DOM MINTOFF AND THE END OF AN ERA IN MALTA

August 21, 2012

The iconic Maltese politician, Dom Mintoff, died yesterday at the age of 96. He was the first Socialist Prime Minister of Malta, serving from 1955 to 1958 (before Malta's independence from Britain in 1964) and then again, from 1971 to 1984. He was a legend in his own time because of his maverick, uncompromising, but somewhat tempered approach to politics. These, and like qualities, endowed him with formidable charisma, as well as powerful enemies; prime amongst them: the Catholic Church. As a child I remember stumbling over a plot in the Malta's monumental Addolorata Cemetery which contained the remains of those who had defied the Church's instructions and voted for Mr Mintoff in the 1960s. The assumption was they they would have been condemned to eternal damnation... The irony is that Dom Mintoff had contemplated becoming a priest himself and had spent some time in the St. Stanislaus Kostka Seminary before choosing to study Architecture and Engineering at the universities of Malta and Oxford. He then move into politics and founded the Malta Labour Party.

Dom Mintoff: third row up and third from the right.

He certainly did knock the authority of the Catholic Church in Malta down a peg or two, but they were not his only targets. He severed ties with NATO and in 1979 he closed all British military basis on the Island, having already distanced himself from Britain by declaring the archipelago a republic on 13 December 1974. Despite the loss of revenue from these sources, he made alliances with other countries such as China and Libya and therefore still managed to introduce programmes of social reforms that significantly improved the welfare of the less privileged in Malta and Gozo.

In some ways Dom Mintoff embodied the modern colonial and post colonial spirit of a dying age. Much of Malta, such as Sliema, has been wrecked by greedy developers; it is barely the same place. But it is not yet too late to save the symbiosis between the past and the present and there are still many gems to be found. But drinking our gin and tonics on the veranda, with the Redifusion whispering Beatles songs in the background and mustachioed brigadiers speculating on Mintoff's next bit of folly, is well and truly gone.

"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." L. P. Hartley.