When Bush And Gorbachev breached our neutrality clause

Malta Independent Sunday, 13 December 2009, 00:00 Last update: about 14 years ago

How nice it is to reach the point where you can look back at the fairly recent past and remember it with a mixture of amusement and relief, rather than the despairing disbelief you experienced then. And you ask yourself: did that really happen? And how did we live like that? How did we end up with such crackpot leaders and who in heaven’s name elected them?

With the last, it’s best not to look too closely for answers, because they might turn out to be friends, neighbours and colleagues who were carried away on the sudden transport of encroaching lunacy. I’m talking about the people who voted for Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici to become Prime Minister in 1992, of course. They saw it as supporting Labour, and it didn’t matter to them one jot that doing this would give us that strange man as Prime Minister, at a time when Malta was really on a roll.

I thought about this when I read Eddie Fenech Adami’s circumspect remarks to mark the 20th anniversary two weeks ago of the Bush-Gorbachev summit in Malta. It was a huge thing for our country – well, you don’t need me to tell you that, or to spell out why – but when Prime Minister Fenech Adami went to Parliament in November 1989 to announce that the Heads of State of the Soviet Union and the United States of America were to meet in Malta with a view to ending the Cold War, he met with the predictable small-minded carping of his opposite number on the Labour benches. It was the equivalent, in domestic terms, of being given a surprise gift of a valuable credenza from a friend you didn’t know you had and telling the donor that you don’t want it because it means you’ll have to move some furniture around at home to create space for it, and you can do without that sort of inconvenience.

“Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici at first said that he agreed,” Fenech Adami told The Sunday Times, “but soon after he began making statements that this could prejudice Malta, particularly in terms of neutrality, because it meant that military vessels would have to enter our waters. He insisted they had to assure us there were no nuclear arms on board and this led to rumours about demonstrations being held when the summit took place.”

Because of the Leader of the Opposition’s public agitation, the United States national security adviser rang the Prime Minister and said that the President of the United States was now reluctant to visit, as he anticipated hostile demonstrations. The Prime Minister reassured him that there would be no hostile demonstrations anywhere that Bush and Gorbachev met in Malta.

So perhaps it was fortunate after all that the meeting took place on board a ship reasonably far out to sea and in a fearsome storm. I imagine this would have discouraged the brave militants at Malta Dry Docks somewhat. Towing a client’s ship called the Copper Mountain across the mouth of Grand Harbour to block the path of – what was it now? HMS Brazen – is one thing, especially if you’re doing it during working hours while the taxpayer foots the bill. Ah, but commandeering a convoy of small vessels and taking them out in a storm to protest like Greenpeace beneath the summit ship and risk drowning, that’s too much stress.

I’m glad Fenech Adami brought that one up. It served to highlight the craziness of the times we lived in: a former and would-be-again Prime Minister demanding that Malta forgoes hosting one of the most significant summits in history to avoid breaching the neutrality clause in the Constitution. And that is quite apart from the fact that, clearly, nobody bothered to tell him that you couldn’t possibly be more neutral than by hosting together both the leaders of the United States and the Soviet Union and letting them get on with dismantling communism. Are we to conclude that Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici and the Labour Party wished not to have communism dismantled, that they enjoyed the Cold War and liked Dom Mintoff’s ‘Europe of Cain and Abel’?

It is quite startling to remember, too, that the Labour Party was so out of touch with people’s sentiments – even those of its own people – that it failed to understand what even its supporters had grasped: that anything which hastens the end of communism and the stand-off between the United States and the Soviet Union, a stand-off that imperilled us all at certain points, could only be a good thing. That is why Bush and Gorbachev were given a hero’s welcome when they arrived in Malta, why people here were fraught with excitement, why they lined the streets to cheer the motorcades and thronged the square outside the Auberge de Castille to chant their support and applaud.

What the blanket-blank was the Labour Party thinking of at the time? And, more to the point, what were the people thinking who voted for that man again just over two years later? I still feel incredulous about that.