Ritratt: Miguela XuerebTista’ taqra bil-
Malti.
Prime minister Robert Abela refused to take any stance on recent geopolitical developments in Greenland, Iran and Venezuela, insisting that Malta should pursue “caution” when urged to express the country’s position on Wednesday.
Abela was delivering a ministerial statement on the last European Council summit, which took place on 17-18 December – the statement could not be delivered earlier due to Parliament’s Christmas break.
Since then, the US has attacked Venezuela and abducted its authoritarian president Nicolás Maduro and has repeatedly threatened to annex Greenland – a self-governing territory within the Kingdom of Denmark – at all costs, and large-scale protests in Iran and a bloody response by the authorities have attracted largescale condemnation and raised the spectre of US intervention in the country.
Perhaps inevitably, these geopolitical developments which occurred since the summit took place were raised by various MPs after Abela’s ministerial statement, including by opposition leader Alex Borg and the shadow minister for foreign affairs Beppe Fenech Adami.
While Borg opened his response to Abela with a reference to Iran, Fenech Adami built on this as he observed that the Maltese government was yet to make any statement on the country’s present situation.
And it was Fenech Adami who brought up Greenland and US president Donald Trump’s threats to take over the territory by force if necessary.
While the Nationalist MP recognised that Malta was constitutionally neutral, he insisted that this must never be interpreted as “remaining silent on issues that concern us.”
Abela, however, would not be drawn on taking any stance on either territory and on Venezuela insisting that all these situations required that Malta exercise “great caution,” even as he insisted that Malta practiced active and not passive neutrality.
He repeatedly maintained that the government is carefully following the situation in all three territories, as well as what the EU has been doing, noting that the EU was yet to issue an official statement on Greenland.
