Your coverage of the relations between Malta and Libya (29 April) was quite extensive and illuminating, especially for the younger generation, but it may have, inadverently, left a few misleading ideas.
The impression may be gained that relations between Malta and Libya assumed significance only after Dom Mintoff and Muammar Gaddafi came to power. This is not so. Diplomatic relations between countries are established by mutual consent, and the implication that in our case this was a Libyan initiative, which Malta reciprocated years later, is wrong. The prominence that Malta-Libya relations assumed, for better or for worse, during the Mintoff-Gaddafi period, has unfairly robbed the Borg Olivier government of the credit that Libya was among the first four new diplomatic posts created after independence. These were in New York to the United Nations, Washington (with the same ambassador), Rome and Tripoli. The delay in opening the embassy in Tripoli was only a question of logistics resulting from a long process of selection and training of a nucleus diplomatic staff. Libya, which already had a diplomatic corps, acted faster.
Again, trade with Libya amounted to no less than 10% by the time that Gaddafi came to power, and Maltese were already working there in significant numbers. Ambassador Doublesin’s contribution confirms this. The abolition of visas for Libyans who wanted to spend a holiday in Malta was a decsion by the Borg Olivier government in the time of King Idris.
Borg Olivier was one of the first to recognise the government in Libya set up after the 1969 September revolution. Incidentally, the Green Book came into existence several years after the revolution, and cannot be said to have inspired it.
The local opposition to Mintoff in the electoral campaign of 1971 was not based on his attitude to Libya, but on the fact that he was a socialist with a Fabian background, and the groundless fear among some, that he was also a communist. The remarks about Malta being historically a bulwark of Christianity has to be seen against the Cold-War background, and not in relation to Islam. This fear was also shared by western countries, and the fact that Gaddafi insisted that Malta’s military facilies were not to be put at the disposal of the Soviet Union may indicate that he also had his doubts on this point. It should be noted that NATO did not just close its headqurters in Malta. Mintoff ordered it to do so. Incidentally, it was not Britain that finally accepted to dish out the extra money to retain the base till 1979, but a few of its NATO allies.
The involvement of the strongly augmented British miltary base in Malta in the 1956 Suez crises, was evident to everyone, and Mintoff claims that he warned Nasser of the forces build-up. In the six-day war of 1967, when Malta was independent, there was no Malta involvement.
The Libyan action to stop drilling for oil by Malta in disputed waters did not cause an outrage among the populance only. Mintoff called Libya’s action as worse than that of an enemy. The drilling stopped when the Italian driller Saipem II found no support from the Italian government, and Texaco, which had engaged it, found no support from the USA Sixth Fleet (as suggested by Malta), while the crew of the small and inadequate Maltese patrol boat that finally made it to the area, was too exhausted and ill-equipped to offer any protection. In fact the patrol boat had to be protected from the swell by the Libyan submarine.
Local commentators seem adamant to ignore the reason behind the clashes in the Gulf of Sirte between Libya and the USA, to the detriment of Malta’s interests in its Exclusive Economic Zone. Libya claims that this gulf is part of its internal waters, a claim that has been formally rejected by Malta in Mintoff’s time, and by the whole world. The USA went further and defied this claim, as it had every right to do according to international law, by sailing in the gulf and responding to the military challenge it faced.
The account of the shooting in Malta of Fathi Shqaqi by Israeli agents, which led to a noisy protest demonstartion in front of the Embassy of Malta in Tripoli, omits the most significant element. It does not mention that Shqaqi, the leader of a terrorist group, had entered Malta from Libya on a Libyan passport bearing a false name.
The Voice of the Mediterranean was created under the Fenech Adami administration to replace a similar joint with Algeria, in which the latter had lost interest, and to fulfill one of a number of unfulfilled agreements between Malta and Libya under the Mintoff administartion.
The views by Minister John Dalli on ways to develop stronger economic links with Libya should be heeded.
Evarist Saliba
Former head of embassy to Tripoli
Tal-Ibragg
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