Please note that I did not mention marijuana in my list – that was being grown on the roundabouts full of weeds.

The Omagh bomb that killed a policemen late last week was made with Semtex from that original consignment that Libya delivered to the IRA.

The Semtex is still around, Gaddafi is still in power and Malta still treads carefully around the wrong people. That is why stories like these are still relevant.

“Nuauseum”. Dan il-KRETIN huwa professor? Makes me want to tie a green band with a slogan on my forehead and blow myself up in the quadrangle.

Here’s the article. It was in the New York Times:
There Sits a State Terrorist

http://www.nytimes.com/1984/11/20/opinion/there-sits-a-state-terrorist.html?scp=193&sq=malta&st=nyt

Colonel Qaddafi of Libya has taught us a good deal in his bungled attempt to reach into Egypt to kill a political opponent. The going rate for murder among British and Maltese contractors is $250,000, plus $150,000 to the Egyptian locals for dirty work. The fee is payable on receipt, at the Libyan Embassy in Malta, of a clear snapshot of the dead victim. That evidence then becomes the basis for broadcast boasts that patriotic ”suicide squads” have eliminated yet another infidel or Zionist tool.

Very well said, Daphne. They all follow that pattern; first it’s Soho, then it’s Tripoli.

[Daphne – For crying out loud, Etil. Of course they did. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher organised the death through bombing of Muammar Gaddafi in 1986, when these arms shipments were being made. But the prime minister of the island where the arms cargoes were loaded tipped him off. Then, after the terrorism was taken up a notch two years later with the Lockerbie bombing, there were tough sanctions for years. That’s why Malta was the through-port for Libya. Please don’t tell me that you’ve forgotten all this. The sanctions were lifted after long negotiations which led to Gaddafi divesting himself of all his Weapons of Mass Destruction build-up in a supervised programme. This was the condition on which he was accepted into the international ‘fold’. It’s a good thing that was done, because imagine if he had WMD now. Gaddafi resented being made to shed his WMD and blamed Musa Kusa for persuading him to do so, hence the deteriorating relationship between them over the last few years.]

No doubt we are going to read more about these articles that are meant to discredit Malta – and anyway who in the first place supplied the arms to Gaddafi ? Why do you always have to belittle and come to certain conclusions when people who are trying to reason out things, except of course if they agree with you.

[Daphne – Because my patience wears completely thin in situations like this, Etil. I do not do blind loyalty and patriotism and all that Maltese version of the Little Englander and US redneck stuff. It is not newspaper articles which ‘discredit Malta’ because nobody has any interest in ‘discrediting Malta’. It’s not as though editors and newsrooms sit down for a morning debriefing and say ‘What do we have today that can discredit that island – you know, what’s it called – ah yes, Malta.’ It’s Malta’s own behaviour over the years that has severely discredited us – yes, us, because Malta is so tiny that all Maltese come under suspicion when anything is wrong – over the decades. I was very well aware of this while it was happening from the late 1970s onwards and now, reading back through these newspaper stories, I am more than shocked when everything falls into place through hindsight. Malta was literally used and abused by Gaddafi’s regime and the Maltese government let him do it in exchange for money and cheap oil. So quite frankly, the ‘qahba ta’ Gaddafi’ moniker fits Malta. Do you remember those regular reports in The Times (Malta) of Libyan students at Ta’ Giorni found hanging in their quarters, and how we thought – “Goodness, these Libyans are really depressive and prone to suicide.” Well, now we know better, don’t we. The trouble is that people in Malta did not read the international press in the late 1970s and 1980s, and there was no internet. So only around 1% of the Maltese population, if that, knew the sort of coverage Malta was getting in the world’s top newspapers. There was one story in the New York Times or the Washington Post – I can’t remember and have no time to find out right now – which described in detail how those who assassinated Libyan dissidents were paid: they were asked to go to the Libyan embassy in Malta with a picture of the dead man and collect their cash.]

Let us not be hypocrites and call a spade a spade. The era of dictators is ending and one by one they will all get what they deserve. In conclusion I do hope that Gaddafi and his family leave Libya forever and maybe the Libyan people can find the peace and serenity they so rightly deserve.

The coast was not that tightly patrolled in 1985.How many sea worthy patrol boats did we have, for? But there was the possibility of such things to happen.

Smuggling in those years was the order of the day: video players, colour TV sets, pasta, melons, small arms, cigarettes; you name it.

[Daphne – That is exactly what I am saying, John. That smuggling was the order of the day, but we all knew that the smugglers were protected and that the smuggling was semi-official. Hence the famous story of Karmenu Vella and Johnny Dalli. Cargoes of arms would not have been loaded off Gozo unless the situation was considered relatively safe, and I don’t mean safe because there were insufficient patrol boats. The large yacht which picked up the cargo could have easily sailed into Libyan territorial waters to do it, or even all the way to Tripoli, which would have been no problem at all. But when the risks of loading off Gozo from a vessel coming in from Tripoli were calculated against the relatively small bother of sailing to Tripoli, the decision was taken to load off Gozo. That tells you they considered the risk to be negligible or nonexistent. Here you see the classic cynicism of a sociopath like Muammar Gaddafi, who probably delighted in embroiling Malta in arms transshipments for the IRA, whether Malta knew about it or not. I would say he derived more pleasure from doing it without Mintoff’s and Karmenu MB’s knowledge while smiling at them and treating them like his serfs. But I would be very, very surprised to learn that nobody in the Maltese government was aware of what was going on, and perhaps even taking a cut. The government of Malta at the time was entrenched in corruption and surrounded by criminals the likes of whom wouldn’t have shrunk away from supplying arms to terrorists, not when they didn’t shrink away from murdering an accountant and chucking his dismembered body into a well, for instance.]

That’s the point made in the introductory paragraph of the Telegraph article, isn’t it?

I meant 1985 not 1995

Simples.