His letters to Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi are lessons in political history, possibly excerpts of the autobiography he is reputed to be writing. He tells José Manuel Barroso that US president George W. Bush has “stealthily” managed to curtail freedom of thought in Malta through EU membership. And he claims the Commissioner of Police has held him prisoner in his own home for the past three years for being a “danger to national security”.
These and other bold statements are what former Labour prime minister Dom Mintoff has been publishing since last October in a personal blog which is kept by his ‘honorary secretary’ Mario Borg. The letters, signed by Mintoff himself, contain the unmistakably crisp insights and recollections of the man who held sway over the Maltese islands for 16 years, but even the paranoia that seems to have taken over the recluse at The Olives, his Tarxien residence.
To Robert Mugabe, the Zimbabwean president, he presents himself as “Doctor Dominic Mintoff, Emeritus Prime Minister and Founder of the Republic of Malta. Held under surveillance by the CIA as directed by G.W. Bush”, a claim of forced imprisonment which he repeats throughout his letters in varying degrees. He tells Barroso that “little [had he] dreamt that suppression of information and freedom of thought would land me for the past three years into a prison on parole in my own house that had endangered my life several times and made it impossible for me to reach the ears of the Maltese people”. And he tells Gonzi that he is “held like a leper incommunicado in his water-infected home” and that the Commissioner of Police “has chosen to become the local head of intelligence in the service of NATO and CIA.”
So this is how the former Labour leader Dom Mintoff describes himself – a poignant picture of an elderly statesman kept under watch by international intelligence and law enforcement agencies.
What is more bizarre is his velvet treatment of the controversial Mugabe – a man notorious for his disregard for human rights, his violent campaign against homosexuals, a man accused of corruption, suppression of political opposition, mishandling of land reform, and according to the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, the architect of the continent’s worst economic performer. Indeed, in his letter dated 1 December, 2007, Mintoff asks Mugabe: “How can I help you and at the same time help Malta and the rest of humanity (India, China, Korea north and south, South Africa, the Emirates) where I have friends to whom I could introduce you if you do not already know them?
“… For a start it might help you to go to your meeting with sovereign states via Libya and seek the cooperation of the President of Libya to secure your personal safety. It might even be advantageous both to Zimbabwe and Libya if you and my friend President Gaddafi stopped in Malta and spoke to our people in the best way you may devise.”

Mugabe’s record ‘similar to mine’
Stranger still is Mintoff’s assertion that Mugabe’s “record is similar to mine”. Like him, Mugabe was a post-colonial leader, hailing from the left-wing spectrum of resistance, although Mintoff was a Fabian socialist, and Mugabe a communist.
Mintoff writes he met Mugabe in 1980 – the year of independence for Zimbabwe – when Britain’s prime minister Jim Callaghan asked Mintoff to mediate a closer cooperation between rivals Joshua Nkomo, the Zapu leader, and Mugabe. They are probably the peace negotiations which started in London a year before when Callaghan was still prime minister: the ones which deprived Mugabe of “the ultimate joy”, a military victory, resulting instead in a coalition government urged by Britain, with Nkomo, and integrating their two rival guerrilla armies into a new national army.
Mintoff writes that he met representatives from Mugabe’s Zanu-PF (Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front), and Zapu, twice at his Delimara retreat “after my customary bathe in Peter’s Pool”, coming to “an understanding” on a strategy on dealing with Ian Smith. Indeed, Mugabe and Nkomo had visited Malta and held talks at the Verdala Hotel in Rabat in 1980.
What that strategy is exactly is not made clear in his letter, but he mentions the word “isolation”. Mintoff suddenly rambles off on Smith, the Rhodesian white supremacist who handed power over to Mugabe in 1980, describing him as “courageous and incorruptible”, and writing that he died being interviewed by journalists in Harare, “while the same journalists were telling the ‘western media’ that Mugabe was a cruel autocrat suppressing human rights.”
What is historically known is that six months after independence in October 1980, Mugabe signed an agreement with the brutal communist dictatorship of North Korea, for assistance in training a new army brigade to deal with internal dissidents. 5 Brigade, as it came to be known, wore different uniforms, with distinctive red berets; it used different equipment, transport and weaponry. Codes and radios were incompatible with other units. It is likely that the same North Korean instructors that became known to the press some time later, had also been entrusted with the training of the Maltese government’s own Special Mobile Unit. Mugabe split from Nkomo in 1982, accusing him of staging a military coup.

Calling Brussels
Mintoff writes to Barroso, the European Commission president, on 14 June 2007, introducing himself as someone who wants to “establish a friendship for the mutual benefit of [his] country and with whatever is left of the former European Union.”
