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Joe Mifsud; Terror’s Footprints. Kite Group, 2014. 440 pp
It still remains to be explained why an island so small should have attracted terrorists on a scale so large. For all its geographic insignificance, Malta has had a hugely significant role to play in the power games that rely on the eloquence of Semtex rather than on that of persuasion.
Sadly, terrorism has made some governments question the universality of human rights. Because of terrorism we are seeing strident challenges to the human rights dogmas we thought had been acquired irrevocably by humanity. No, they hadn’t.
A tendency is developing, in politicians first but also among some jurists, to view terrorists the way previous generations before the enlightenment viewed pirates enemies of humankind who have lost all claims to the protection of the law.
This is a most disturbing trend which erases centuries of civil conquests and hurls us with marvellous acceleration back to darker ages. You do not protect the rule of law by undermining the universality of its protection.
The author of this book, Joe Mifsud has, for years, been collating material relative to the Malta connections of a large number of terrorist incidents. Some very well-known, others that the authorities managed to keep under wraps, others still that have now faded off the screen of the collective memory.
But collating is perhaps not the right word to describe the multiple energies behind this book. There is plenty of documentation, both public and private, meticulously filed and referenced, mostly reproduced verbatim.
Beside Mifsud’s collection of primary sources, there is also his sleuthing, that saw him trudging through Europe and the Middle East in a hunt for new clues, to interview some of the protagonists one on one, to discover relevancies and connections that the official discourse had not recorded.
The author is very rarely either censorious or supportive
The end result is a well-rounded record of how Malta featured so consistently in the schemes of terrorism. Why, it is less clear.
The author is very rarely either censorious or supportive, limiting himself to place facts on record, details in perspective and leaving the value judgement to the reader.
It undoubtedly betrays a pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli slant, but then, the facts themselves are heavily weighted by pro-Palestinian bias. This brings to mind a reflection by Guzè Pace when I started off as a lawyer: “Today I pleaded this most inconvenient case: both parties are right.”
This research is deliberately limited in time to the last quarter of the twentieth century, a heyday of Zionist fractures, Arab revivalism, Islamist assertiveness, nationalist and minority revanche and the spasmodic pursuit of anarchy throughout Europe. And rightly so, as Malta took centre stage in the terrorism map about that time. Though it is hardly well known, it was not the 20th-century that witnessed the debut of Malta in the historical annals of terrorism.
Possibly, the first time an incendiary time bomb activated by mechanical clockwork was devised as the weapon of choice for a high-profile political assassination was in the 1550s, when the knight of Malta Fra Leone Strozzi plotted to blow up and set on fire the galley that was carrying his enemies, the Admiral Andrea Doria and the king of Bohemia.
The same Strozzi is credited with more terrorist activity, this time in Malta itself.
He had fancied himself the next Grand Master of the Order in the 1553 election, but his ambitions had been thwarted by the opposition of three leading knights who, instead, supported the rival candidate Fra Claude de la Sengle.
Within a short while, those three knights were all dead, in highly suspicious circumstances. Strozzi’s personal poisoner, Biagio Pesci, got all the credit for the vendetta. The brother of one of the murdered knights soon knifed Pesci to death to restore an equilibrium of hate.
Malta could also have been the staging ground of a very high-profile assassination in 1923 when Korean terrorists were believed to be planning the murder of Prince Hirohito, the heir to the throne of Japan, during his visit to the island.
Japan had invaded and established its dominion over Korea and according to the secret and alarming dispatches from London to the Governor Lord Plumer, three named Korean terrorists had been designated to take advantage of the Malta visit to assassinate Hirohito.
I found this book thoroughly fascinating, dealing as it does in mystery, conspiracy, double agents, death. Mostly death. Virtually all the main actors are professionals of death: supplying it, sharing it and embracing it. The stuff of epics.
Terror’s Footprints is available during the National Book Festival, which comes to an end today at the Mediterranean Conference Centre, Valletta.