where their rights are far from guaranteed.
This is unbelievable.
Besides, should the UN also police the ports of Syria so that the Syrians do not escape the conflict in their country and they remain trapped in there?
And why shouldn’t the UN police all borders of all those countries where people are escaping, like Somalia, Erithrea, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Sri Lanka?
Could it be that he issued the warning in Maltese? No news agency outside the archipelago seems to have reported anything of it. What the hack.
When Joseph Muscat addressed the United Nations General Assembly (where he spoke about how the UN countries had agreed to WOK the TOK), he boasted about the EU’s credentials as the world’s largest donor of development aid.
He also spoke about ‘our’ longing to belong, and how ‘we’ must be part of the solution.
Then, back in Europe, he revels in threatening his EU counterparts with deadlines and the veto if they do not do what he dictates, and he asks for more resources. He does so while he sells Maltese and EU citizenship and passports to shady persons from shady countries at the rate of euro 650,000 per passport, without any contribution to the EU.
At the UN, reading from the teleprompter to his left, he said that immigration is not somebody else’s problem. (With hindsight, I don’t know if the teleprompter on his right had a different version).
In NY, he had a golden opportunity to tell Mr. John William Ashe, current President of the General Assembly – who incidentally comes from Antigua and Barbuda – that the UN should police the ports of Libya. And that he did not want to build a cemetry in the Mediterranean, although his government had issued a call for expressions of interest for land reclamation.
But he did not say anything of this sort, did he?
And did he tell US Presidents Obama and Clinton – with whom he posed for pictures which the government reported as “meetings” – that “we are not a military superpower,” as he sarcastically told CNN?
The hypocrite.
Il-mentalita’ mishuta – “mil-ghatba l gewwa”