Here’s what you don’t do when the roof over the house two doors down from yours collapses killing everyone inside. You do not organise a party to celebrate the fact that your roof is still standing. And you especially don’t go to your neighbours to tell them how pleased you are that unlike them you don’t live exactly next door to a collapsed building so you don’t have to deal with the trouble of propping your roof up in case the trauma next door damages yours.
There is no context that justifies Robert Abela’s utterly insensitive, crass, and childish remarks yesterday. He’d just come back from an EU emergency summit where he described the chilling atmosphere in the room as they listened to Ukraine’s president speaking to them for quite likely the last time. His capital Kyiv is about to be engulfed by one of the most sophisticated and well-resourced land armies in the world. The Ukrainian President was about to change out of his suit and wear fatigues to join the volunteers, many of them without a day of military training, resisting the invasion on the Kyiv streets, block by block.
What Robert Abela brought back from that was how lucky he felt he didn’t have to be the one donning fatigues. Nor did he have to worry, he said in no uncertain terms, about having to run a country next door to that conflagration. Thousands, probably millions, will be marching carrying what they can of their belongings – to borrow a line, the rich rubbing shoulders with beggars and outcasts in a stampede without order and without a goal, except to march out of the country they lost.
Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and Romania are bracing themselves to receive these millions of refugees. And, together with Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania they will once again in their long history live right next door to an aggressive and expansionist Russian Empire intent on redrawing the security apparatus they had achieved after the Cold War.
All Robert Abela has to say about that is, thank fuck it’s not us.
Consider the next time Robert Abela will expect to be taken seriously by other EU countries that we can’t handle a boatload of some two dozen souls escaping starvation or slavery in Libya. Think how pathetic and ironic his panic will sound as he holds migrants on a boat out in the rough seas in case our “serenity, peace of mind and peace”, as he called his callous indifference yesterday, are crushed by less people than stand outside a Marsascala pizzeria waiting for a table on any given Saturday night.
If we remain “serene” while war is raged within smelling distance of the European border that we share with others, if our leader speaks on our behalf like the mayor of the Hobbit’s Shire declaring he’ll be all right as long as Hobbiton remains unscratched by the goings on in the strange world of the Big Folk, serenity will be taken away from us before we know it with or without our help.
Until this war broke out we lamented having a prime minister compromised by his past compromises, particularly the paradoxical one where he replaced Joseph Muscat in order to preserve him. As the paradigm shifts, we may yet rue the fact that our prime minister is a baby.