The Malta Independent of Sunday
How can they give beautiful names like Ivan or Katrina to such
destructive monstrous hurricanes?
How is it possible that the sole super power left, which has no qualms playing super-cop around the globe and pretending to have the capacity to establish democracy in desert kingdoms and caliphates that probably cannot even spell the word let alone appreciate it and embrace it, is so incapable of protecting its own against a relatively small natural calamity?
Compared to the Asian tsunami hurricane Katrina is small change. But whereas the tsunami ravage was a one shot resulting from an act of God, which destroyed hundreds of thousand of lives but produced relatively small material damage (because the poor Asian countries had little material to damage), Katrina’s aftermath is contrastingly different. The storm itself was pretty mild on the Asian tsunami scale, and there is absolutely no comparison as regards loss of life. However, in terms of material damage and economic disruption the costs will be astronomically higher than the tsunami damages purely because it hit an area where there is concentration of economic activity and huge industrial plants, busy ports and a nerve centre for the distribution of energy and commodities.
The tragedy is that much of this damage is not quite the result of the hurricane itself but the result of human abuse of Mother Nature. Abuse in building cities below sea level. Abuse in finding the billions required to fight unnecessary foreign wars on false pretexts but not finding the few millions necessary to maintain the damns or levees to keep cities, dangerously built below sea level, safe and protected.
Only time will tell why the emergency services have proven so gaspingly ineffective that journalists were forced to sympathise with looters, who were described as being forced to steal because it was a matter of survival given the failure of the emergency services to respond effectively. How can the richest and most technologically advanced nation in the world be capable of landing men on the moon, building a manned base lab in space, sending spacecraft to the farthest corner of our solar system, keeping satellite watch on every corner of the world, responding to 9/11 attacks by bringing back its financial systems up and running in less than a week and then prove so ineffective in airlifting emergency supplies to so many thousands of New Orleans citizens who were ordered to leave their water-logged homes without any supplies or belongings?
How can it be that America could let its citizens suffer such degradation and deprivation in such an hour of need, which in its experience is comparable to the suffering of the children of Beslam a year earlier though hopefully the ending will be less tragic?
Closer to home, how can the EU leave its tiniest member State to fend on its own as it tries to grapple with the problem of illegal immigration? Is it not clear to one and all that the problem this year has taken on a totally different dimension now?
It is no longer a case of the odd boatload of immigrants landing on our shores by mistake on their way to Sicily and the European mainland. It has now become an organised system of immigrants coming purposely to Malta to join the friends or relatives who had arrived earlier.
Can’t the EU be made to realize that a small country like us doesn’t have the skills and resources to cope with this problem without putting the life of such illegal immigrants at risk by abandoning them to their own destiny on the high seas?
For the EU as a whole this is a small problem. Illegal immigration from the Balkans, mostly Albania and the former Yugoslav Republic and from former communist countries is now history. Illegal immigration from former UK colonies into Britain and francophone colonies into France has also largely diminished as many such colonies have improved domestic economic conditions.
So if our geography is condemning us to become the first port of call for the last remaining source of illegal immigration, the African continent, why should we be left to fend for ourselves? Where is the European solidarity we were promised?
The developed world, and Europe in particular, has an obligation to promote development in Africa to reduce and eventually eliminate the flow of illegal immigration. But until his happens Europe must help Malta and Sicily to tackle this problem with a sense of solidarity. Otherwise, Sicily and Malta will be constrained to continue dumping responsibility for the occasional mishaps on one another and will continue to play at passing the parcel to each other, that is, the responsibility for housing the immigrants. This is not a Sicilian problem or a Maltese one. It is a EU problem, or if you will, a European problem that even involves countries outside the EU. It is the lack of real aid to Africa that has brought about this unbearable situation which has disproportionately burdened the central Mediterranean islands.
As a minimum, the EU should invest in a proper detention centre in Malta, resourced as an EU-wide project both in terms of funding as well as in terms of equipment and skilled human resources, and setting up efficient systems to distinguish between genuine asylum seekers who could be absorbed inside the EU and abusive economic immigrants who should be returned to their country of origin.
Like the poor souls stranded with just the clothes they are wearing in the New Orleans Super-dome and Convention Centre, which is bringing the worst out of humans who feel threatened and abandoned, we should not be abandoned by the EU to face the problem of illegal immigration single-handedly. If they do that they can hardly be surprised if it brings out our worst side, as happened to Minister Tonio Borg when he said that if we are not helped we could be forced to renege on our international agreements.
Rather than be chastised for saying it I think it should be said more forcefully until someone listens.
