Way off the mark

The leading article in The Malta Independent on Sunday, yesterday:

WAY OFF THE MARK

We did not need the Prime Minister to tell us this week that Malta’s ambassador to the European Union, Richard Cachia Caruana, was acting under direct orders from the government when he negotiated, in whatever capacity, Malta’s reactivation of the country’s membership in Nato’s Partnership for Peace (PfP) programme.

The Labour Party is currently attempting to have Mr Cachia Caruana resign over the affair but the accusations, and effectively the motion itself, are way off the mark in that if there were any bones to pick in the way in which Malta reactivated its membership to Nato’s Partnership for Peace, they should be picked with the Prime Minister himself and not with the person tasked with doing some of the negotiating.

However influential the person in question may or may not be within government and Nationalist circles is quite another matter altogether. What matters here is that the decision to rejoin the Nato programme was clearly a Cabinet decision and, in that respect, it is crystal clear that no one person unilaterally decided to negotiate Malta’s re-entry.

That the man did not personally circumnavigate Parliament is patently obvious. The accusations, it is crystal clear, is merely an exercise of clutching at straws.

But what really grates about the whole affair is how we have an Opposition that demands people at the top of the political sphere to take responsibility for what their underlings have done, but on the other hand, in this particular case, the Opposition is effectively demanding that an underling takes the fall for a decision taken by Cabinet and which was obviously endorsed by the Prime Minister.

Unless, of course, the Opposition is implying that Mr Cachia Caruana holds more power than the collective Cabinet and the Prime Minister himself.

Now no one is denying that Mr Cachia Caruana is a central player in the governing Nationalist Party, but there is an order to things, a pecking order, and to believe in Labour’s motion would mean that one believes Mr Cachia Caruana went behind not just Parliament’s back but behind the back of the Cabinet and the government, decided that Malta must rejoin the PfP, and set about negotiating the ways and means of his own volition and accord.

That simply cannot be done without the backing of the Cabinet. Perhaps the Cabinet circumvented Parliament in its decision but again, that would be another matter altogether.

But to seize upon a Wikileaks cable that was released several months ago and which the media had already reported, and to cry foul at this stage is simply suspicious and it shows how hollow this particular motion really is. We are certain that the Opposition media had trawled through all the Malta cables when they were released, just as we at this newspaper did.

But for the Opposition to resurrect this months-old cable at this particular point in time leads us to only one conclusion: that it is baiting PN MP Franco Debono with anything that he may bite at.

The MP is still threatening to no longer vote along government lines and at virtually every possible fork in the road, the Opposition seeks to bait him with parliamentary motions that, it would seem, he simply cannot refuse.

Whenever the MP draws a line in the sand with the government, the Opposition seems to appear some time later with a parliamentary motion in hand that it believes he simply must vote in favour of.

To suggest that the man, however influential he may be, dictated and unilaterally negotiated Malta’s re-entry into the PfP is ridiculous. He may be influential but he is certainly not the Prime Minister.

He may be an unofficial and unelected Cabinet member, but he is not the Cabinet nor can any one person take decisions of such magnitude alone.

The motion obviously attempts to strike the right chord for the Nationalist MP, who has been scathing in his criticism of Cachia Caruana.

In this newspaper, at the beginning of March, the MP launched his first broadside against the ambassador, commenting that the long-time PN adviser should “stick to his job in Brussels or contest an election, after 25 years of behind-the-scenes-manoeuvring”, and the attack continued over the following weeks.

But here is where the Opposition’s motion falls flat in its attempt to woo over Dr Debono, for he never called for Cachia Caruana’s resignation from his position in Brussels, he actually suggested he stays in Brussels, or runs for election.

And tomorrow evening this farce, which we suspect Labour is regretting having started and which will call in people from across the continent and from even further away to give testimony, will continue, as will the clutching at straws.