In order to impress Muammar Gaddafi, Dom Mintoff had made changes to both internal and external relations. (Changes made internally were listed in the first part of this that appeared yesterday.) On the international front, diplomatic and economic relations with Israel were practically frozen; voting patterns in the United Nations followed an anti-Western non-aligned pattern; full support was given to Libyan initiatives, while any shortcomings on its part were overlooked. Mr Mintoff championed the Arab cause, whatever it was, in international fora.
To free himself from total dependence on Col Gaddafi for funds and investment, Mr Mintoff sought aid from other Arab countries. He succeeded with Algeria, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait but in each case it was a solitary and unrepeated gesture.
Now and again, Col Gaddafi felt the need to call the shots. To Mr Mintoff’s annoyance, he put his less accommodating Prime Minister, Abdessalam Jalloud, as an intermediary. He openly denounced Mr Mintoff’s policy of “neutrality on the basis of non-alignment” during a non-aligned summit in Belgrade. He refused the invitation to get involved in the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. On a visit to Malta, he defied Mr Mintoff’s policy of not allowing foreign uniformed military personnel on the island by surrounding himself with his own uniformed and fully-armed female personal guards.
When the British military base was formally closed in 1979, Col Gaddafi made his presence felt by sending over a shipload of hundreds of Libyans who overwhelmed the festivities. The most notorious case was in 1980 when he used his navy to stop Malta from drilling for oil in an area he also claimed. An oil-rich Malta would have made it financially independent of Libya. When Libya finally agreed to supply Malta with oil at a reduced price, the allocated quota was not fully taken up because Malta found it could buy oil on the open market at an even cheaper price.
During a meeting on the CSCE with Mr Mintoff, we were interrupted by an important telephone call from Libya. Mr Mintoff would not be disturbed. I had warned one of the other two senior officers attending the meeting Mr Mintoff was underestimating the Libyans and this could have unpleasant consequences.
The bluff was called when Col Gaddafi invited Mr Mintoff to plead his case for more financial aid in front of the People’s Congress. At the end, planted questions from the floor wanted to establish if Arabic would be included among the official languages of Malta and whether Islam would be given the same status as the Catholic Church. To Mr Mintoff’s credit, he was not ready to pay that price but the outcome of this meeting was not made public in Malta.
Mr Mintoff’s economic and political policies discouraged economic investment from Western countries and this was not made up by investment from Libya or other Arab countries. Dependence on favours from Col Gaddafi remained crucial.
Soon after, in 1984, Mr Mintoff decided to leave the office of Prime Minister and pass the honour, or burden, to Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici. Relations between Malta and Libya passed into a new phase. Malta’s uncritical support for Libya and Col Gaddafi personally became stronger. Many have declared that they could not fathom Dr Mifsud Bonnici’s thinking, and that goes for me too. A part explanation could be that he was traumatised by the 1985 massacre at Luqa airport (during the Egyptair hijacking) when he accepted advice to deny the Egyptian commandos the leadership of their US experts. He must have realised that his government’s blind policy of non-alignment had contributed to the death of 57 innocent lives.
Another incident was the placing of an explosive device on an Air Malta flight to Cairo that damaged the plane but left no casualties. Dr Mifsud Bonnici’s reaction was that Malta’s best defence against terrorism was friendship with the Arab world.
Two prominent instances where Dr Mifsud Bonnici supported Libya were when he claimed he had given advance warning of an impending US air attack on Tripoli, thus saving Col Gaddafi’s life, and when he denounced the US for exercising its right to challenge the Libyan claim that the Gulf of Sirte was its internal waters, a claim Mr Mintoff had rejected.
Dr Mifsud Bonnici’s very close ties with Col Gaddafi have survived beyond his leadership of the Labour Party, right to the present days.
A new chapter in the relations between Malta and Libya opened when Eddie Fenech Adami became Prime Minister in 1987. Malta’s internal and foreign policies became independent of Libya, from whom no financial assistance was necessary because investment from the West and other countries started to flow in. Col Gaddafi seemed to accept this and the friendship agreement was amended at our request. Cooperation became less dramatic and more effective for quite some time.
However, as time went by and Malta became less accommodating, it became apparent Col Gaddafi preferred to deal with a Labour government. The setting up of the Malta-based, but Libya-funded, organisation Popem, run by prominent Labour supporters, became a tool in the hands of opponents to the democratically-elected government. Covert support for Libya reached the point where an airport officer, known for his support of Dr Mifsud Bonnici, was hand-picked by the Libyan Embassy to help the head of the Libyan security service, Musa Kusa, enter Malta, using VIP facilities, without informing the Maltese authorities.
More sinister was Col Gaddafi’s utter disregard of Malta’s sovereignty by involving it in his support for terrorist activities. He involved Malta in the blowing up of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, the trasfer of weapons sold to the IRA in Maltese waters and the transit through Malta of terrorist Fathi Sqaqi on a Libyan passport issued under a false name.
Yet, economic cooperation grew, not without hiccups, involving private enterprise rather than state intervention. However, it should not be forgotten that in the time of King Idris Maltese firms were already trading with, or were established in, Libya while 10 per cent of Malta’s trade was with Libya.
There is no reason why economic ties with Libya should not go on prospering without reliance or the interferance of a leader like Col Gaddafi.
(In 2004, Col Gaddafi was made a member of the National Order of Merit.)
The author headed Malta’s Embassy in Tripoli twice, in the time of King Idris and Muammar Gaddafi, and dealt with Malta’s relations with Libya as secretary and adviser at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.