Gaddafi is dead; George Vella is free to talk

This is my column in The Malta Independent today.

I find it hard to keep up with George Vella’s various changes of tune.

The man who would be our foreign minister in a little over a year probably can’t keep up himself.

He barely manages to keep from gritting his teeth when talking about anything to do with the European Union, and avoids the subject as far as he can – eurozone crisis and all – but after being one of his party’s most passionate opponents of EU membership, he is now expected to speak on its behalf with a carefully draped EU flag behind him.

When he was last foreign minister, in Alfred Sant’s cabinet, his very first act was to hop on a plane along with his boss and formally withdraw Malta from the Partnership for Peace.

They didn’t need to go there in person, of course; they could have written a letter or sent a dispatch via an ambassador.

But Sant is a playwright and (appalling) novelist before he is a politician, and he had to heighten the drama after making Our Maltese Youths Returning Home to Their Mothers in Body-Bags one of the main planks of his electoral campaign.

Now George Vella has announced that Labour will not pull Malta out of Partnership for Peace when, not if, it is elected to government.

You would think he would have the decency to explain his change of heart, but there was no such explanation. Perhaps it’s because he is no longer working for Alfred Sant.

Perhaps it’s because his party’s Libyan friends are six feet under. Perhaps it’s because he has had one of those infrequent Damascene moments.

Whatever it is, he and his party clearly don’t think the public deserves an explanation, just as the public doesn’t deserve to be told what Labour’s policies are.

It is extraordinary how free George Vella and the Labour Party feel now that Muammar Gaddafi is dead and his people are scattered. Vella announced today that he thinks it’s time we discussed the neutrality clause in the Constitution “in the light of current realities”, while still leaving it where it is.

You would be forgiven for asking why he has waited the 22 years since the fall of communism in 1989 to bring this up, while calling it ‘current’. That’s because you, me and most sensible people think ‘neutral’ in the context of the Cold War. But that’s not what George Vella and his Labour Party think. T

he ‘current realities’ here are those in Libya, which is precisely why he has called them current. The fall of communism more than two decades ago made no difference to the Labour Party’s take on neutrality for Malta. It is only the death of Muammar Gaddafi and the end of his regime which has done that.

You might think this strange. Why would events in Libya affect Malta’s view of its neutrality when the fall of the Berlin wall and the disintegration of the Iron Curtain did not? The cold, hard answer is that the only reason we have that clause in our Constitution is because of Muammar Gaddafi.

He bought it.

Boiled down to their essence, the facts are as follows.

The British government’s response to Mintoff’s demands in 1978 for more rent for its military base here was to announce that it would not be renewing its contract on 31 March 1979, when the lease was up. The pull-out meant major job losses when unemployment was high already and, worse than this, a naval dockyard with no naval ships to service.

Not wanting to lose face or admit to his supporters that the British had raised two fingers to his request for more rent and decided that they didn’t want the Malta base that much, Mintoff packaged this disaster as a great victory and sold it as Jum il-Helsien, making the rash promise that the dockyard would not be closed down.

Muammar Gaddafi, who had good reasons to want the closure of the British military base a couple of hundred miles away from his stronghold, held a carrot out to Mintoff: that he would help bankroll Malta to make up for the losses suffered when the British went off.

And that’s what he did. He helped bankroll Malta. He gave Mintoff’s government hard cash and he directed Libyan businesses to open up in Malta, which is how we came to have so many Libyan companies here post 1979. In return, he demanded that Malta declare itself neutral, but the Maltese Constitution cannot be amended without a two-thirds vote in parliament.

There was no way Mintoff was going to get the consent of the Opposition.

Three years later, in the aftermath of the 1981 general election, when the Nationalist Party won the highest number of votes but the Labour Party got to govern because the perverse result gave it the highest number of seats, Mintoff got his chance.

The Nationalist Party demanded amendments to the electoral law, so that the party with the highest number of votes would also have the highest number of seats in the house. Mintoff consented to this but only on condition that the Nationalist Party agreed to vote to amend the Constitution and make Malta neutral.

And so a deal was struck, and Malta became neutral to keep Muammar Gaddafi happy.

Now that he is dead and buried, these pacts with the devil – and here I do not refer only to Mintoff’s pact with Gaddafi but also to the Nationalist Party’s pact with Mintoff – are deemed to be irrelevant and redundant, by George Vella at least.

It is depressing to think that we have had to be neutral for 22 years beyond the end of the Cold War – ironically, at a meeting held in Malta between Bush and Gorbachov – for no reason other than to keep Muammar Gaddafi in check.