George Abela in The Australian

NATO is united in spirit but fractured in fact
Greg Sheridan, Foreign editor
The Australian – March 26, 2011

The row over the Libyan no-fly zone and attendant military action is showing us a lot of home truths, among them divisions within NATO, divisions within America and profound uncertainty over how this situation will develop.

One intriguing sidelight was provided by the President of Malta, George Abela, who was visiting Australia this week.

In his only media interview, Abela told me Malta strongly supported the no-fly zone over Libya. Indeed, he sounded like Kevin Rudd when he added: “The only criticism is whether it was timely enough. It took some time to be implemented.”

He rates the no-fly zone as very effective – “it has eliminated Gaddafi’s air force”.

Abela’s concerns are humanitarian and strategic, but Malta also has one specific concern, the danger that it will be flooded with Libyans fleeing the conflict.

Malta has deep experience with emigration. There are 200,000 Maltese and their offspring in Australia. Recently, like much of Europe, it has had to cope with unplanned, mass immigration.

Says Abela: “In the last five or six years we have had many people come to Malta from Libya, and come through Libya from Eritrea and Somalia.”

How does Malta handle this?

“We follow a detention policy, we run detention centres. We put them in a detention centre for up to 18 months.

“The government policy is that that should serve as a deterrent.”

Doesn’t the asylum-seeker lobby in Australia claim that we are the only Western country to have mandatory detention? “They can apply for refugee or humanitarian status and, if successful, go to mainland Europe,” says Abela. ” If not, they can go home.”

Abela says his country benefited from an agreement between Libya and Italy which stopped illegal immigrants from using Libya as an embarkation point.

He is optimistic that the Arab Spring may yet bring democracy to the Middle East and this could solve the crippling problem of unregulated North African immigration to Europe: “We should attack the problem at its roots and produce more stable countries with a future of their own. This wave of democratisation should give the people a future in their own countries.”

He believes the upheavals in North Africa have forced a change to European policy: “Until now the EU has taken a status-quo attitude, even saying sometimes that democracy in these countries cannot work. The people there have shown us they do believe in democracy.”

Abela believes unplanned immigration “if it’s uncontrolled causes problems” for Europe, and the long-term solution is for Europe to assist North Africa’s economic and political development. This week, however, Europe has not put on a very good display of unity of purpose or even coherence of institutions on this matter.Yesterday NATO finally agreed to take over nominal control of enforcing the no-fly zone over Libya.
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