The gist of his letter is summed up in a few concluding lines towards the end, in a megalomaniacal claim that “there is nothing to stop me and Malta to join them” – referring to US Presidents George W. Bush and Jimmy Carter – in a mission for global peace, “by declaring that provided I am allowed freedom of thought and action there is nothing to stop me from contributing to the wisdom that comes through experience to the global prosperity in pursuit of happiness. There is everything to gain by the EU also changing course. Let us please do it together.”
His impression is that the EU is nothing more than a US satellite.
But his four-page letter to Barroso is a historical meandering. First he points out, rightly, the failure of Malta and the EU to ensure the survival of the dockyards. “These yards survived a similar threat in 1958 when Britain’s minister of defence, Churchill’s protégé Duncan Sandys, in order to conform with the quality of weapons of destruction by his allies France and Israel, shut down some British yards and included the Malta Dockyard.”
Referring to his first administration between 1955 and 1958, he describes his objectives for total independence as “high” given that the island was “totally dominated by a Catholic establishment relying entirely on the Vatican for its survival in [a] protestant fortress… our opponents in Britain called us the brave children of a ‘convent fortress’.”
His antipathy towards colonial rule is clearly outlined in the post-war years. As the Fabian socialist that he was, egged on by his British comrades he sought to turn “old Labour” into “a democratic socialist movement with the most liberal outlook and yet with the real interest of Maltese workers at heart”. He writes that political duty came before his private interests: “I did not have the time to survive economically (I had embarked on a private practice as an architect rebuilding the damaged dwellings of workers where these had not been literally razed to the ground), nor the case and wish to satisfy the ambition to sit in a Parliament with a so-called ‘Self-Government Constitution’ imposed by the British Emporer from Whitehall…”
“It was a Constitution that had elevated the privileges of the Catholic Establishment to the status of those of the Fortress: the security of the British Imperial Forces needed the reinforcement of the privileges of the local Catholic Clergy…”
Ironically, the blustering Mintoff takes issue with the lack of freedom of speech and inability to criticise the powers that be – something he failed to live up to in the libel suits he instituted against this very newspaper. “What was still one of the greatest handicaps was… the lack of freedom of speech which made criticism of the Church or Empire a criminal offence, and worst of all freedom of thought and information that made liable to prosecution even those citizens who dared to have in their possession the works of George Bernard Shaw.”
It is here that he turns to George W. Bush as having “stealthily managed to impose on Malta” a “lack of freedom of thought… because his interest coincided with those influential conservative members of the European Community who took the Island by storm, stomped her conservative elements into an enthusiastic and prompt support of a European Union that for economic reasons subordinated her political rights to those of her American conquerors.”
A few lines later, he claims Bush “will soon realise that my stand to get the American people change their course from the prevailing mode of crass old imperialism… to one of enlightened leadership that would still give the USA a prevailing role in the world’s destiny for many future generations.”
But his knowledge of US politics falters: “Unlike me – he is about two decades younger than me – he has still a potential longevity in which he can fulfil his mission as an American adherent of the newly-born Christian faith.” He claims that “there is nothing to stop him from choosing ex-President Carter” – a vehement Bush critic – “as a Christian ally”. And he also awards himself a place in this unlikely trio for global peace.

Lessons in history and politics
His most revealing comments are contained in two letters to Lawrence Gonzi, again suggesting a “way forward” to the prime minister whose premiership he describes as “your perversely stormy snatching of the helm as PM of our sun drenched Islands.”
In his letter dated 5 July 2007, he discusses immigration, oil exploration, disaster plans, US imperialism, moral decadence in Malta and the “generations of comparatively well-to-do lads and lasses falling by the wayside as suicidal drug addicts or condemned to a slow death by HIV infections… this malaise is endemic throughout all the nations of old and new Europe, and presents a gloomy prospect for the bravest amongst us.”
He then proposes to Gonzi that an international fact finding commission, amongst them formerly non-aligned champions like China, India, Algeria, Libya, but also Russia, the EU, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Australia and the USA “without the ill-starred war mongering George W. Bush”, be invited to “inquire what has stopped Malta’s institutions including its little army, its media, its banks etc. from persevering along the paths of peace.”
But his concluding paragraph carries a bizarre proviso: “But it is impossible to do this without first and immediately getting rid of the Commissioner of Police who instead of protecting civilians from being harmed by criminals has chosen to become the local head of intelligence from the service of NATO and CIA. Kindly let me know possibly by next Tuesday whether you agree.”

Respect for Borg Olivier
His longest letter to Gonzi, dated 3 October 2007 is even more revealing.
For example, Mintoff effectively documents his disdain for former rival Eddie Fenech Adami and instead reserves enormous respect for the PN predecessor Gorg Borg Olivier.
