Letters | Sunday, 05 April 2009

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Use and abuse of the veto

The debate on the tactics that Malta should use within the EU to obtain what it wants by way of meeting the problem of illegal migration, is echoing past tactics used by Dom Mintoff in the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, the CSCE. Journalists, opinion writers, cartoonists and politicians use the term “Helsinki” instead of “CSCE”, thus distorting the full negative impact of those tactics. Lest I be accused of being selective in my criticism, I have now to include my friends Minister Carm Mifsud Bonnic1 (22 March) and the cartoonist in The Times (23 March).
Mintoff exercised his veto, or to be precise, denied his consensus to the final document agreed to by all the other participating states in the CSCE, in Helsinki (1973), Geneva (1975), Belgrade (1978) and Madrid (1983). The most notorious occasion was the 53-day delay in the conclusion of the Madrid meeting. The next was the Geneva session where the Helsinki Final Act was drawn up. However, the meeting which gave the loose but inaccurate label “Helsinki” to Mintoff’s intransigent tactics, was the first, that in Helsinki in 1973. On each of these three occasions the threat of Malta being excluded from the CSCE was present. That this did not come about was not because Malta finally obtained what it wanted, but because Mintoff had to give in.
The most incisive, and negative, comment against Mintoff’s tactics came from Lazar Mojsov, the foreign minister of friendly non-aligned Yugoslavia, at the end of the Madrid meeting. In his concluding statement Mojsov declared that the witholding of the concensus (by Malta) had been an abuse of the consensus provision, which was meant to protect a nation’s security interests, and not for a nation to try to impose its demands on the other participating states.
For those too young to remember those days, or older ones with short or selective memories, I would point out that, next to Mintoff himself, I am the person who has dealt most closely, and consistenly, with the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe.

Evarist Saliba
Swieqi

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