Malta hosted the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe annual summit this week, though it hardly noticed.
I am writing this on Thursday morning and the readers will be able to access its conclusions from Sunday, that is after it had been wrapped up.
But so far only two news items brought the fact that the conference was being held in Malta to the attention of the public: grumbles about logistics and a ban.
The conference was being held at the MFCC tent in Ta' Qali. Previous high level meetings had been held at MCC in Valletta but such is the geography of our capital city that all traffic in and out of Valletta was jammed for hours. Remember the CHOGM nightmare? Or when Yasser Arafat came to a Malta Euro-Med conference again at MCC?
For this year's conference schools and businesses in the Ta' Qali area were told to stay closed - a logistical necessity keeping the road from Ghajn Tuffieha where many of the delegates were presumably staying to Ta' Qali open.
The second mention of the conference in Malta in the media centred around a news item in the past hours that said that Malta had withdrawn permission for the spokesperson of Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to enter Malta.
This was the first time that Lavrov (Russia's longest serving Foreign Minister since Tsarist times) has entered a European Union country since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The last time he entered a European Union country was Sweden, before the invasion.
Significantly, the Ukrainian Foreign Minister, Andriy Sibiga was also due in Malta and the two could have met. Things are on the move in Kyiv what with Trump's incoming presidency and with Ukraine seemingly running out of force due to repeated setbacks on the field.
Also in Malta for the conference was the US Under Secretary of State Anthony Blinken in his last official conference before the end of the Biden presidency.
It seems that Malta was obliged to block the entry of Lavrov's spokesperson due to vetoes by the three Baltic states. The rules of OSCE insist on unanimity in any decision that is taken and so a negative vote by three countries would have been decisive.
In a way, this was a cleverly planned revenge because Russia had been holding up progress by its repeated vetoes.
On the other hand Russia and specifically Lavrov have been extremely negative about the organization in the past months calling OSCE an 'appendage' of the EU and of Nato.
Yet, with the EU's two leading member states at sixes and sevens because of the collapse of the German government and now also of the French one, things in the OECD seem to have finally been unblocked with an agreement on a new secretary general (a Turk) and on the venue of next year's conference, Helsinki on the 50th anniversary of the first one.
Otherwise the conference was expected to conclude with the usual batch of wooly-worded, soporific, conclusions that do not mean anything.
Which, together with the sensation Malta will only be responsible for the catering, brings many Maltese to regret and miss those days in 1976 when it held up the OSCE summit in Helsinki with Dom Mintoff holding up all Europe and angering both Kissinger and Gromyko, Lavrov's predecessor, insisting there can be no security in Europe unless there was peace in the Middle East.
And here we are with yet another war in the Middle East while Europe limps on, people risk their lives to enter it, people in Georgia battle police to become a member state and other Balkan countries queue to enter.
Never have Mintoff's brash words appeared so hollow and worthless. He risked blocking Europe and giving Malta a bad name and all this for countries that could not be counted upon to move towards peace and progress.
We still celebrate Freedom Day when we kicked out the British and for a time almost became a Libyan protectorate and not when we joined the EU and thus became really free.
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