How neutral Switzerland saw Maltese neutrality in 1979: "Mr Mintoff has been anxious that his country should be recognized as belonging to the Third World."

Muammar Gaddafi and Dom Mintoff at the Auberge de Castille on 31 March 1979, celebrating the closure of Britain's military base in Malta.

This is something else you really must read. The comment about non-alignment was made in the context of the Cold War division between the USSR and its allies and the West. It looks even more absurd today with Malta having been left defenceless against attack by Gaddafi’s Libya.

The Sunday Times (Malta), April 15, 1979, page 32

LIBYAN CONNECTION RISKY FOR DEMOCRACY IN MALTA – A SWISS VIEW

BERNE – “Britain would have wished to retain its base in Malta only if this was totally in accordance with the wishes of the island’s government. In the case of the present Labour Prime Minister, Mr Dom Mintoff, this was not the case,” according to Swiss Press Review and News Report, the Swiss independent weekly press service.

Mr Mintoff, the Swiss agency report adds, “has been anxious that his country should be recognized as belonging to the Third World. In order to achieve this, he has had to bring about a status for his country of neutrality – in the sense of non-alignment – and this meant the avoidance of a military link with a Western Alliance.”

It is one of the ironies of the modern versions of non-alignment, comments the Swiss agency, that “military alliances do not need to be eschewed altogether. For the bloc of neutral nations has a built-in slant towards the Communist bloc.”

Many of the members of the Third World, the Swiss agency report goes on, “are dictatorships of one kind or another and a number of them – Cuba, for example – are unashamed members of the Soviet bloc. So you can be non-aligned and a military friend of the Soviet Union, but you cannot be non-aligned and remain a military friend of the West. Unfair and unreasonable as this is, it has to be treated as a fact”.

Malta under the present government has recognized this, the Swiss agency goes on. “Its neutrality is not armed neutrality on the Swiss model – with its emphasis on national independence – but neutrality based on an alliance with a member of the Third World.”

The member of the Third World, chosen by the present Malta Government, is “near neighbour Gaddafi’s Libya”, states the Swiss Report, which goes on to say: “There is no doubt that the Libyan dictator has been very pleased about this close connection with a European country and he has pushed it much further than Mr Mintoff has wanted it to go. For instance, the Maltese Prime Minister could have done without Gaddafi’s physical presence to emphasize the new order of things as HMS London sailed out of Valletta harbour and the Union Jack went down forever. But the fact that Malta had to submit to this treatment shows in itself that some measure of independence has already been forfeited”.

The Swiss report remarks that this was not the sort of neutrality explained in the Malta Labour Party’s electoral manifesto and pursued by the party in Government. The plan, the Swiss report goes on, was to forge an alliance with “France, Italy and Algeria, as well as Libya”, but “only Colonel Gaddafi with his hegemonistic pretensions – shown in many aspects of his foreign policy – accepted the offer and, as we have seen, with more alacrity than Mr Mintoff would have liked”.

“Is Malta, in these circumstances safe for democracy”, asks the Swiss agency report. Malta remains, it adds, one of the few democracies in the Third World “judged by the touchstone that a general election might topple the government and replace it with a new one”.

But the Swiss report, while considering the Libyan connection as one which makes sense economically, states that the connection is, politically, “an unworthy and dangerous one for a free country”.

The Libyan leader, Colonel Gaddafi, the Swiss report concludes, “has learned much from his enthusiastic friendship with the Soviet Union, and if Malta shows signs of wishing to recover its independence, Gaddafi would have no difficulty in working out a Mediterranean version of the Brezhnev doctrine: fraternal aid to regimes where the survival of ‘socialism’ is threatened.