The story of the week was veteran Maltese diplomat Evarist Saliba last Monday, repeating on what in the US would be called ‘national television’ during Bondiplus, the allegation made in his recently published autobiography: that a high PN official had told him that an American industrialist had told him that a CIA operative in Rome had told him that the CIA had helped Sant win the 1996 election. Quite an interesting chain exposing how what might have been simply a stupid brag was relayed to the people of Malta ten years after the event…
Dr Sant himself was reported to have dismissed the story immediately and summarily, saying he had no time for bullshit. I don’t blame him. With an election looming over the horizon, I am sure that he needs to dedicate his time to many issues and topics, all much more important than bovine excrement.
Yet there are many uncanny angles to this story, not the least of which was the fact that the Alfred Sant’s government elected with such acclaim in October 1996 was dead and buried within 22 months. In this case there is no mysterious whodunit. It was wily old Dom Mintoff who did it, single-handedly. The uncanny bit is that I am convinced that the real reason why Don Mintoff did it was his obsession that Alfred Sant is a US puppet. Strange as it may seem, I have had the opportunity to meet Dom Mintoff several times since his demolition of the Alfred Sant administration in 1998 and as everyone who has met and talked with Dom Mintoff knows, a short dialogue about anything somehow always ends up being a long monologue about everything. So, in this case, my conviction is not the result of a series of relays from one to another, detto del detto, as our lawyers would put it.
Alfred Sant got a degree (in management, not economics) from Harvard and is known to look at things American with a soft spot. That does not make him a puppet of the US, of course. But it is the sort of thing that starts off Mintoff’s suspicious mind wandering into the realm of supposition and fantasy. The Cottonera project, on which Mintoff ostensibly voted against his own party’s government, included an element of American investment in a proposal that incorporated a marina for big yachts – the sort of thing that makes Mr Mintoff’s fertile imagination go into high gear. The rest is history. Or is it?
There are also three other uncanny coincidences in which Dom Mintoff does not figure at all: the US government had been ‘pissed off’ with the Fenech Adami administration about the Ali Rezaq incident and, it would have preferred Malta to remain outside the EU, or so it was rumoured. Moreover, the MLP employed an American consultant – Phil Noble – to organise its electoral campaign. Whether Phil Noble was picked by Alfred Sant off his website on the internet or as a result of some ‘friend of friends’ recommendation, is a moot point.
Omar Mohammed Ali Rezaq was the only Palestinian militant survivor among the hijackers of Egyptair flight 648 in September 1984 that ended in a tragedy at Luqa airport. According to Lino Spiteri’s recently published reminiscences, on that occasion the members of the cabinet were called by the PM (Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici) to the control tower to deal with the hijacking of the passenger plane. Lino Spiteri writes: “We were told of discussions with the ambassadors to see whether any of their countries were willing to send help. This was one of the reasons for the presence of the ministers, because of the implications for Malta’s neutrality. … None of us wanted US forces to come near Malta.” The episode ended in a horror story after Egyptian commandoes stormed the plane and a veritable disaster ensued.
Ali Rezaq was tried in Malta and dealt with according to the laws of Malta at the time of the crime. These happened to be woefully inadequate to deal with that sort of hijacking incident and were, in fact, subsequently beefed up. But, as even Americans should know, criminal laws are not retroactive. To make matters worse, there was even an unnecessary controversy on when Ali Rezaq was to be released from prison as the Justice Minister, the late Joe Fenech, publicly disagreed with the Attorney-General on how the time remitted for good behaviour was to be calculated… as if a time-honoured way of doing it did not exist!
The US government naively interpreted these series of coincidences as the result of the existence of some strong anti-US, pro-Palestinian faction within the Fenech Adami administration. Matters got worse when the US made it known that they wanted to arrest Ali Rezaq and proceed with trying him again in the US courts for the same crime that he had already been tried in Malta. This unorthodox way of doing things precluded successful extradition proceedings, so the US just expected the Maltese government to hand over Ali Rezaq to them, flouting all principles of the rule of law. Eventually Ali Rezaq left Malta a free man, only to land in Lagos where the rule of law is subservient to US interests and where he was promptly arrested by American officials.
Admittedly, there was some bumbling from the Maltese side, but basically the Maltese government acted correctly in the face of US ire. Even though relations between the US and Maltese governments turned very cool as a result, I find it hard to believe that this incident led to a decision such that the CIA was ordered to help Alfred Sant become Prime Minister, as is now being alleged.
In any case, even if the Americans helped Alfred Sant’s 1996 electoral campaign, the CIA certainly did not stuff the ballot boxes and the election result reflected the way Maltese voters had marked their ballot papers. This was a real and serious democratic process, not some Presidential election in Florida!
The truth is that Alfred Sant was not elected Prime Minister in 1996 because he was abetted by the CIA, but because he successfully conned a substantial part of the electorate by promising things that he could not deliver. Anything else is a fib, that the PN might find to be quite convenient in the present circumstances.

micfal@maltanet.net