To him, Borg Olivier was “stealthily deprived of his leadership of the PN by the ‘no problem’ magician, the Hon. Dr Eddie Fenech Adami, who had scrounged a seat in Parliament by a bye-election. The anti-Giorgio bold move earned the Hon. Fenech Adami the leadership… and eventually the premiership. The Hon. Fenech Adami’s stunning cunning reached its climax four years ago when he managed to appoint himself President of the Republic.”
To Fenech Adami goes the blame for systematically slaying “our Nation’s young body politic in 1987”, while in the same breath he launches into a poetic extolling of the Republican Constitution for eliminating racial and religious discrimination, “and invigorated the live roots of our Christian faith. Christ was not king anymore: he was the Son of God and his crucifixion helped us to be the sons and daughters of the same Father who awaits us all in Heaven” – surely an unknown revelation of the anti-clerical leader’s faith in his twilight years.
He turns back to Fenech Adami for having used his “petty conspirators” to oust Borg Olivier and the “feudal roots” which he says were “intrinsically sound in a right-wing national (never nationalist) political party”. For him, Borg Olivier only ever gave his consent to colonial or Vatican dominance if he got some minimum of power sharing in return, and praises him for turning his back on erstwhile ally Herbert Ganado by calling for independence and joining “rebellious Labour against the combined forces of the British Raj led by Winston Churchill and Strickland House.”
“Deceit was never in Borg Olivier’s tactics or style. He always stated his political credo openly, and when the time was for him ripe (long enough to wear out his powerful opponents), he openly gave it flesh and blood.” It is an intimate observation that is consonant with Borg Olivier’s waiting, sometimes procrastinating, political style during Independence negotiations.
“Never was he influenced by personal aggrandisement or filthy lucre. He is, I believe, the only Colonial Prime Minister who ended his life in bankruptcy and without a British Knighthood.”
His detail on Borg Olivier’s ‘ousting’ is telling of his respect for the former Independence prime minister:
“Borg Olivier’s predicament was worse than mine… only a handful of his most faithful followers were aware that the old bright light had burnt out and a dim light carried by an almost unknown new corner called Fenech Adami was casting queer shadows on Malta’s shadow Cabinet,” referring to the events of 1979 in which he says Fenech Adami “heroically filled the gap to give time to his more political experienced colleagues” to decide whether he or anyone else “was worthy to wear the spotless mantle of the politically extinct and physically much alive Giorgio Borg Olivier.”
“It was therefore my duty to detect that a mastermind at political deception has stealthily crawled in our midst,” possibly referring to the new wave in the PN that was dead set against Labour’s non-alignment. “I did not. My remorse for making that mistake is not assuaged by the fact that no one of my colleagues of political advisors drew my attention to this mortal danger…”
“Partly due to my mistake, Fenech Adami succeeded in beating the able leaders of the various new currents contending for the soul of the Nationalist party.”
He then turns back on the attack against Fenech Adami for spurning Malta’s non-aligned policy for the “aura of a sudden world publicity” during the Gorbachev-Bush talks in Malta. “Our clever hero gave the Maltese electorate and the world-at-large the deceitful impression that in brokering this international venue he had convinced the President of the USA to give up his ambition for a PAX AMERICANA driven entirely by US imperialists and the CIA. Father Bush, we were led to believe, was willing to learn from his errors in Iran and Iraq and was ready to let a reformed United Nations be our collective social instrument for peace in this millennium.”
He berates both Nationalist and ‘LABOUR’ (always printed in capitals throughout his letters) for allowing “self-proclaimed modern innovators” for discontinuing his afforestation project. Turning temporarily to climate change, he mentions that Al Gore had spent “more time with me at l-Gharix in Delimara” than in meetings with government in his 36 hours here in 1990.
He reserves a diatribe for former PN minister Michael Falzon, the current Water Services Corporation chairman with whom Mintoff has been locked into a court battle over the suspension of his water service for a day (and in which he has claimed a breach of his fundamental human rights).
And he also reveals a close friendship with Josie Muscat. On the need of injecting Maltese Catholicism with “large doses of social justice”, he says “the corruption problem is one which my friends and I and Dr Josie Muscat’s centre-right political party are trying very hard to tackle”.
It seems to make sense: a contempt for innovation, his self-aggrandisement of his political legacy, his demand to take the stage with world leaders, and an insight into his willing listeners – Josie Muscat – the self-declared right-wing throwback.
He finally appeals to Gonzi to “urgently” respond to his correspondence, lest “we will assume that you are George W. Bush’s accomplices”.
And once again, the bizarre post scriptum, too telling of the condition of Mr Dom Mintoff:
“Your Commissioner of Police has held me prisoner in my own house by claiming that I am a danger to national security although it is taking him more than three years to prove it. Also the speed with which you have lately bolstered your tottering Nationalist Establishment has taken my breath away.”