Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/513060
maltatoday, SUNDAY, 17 MAY 2015 Opinion 23 for a suspected Russian submarine in its waters last year…" This, then, is the backdrop against which NATO's leaders all got plastered and sang the quintessential pacifist, anti-war anthem last Wednesday. It was the prelude to a sudden deepening of an already dangerously precarious cold war with Russia. Yet this is only a small part of the truly devastating irony behind the choice of precisely that song. When Michael Jackson teamed up with Lionel Ritchie to write that song in 1985, the declared aim was to raise money for Ethiopian famine relief. 'We Are The World' followed hard on the heels of Bob Geldof's Live Aid concert – which was triggered by the same crisis – and Band Aid's 'Do They Know It's Christmas', etc. That was almost exactly 30 years ago, when the world was bombarded by endless images of starving children in countries such as Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia, etc. All that remains is to fast forward three decades, and… oh look. Children are still starving in that particular corner of Africa. And to add to famine, there is also war, religious persecution, injustice, poverty, pestilence, crime, drought… you name it, it's killing someone in Africa right now. In fact, the situation has deteriorated alarmingly since all those European and American artists held hands and sang songs like 'We are the World' in the 1980s. The number of people living in abject poverty in Africa has simply exploded since then. There have been genocides in Rwanda, Burundi, Darfur, and elsewhere. Somalia alone has suffered consistent famine and drought over the past 20 years. So not only did the combined efforts of all those singers, songwriters and artists fail in their declared objective to alleviate the suffering of so many people in that continent… but it seems we have somehow managed to achieve the clean opposite result. More people are suffering today than ever before… so much so, that the entire continent of Africa seems to be de-peopling itself, with thousands upon thousands fleeing their homelands to pursue the often fatal dream of a better life in Europe. And this is why I found the video of those NATO bigwigs so utterly terrifying. Among the VIPs who can be seen (and heard) bawling 'We Are The World, We Are The Children' is a certain Federica Mogherini: the EU's chief foreign and security policy coordinator, and special envoy to NATO. And what was Mogherini's response to the ongoing refugee crisis in the Mediterranean? What is her grand strategy to address the root causes of a phenomenon which drives countless numbers of people to abandon their home countries out of sheer desperation? Simple. She intends to bomb Libya. Just days before her Michael Jackson/ Lionel Ritchie impersonation in Antalya, Turkey, Federica Mogherini addressed the United Nations Security Council to secure international backing for a military campaign against specific targets in Libya… a campaign for which NATO is likely to assume full command. This is from a report in the Guardian this week: "Britain is drafting the UN security council resolution that would authorise the mission, said senior officials in Brussels. It would come under Italian command, have the participation of around 10 EU countries, including Britain, France, Spain, and Italy, and could also drag in NATO although there are no plans for initial alliance involvement…" It's a choice we're making, you see. We're saving our own lives… by bombing the crap out of another country, in the hope that the entire problem will simply go away. Meanwhile, it doesn't seem to have occurred to any of the members of that drunken NATO chorus that 'bombing other countries', as a strategy, has a long and spectacularly consistent history of actually causing refugee crises in the first place. And it's not exactly very hard to understand why, either. People generally flee countries out of fear for their lives. It doesn't really matter much if death takes the form of starvation, sickness, execution or military action. The end result is the same: if people feel that their life is in danger in one place… they will try to move to another, safer place. It really is as simple as that. So what better way to reduce the number of people fleeing Africa for Europe… than to drop even more bombs on yet another African country? To create even more instability, to visit more war on a war-torn continent, and dramatically increase the risk of death in an already volatile country… and ultimately, to give anyone in Libya today – be they asylum seekers or not – yet another reason to want to flee for their lives? There is a word for Mogherini's (and, by extension, the EU's) plan to counter the migration crises. It is madness, nothing more, nothing less. But then: what else can we expect if not madness, from a bunch of NATO warmongers who do not even see the irony of holding hands for a drunken chorus of 'We Are The World?' making…