How can they give beautiful names like Ivan or Katrina to such
destructive monstrous hurricanes?How is it possible that the sole super power left, which has no qualms playing super-cop around the globe and pretending to have the capacity to establish democracy in desert kingdoms and caliphates that probably cannot even spell the word let alone appreciate it and embrace it, is so incapable of protecting its own against a relatively small natural calamity?
Compared to the Asian tsunami hurricane Katrina is small change. But whereas the tsunami ravage was a one shot resulting from an act of God, which destroyed hundreds of thousand of lives but produced relatively small material damage (because the poor Asian countries had little material to damage), Katrina’s aftermath is contrastingly different. The storm itself was pretty mild on the Asian tsunami scale, and there is absolutely no comparison as regards loss of life. However, in terms of material damage and economic disruption the costs will be astronomically higher than the tsunami damages purely because it hit an area where there is concentration of economic activity and huge industrial plants, busy ports and a nerve centre for the distribution of energy and commodities.
The tragedy is that much of this damage is not quite the result of the hurricane itself but the result of human abuse of Mother Nature. Abuse in building cities below sea level. Abuse in finding the billions required to fight unnecessary foreign wars on false pretexts but not finding the few millions necessary to maintain the damns or levees to keep cities, dangerously built below sea level, safe and protected.
Only time will tell why the emergency services have proven so gaspingly ineffective that journalists were forced to sympathise with looters, who were described as being forced to steal because it was a matter of survival given the failure of the emergency services to respond effectively. How can the richest and most technologically advanced nation in the world be capable of landing men on the moon, building a manned base lab in space, sending spacecraft to the farthest corner of our solar system, keeping satellite watch on every corner of the world, responding to 9/11 attacks by bringing back its financial systems up and running in less than a week and then prove so ineffective in airlifting emergency supplies to so many thousands of New Orleans citizens who were ordered to leave their water-logged homes without any supplies or belongings?
How can it be that America could let its citizens suffer such degradation and deprivation in such an hour of need, which in its experience is comparable to the suffering of the children of Beslam a year earlier though hopefully the ending will be less tragic?
Closer to home, how can the EU leave its tiniest member State to fend on its own as it tries to grapple with the problem of illegal immigration? Is it not clear to one and all that the problem this year has taken on a totally different dimension now?
It is no longer a case of the odd boatload of immigrants landing on our shores by mistake on their way to Sicily and the European mainland. It has now become an organised system of immigrants coming purposely to Malta to join the friends or relatives who had arrived earlier.
Can’t the EU be made to realize that a small country like us doesn’t have the skills and resources to cope with this problem without putting the life of such illegal immigrants at risk by abandoning them to their own destiny on the high seas?
For the EU as a whole this is a small problem. Illegal immigration from the Balkans, mostly Albania and the former Yugoslav Republic and from former communist countries is now history. Illegal immigration from former UK colonies into Britain and francophone colonies into France has also largely diminished as many such colonies have improved domestic economic conditions.
So if our geography is condemning us to become the first port of call for the last remaining source of illegal immigration, the African continent, why should we be left to fend for ourselves? Where is the European solidarity we were promised?
The developed world, and Europe in particular, has an obligation to promote development in Africa to reduce and eventually eliminate the flow of illegal immigration. But until his happens Europe must help Malta and Sicily to tackle this problem with a sense of solidarity. Otherwise, Sicily and Malta will be constrained to continue dumping responsibility for the occasional mishaps on one another and will continue to play at passing the parcel to each other, that is, the responsibility for housing the immigrants. This is not a Sicilian problem or a Maltese one. It is a EU problem, or if you will, a European problem that even involves countries outside the EU. It is the lack of real aid to Africa that has brought about this unbearable situation which has disproportionately burdened the central Mediterranean islands.
As a minimum, the EU should invest in a proper detention centre in Malta, resourced as an EU-wide project both in terms of funding as well as in terms of equipment and skilled human resources, and setting up efficient systems to distinguish between genuine asylum seekers who could be absorbed inside the EU and abusive economic immigrants who should be returned to their country of origin.
Like the poor souls stranded with just the clothes they are wearing in the New Orleans Super-dome and Convention Centre, which is bringing the worst out of humans who feel threatened and abandoned, we should not be abandoned by the EU to face the problem of illegal immigration single-handedly. If they do that they can hardly be surprised if it brings out our worst side, as happened to Minister Tonio Borg when he said that if we are not helped we could be forced to renege on our international agreements.
Rather than be chastised for saying it I think it should be said more forcefully until someone listens.
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