Unbelievable. There’s good cause to review Malta’s neutrality but, since the start of Russia’s war on Ukraine, the reasons shouted off the rooftops are the bad ones.
We’re told that to be neutral is to pander to the powerful. The absurd, unintended implication: we should ditch neutrality to join a weak military alliance against a powerful one.
Anything less than that – from sanctions on Russia to development aid for Ukraine – we can, in principle, already do. If there are obstacles, it’s not neutrality.
The conclusion we’re supposed to draw, of course, is that we should join or associate ourselves with NATO. How is that not pandering to the powerful? NATO is the most formidable military alliance in the world, led by the US, which has the most powerful army in history.
We’re urged to get real by people who seem to have been living on another planet. They say it’s immoral to be neutral when one contemplates the horrors taking place in Ukraine.
Do they mean neutrality was morally okay when hundreds of thousands were killed, maimed, wounded and orphaned in Iraq? It was a war begun by democracies, the US and the UK, the two leading members of NATO, against a brutal dictator. It was still an illegal war, begun on false pretences, with the highest price paid by innocent civilians.
Was it morally okay, in 1999, when NATO bombed Serbia out of Kosovo? It was a war of liberal democracies against a nationalist autocrat. That didn’t mean the calculus wasn’t ruthless. The planes bombed from a great height and, therefore, with significant inaccuracy. Minimising military losses counted for more than civilian casualties.
As long as war is waged, there is no opting out of its brutality. There are no clean hands. It is brutal to be neutral (as, say, Sweden was during WWII). And it is brutal to be on either side of war, no matter the universal principles your side stands for. The Nazis and imperial Japan had to be defeated; but the bombings of Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were war crimes.
After the fall of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, NATO was still conducting air strikes. In trying to hunt down Gaddafi’s son, Saadi, it bombed a private house where he had just dined 20 minutes earlier. I knew the host well; he was incinerated together with his wife and children. He was just a minor opportunist on the make; no one in the area deemed him important.
NATO maintains it only destroyed a military target. The US maintains that all those drone strikes gone wrong, over the years, were regrettable mistakes. That is, when it does admit that the terrorist convoy was actually an Arab wedding party and the Afghans packing missiles into a car were, in fact, a family loading the boot.
Neutrality’s critics are neither hypocrites nor racists. They’re naive about war. The Ukraine war seems to signify something new. It doesn’t. It’s just more visible, given the character of the Russian army and of international news organisations.
Many recent wars have been based on avoidance of massive confrontations but Russian military strategy is based on heavy artillery and pulverising sieges. Its high visibility is unusual for our screens. US strategy is more surgical and aerial. Its operations have been conducted in lands beyond our attention span.
What’s happening in Ukraine is, therefore, shocking to people who know war only through their news sources.
We’ve often been respecting neutrality in the breach- Ranier Fsadni
In addition, western media organisations are highlighting Russian atrocities. In Libya, they were cheerleaders for regime change in a country they hardly knew and barely travelled in. In Iraq, they were embedded within the US army, with limitations on what they could report. Arab news organisations reported the horrors in grimier detail.
We’re being given rationalisations, not reasons, against neutrality. How else to explain the naivety about history?
We’re told that it’s the return to war in Europe that makes neutrality outdated. But it was war in Europe that led to the invention of neutrality – the functional need for it. Its golden age stretched from the 17th to 19th centuries.
When it comes to Maltese neutrality, to move from rationalisation to reason is to move from intuitive moral horror at violence to cold-blooded assessment of our security needs.
At this stage, neutrality’s current form as Dom Mintoff’s Plan B (after his attempt to get Malta’s neutrality recognised by treaty with four Mediterranean states) matter less than what our needs are now. It’s pointless criticising those origins if we can find fresh use for it.
Some of its champions are confused about whether our neutrality means keeping our head down or, instead, sticking our neck out for peace. That doesn’t mean that we can’t find clarity.
Clarity does mean coming clean. We’ve often been respecting neutrality in the breach. It’s been at least 15 years since international observers have considered Malta a base for private armies like Academi (formerly, Blackwater). Since Libya’s descent into chaos, Malta has been a hub for the gun trade.
Under Joseph Muscat, neutrality and non-alignment, if they served a purpose at all, served private interests. It was a policy that, wittingly or not, breached the constitution’s proactive commitment to peace.
So, there’s plenty to review. Can neutrality keep up with the conduct of war through cyberattacks and mercenaries? Is it even workable in a Cold War that involves China as a superpower – at least without neutralising its leverage over some of our strategic assets?
Should we continue to twin our proactive commitment to peace to neutrality? Or should we go the way of Norway, one of NATO’s first members, whose foreign policy has conflict resolution and reconciliation as an important pillar?
These are open-ended questions, with legitimate arguments on both sides of the neutrality debate.
But we don’t need fairy-tale arguments against neutrality based on the horrors inflicted by Russia on Ukraine. We don’t inhabit a world where the good side is always the same side. Or a world where the horrors of war don’t implicate everyone.