The large Valentine’s Day picture of Dominic Mintoff on the front-page of The Times, followed by another one as you turned the page, made ground-breaking news and must have been meant to entertain the uninitiated. The front-page caption defined him as “the Grand Old Man of Maltese politics”.
Coming from a newspaper whose premises were set on fire on 15 October, 1979, by thugs, none of whom were recognised or apprehended by the police, outside the then prime minister’s office, that’s rich. It was no doubt a throw away editorial bye-line, perhaps by one of the 17,000 plus new voters in this general election, who never smelt the inside of a police cell at the Depot, or bathed his face after a tear gas raid.
I sometimes wonder if the “big man” cult from colonial times still survives, when self-respect and self-esteem by the citizenry should be in the process of rehabilitation.
Winston Churchill and Konrad Adenauer both died at 91, the former still a sitting MP, the latter still practically chairman of the Christian Democratic Union. As, however, Mr Mintoff has outlived them both, that even makes him ‘grander’. What Malta went through in the 1970s and 1980s was not Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal”: it was grander still.
Mr Mintoff, now in his early 90s, was a firebrand social nationalist of sorts, but that does not exculpate him from the unprecedented ordeals Malta went through, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s, even if succeeding generations may know nothing about them, generally deprived as they are of any knowledge of recent history, or indeed of any national history.
Presenting Mintoff in this way may perhaps be construed as a dig at the MLP, whose leader had called him “a traitor” in 1998; but it would probably be regarded in a critical light by all political parties from left to right today, not to mention the thousands of workers and professional people, all loyal Maltese citizens, who struggled to survive when unjustly suspended from work, or were constrained to leave their country, or were terrified out of their wits by wanton acts of violence (or indeed beaten, wounded and killed), and so on.
That Mintoff as a leader may have always had the country’s good at heart, as somebody recently held, may be so, and certainly there are instances of that; but many other leaders in modern European history would have made the same claim when driven by a twisted identification of nation with self, at the cost of fundamental human rights. Any such naïve and prominently displayed fawning of their pasts in any of their respective countries today would not have been applauded.
Mintoff could indeed be seen in the light portrayed – as “the Grand Old Man of Maltese politics” – given that he has been at it for so long, from his “Bolshevik” student days in the 1930s to his wartime stint in England and immediately afterwards when, as Dr Boffa’s public works minister, and an up-and-coming architect, he was much engaged in reconstruction, later to include slum demolition.
For reasons and in ways that would need evaluation at length in due course, Mintoff brazenly enough twice brought his party to its knees when in office, first by splitting it down the middle in 1949 and ousting Boffa; then, in 1998, by purportedly opposing a project proposed for “his” Cottonera region. The first permitted Nerik Mizzi to become prime minister in 1950, the second Malta to join the EU in 2004.
Mintoff ruled for longer than any other prime minister. For three years in the 1950s, the highlight of his ambition had been to make Malta an integral part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. After a battle royal with the seemingly eternal Archbishop Gonzi, he ruled again from 1971 to at least 1984, when he just took it upon himself to appoint a successor, while still commanding his party’s moral high ground, if that is what it was.
That makes a total of at least 16 years, in the course of which the Anglo-Maltese agreement entered into by his predecessor, Dr Gorg Borg Olivier (who incidentally had obtained independence for Malta) was doggedly re-negotiated and extended until 1979. Malta’s independence constitution, approved in a referendum in 1964, was changed and “republicanised” without one in 1974, although that, in spite of the smashed windscreens, was in some respects a secularising move, as the long overdue introduction of civil marriage had been in 1975.
Internally, Mintoff’s politics were generally a very mixed bag, a socially-engineered give-and-take experiment, which on the positive side attracted some foreign direct investment, notably SGS, and generally uplifted the most needy materially, while freezing wages and making strikes a very risky affair indeed. His politics also landed all Maltese in a grotesque muddle where ordinary people had to join corps under military discipline such as Izra u Rabbi and Bahhar u Sewwi. At the same time they could not as much as own a colour TV or a computer, or indeed buy decent toothpaste or a bar of fruit and nut chocolate, becoming the laughing stock of Sicilian pedlars. Most secure of all was the cross-lined telephone system, not to mention water in short supply.
Externally, while the Cold War still thrived, Mintoff’s politics shifted Malta’s perhaps excessive reliance on the West away to an idiosyncratic rapport not only with Libyan “blood brothers” but with some of the world’s most obnoxious dictatorships, from Romania to North Korea, repeat North Korea; although the opening up to Communist China in 1972 turned out to be a pace-setting move.
In the escalating and bloody internecine tensions which Mintoff’s politics had unleashed by commission and omission, including sadly a number of politically-related deaths and various cases of police torture, and with Malta on the brink, it was Mintoff himself who helped find a way out in 1986 by ensuring that the most elementary democratic principle would henceforth prevail: that the party obtaining a majority of first preference votes in a general election should be the one to govern the country, thus avoiding a repeat of the “perverse result” of 1981.
Mintoff’s closest competitor for longevity in office is Eddie Fenech Adami, who led the island from 1987 to 1996, nine years, and then again from 1998 until he was made President some six years later, having helped to more or less normalise and democratise it in a generally post-Mintoffian, Europeanising direction, although legacies from the past lingered on as, for example, in the question of property and ownership rights, leases and rents.
Aided and abetted by Malta’s “public broadcasting service” and local newspapers, for Mintoff now to strut into some kind of a final if fictitious electoral fling as the electoral nominations opened and closed, is not quite the stuff of legend either.
As I have shown in my biographies of Censu Tabone and Gorg Borg Olivier and in other books and journals locally and overseas, the problem with Mintoff’s politics, however charismatic and even dramatic they were or seemed, lay mainly in his crudely over-bearing manner of dealing, an often erratic sense of direction liable to fits and starts, and a sustained propensity to close an eye to the repression and suppression of critics or adversaries. Ironically, even to make formal use of the word “Malta” and of any derivative from it, without superior permission, was made illegal under his rule. That, from a man who was all too ready, for example, officially and forcefully to rehabilitate Manwel Dimech (1860-1921) after a chat I had with him at party HQs in June 1971, followed by my first Dimech books. Mintoff acknowledged what a left-wing nationalist and patriot he had been, not an anarchist, and how he had suffered for it especially at the hands of the Roman Catholic ecclesiastical hierarchy, of which Mintoff too (in a way like Strickland before him) had had a taste.
Comparisons are odious. In a posthumous historical assessment, Adenauer, for example, was praised for his congenial relations with other statesmen including de Gaulle, characterised by open and undisguised warmth; he was found to have been a sober man of great sensibility who despised wishful thinking; an unpretentious and disciplined family man; and so on. Post-war Germany, like De Gasperi’s Italy, had much to account for in a newly-developing world order, whereas in Malta you had a onetime fortress colony trying to emerge with difficulty from the throes of dependence and obscurantism.
The problem was that, as I once put it: “colonialism was not just a question of the native versus the foreigner: on the contrary, it seriously affected the attitude of Maltese towards fellow Maltese.”
Ai posteri l’ardua sentenza.