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Dom Mintoff
maltatoday, TUESDAY, 21 AUGUST 2012
Death of a pa FEW politicians have succeeded
Loved and derided WHETHER we liked him or not, we cannot dismiss the fact that we were in some ways a direct product of Dom Mintoff. Our education system, the opportunities we experienced were all dependent on his whims and policies. He was loved and derided by many. His politics was not only divisive and confrontational but very much based on the premise that things needed to change. Yet it was this confrontational streak in his character that catalyzed change and reactions from his staunchest adversaries. He was a reformer who somehow lost the plot in later years, he will be remembered for his massive reforms and for his aggressive reactions to his opponents. He was unrepentant over many of his decisions namely the nationalizations of banks and other entities, but he was also the father of initiatives that modeled modern Malta. He challenged the Church and the establishment but he allowed mediocrity to develop and cronies to surround him and his party. He stood up to the British and professed the meaning of being Maltese. Yet on the other hand he ignored the writing on the wall and treated strata of Maltese society with derision. Nonetheless he will be remembered for his reform in social welfare and of eradicating poverty and his roadmap to Republican Malta. It will take time before anyone can objectively assess the Mintoff years. It will take time before we can accept an honest appraisal of his long years as one of Malta’s most incisive political leaders. His oratory and wit was often outmatched. He shielded his intellect under a comic appearance, but this was often meant to demean his adversaries. His prowess and macho character fuelled many of his followers who reveled at the ruthlessness of their political leader. In the last years of his life he contributed to bringing down his own government, he became a darling for the Nationalists. Yesterday he was praised by about everyone even by the same party that had accused him of being a traitor. Yet there is no doubt that he was the father and soul of the Labour party. He was also their nemesis in 1998. Until his late eighties he could still muster a conversation with his admirers about international politics. In the next days, we should as is the norm in this culture of ours experience an outpouring of grief and adulation for the man who dominated Maltese politics for over 50 years. When the dust settles, the time will come when we will write history as it really was. Yet on one aspect we may wish to agree, that he was patriarch of Maltese politics.
in embodying so many instant contradictions as Dom Mintoff (19162012). As much adored as abhorred, feared as revered, Dom Mintoff remains arguably the most divisive yet iconic figure ever to have emerged from Malta’s traditionally confrontational political landscape – a landscape he himself helped to shape, for better or for worse, over a political career spanning almost 70 years. He died yesterday the 20 August, a few days after being admitted to hospital. As Prime Minister between 1955 and 1958, and then again between 1971 and 1984, Dom Mintoff walked a tightrope between statesman and a pariah, liberator and autocrat, an enlightened (Fabian) socialist and Malta’s own version of his personal friend, Robert Mugabe. Architect of the Maltese Republic and a self-styled ‘professor of democracy’, Mintoff’s sweeping reforms But his vision of modernity was ultimately overshadowed by his proverbial parsimony, leaving Malta both ‘richer’ and ‘poorer’ for his own particular brand of Socialism: richer, in that Mintoff’s far-reaching social reforms elevated the standard of living of a previously impoverished and barefoot working class; poorer, because the same Mintoff’s distrust of technology and quasipathological caution in spending public money starved the country of a number of key infrastructural developments. On an international level, Dom Mintoff remains arguably Malta’s best known export: occasionally crossing the line several times by courting dictators like North Korea’s Kim Il Sung and Romania’s Nikolai Ceaucescu, while earning a certain notoriety for his brinkmanship in dealing with a Western world pitted against the eastern bloc at the height of the Cold War. On the domestic front, he was all too often accused of harbouring dictatorial tendencies of his own – manifesting themselves in the excesses of overzealous ‘Mintoffjani’ thugs, as emblemized by the attacks on the Opposition leader’s Birkirkara home, as well as the Times building in Valletta, in October 1979. Ultimately, however, Mintoff always sought legitimacy from the ballot box… although when even that failed him in 1981, he was visibly stung but still managed to hang onto the seat of government for six years. And ironically, it was Mintoff the statesman who first envisioned Malta’s future as a neutral member in the European Union, when proposing his vision for Malta as a ‘Switzerland in the Mediterranean’ in an article entitled A New Plan for Malta, penned for the New Statesman in 1959. Even his plan to integrate Malta with Great Britain was animated by a desire to make Malta a part of continental Europe. Perhaps, it was his attempt to undo the country’s insularity with the stroke of a pen. In the same reformist zeal, it was Mintoff who modernized the country by introducing civil marriage and decriminalising homosexuality – two measures opposed by the Church and the Nationalist Party in opposition – in the early 1970s. His 1971 electoral manifesto was full of enlightened proposals such as the pledge to introduce an Ombudsman and to give citizens the right of petition the European Court of Justice: two promises he completely ignored after winning power. He
also modernized the country’s social structures, giving dignity to the working-class and contributing to the very social mobility which would ultimately undo his hegemony over society a decade later. Tragically, it was Mintoff the autocrat who prevailed after 1971 and even more so after 1976: ushering in a period of turbulence characterized by political violence, arbitrary policing and human rights violations. It was Mintoff, too, who crystallized the country’s endemic polarisation the country through his reverberating battlecry, “whoever is not with us is against us.” Despite his pretensions of being Malta’s liberator he was often accused of exploiting the worse aspects of the Maltese psyche for his own political ends. Anthropologist Jeremy Boissevain noted that Mintoff behaved “like the traditional Maltese father – aloof, mainly harsh and looked after his own. The authoritarian figure was familiar to all Maltese. Most of them had grown up in and formed part of families dominated by such fathers.” And yet, these same characteristics arguably stood him in good stead in his various negotiations with the British colonial administration, at a time when authoritarianism was perhaps necessary to buttress the relative weakness of the local (and limited) government. At the other end of the pendulum, the same Dom Mintoff was hailed as “saviour” by those who felt they owed him their entire livelihood, their homes and jobs. These were to become his tribal followers, and in time – arguably the most enduring myth of Mintoff’s questionable legacy - they came to believe that the State owes them and their children a living. It was Mintoff, too, who succeeded in alienating the middle class and even the progressive intelligentsia, which elsewhere in Europe was gravitating leftwards, provoking them to unite against him under the unlikely banner of ‘Xoghol, Gustixxja, Liberta’”. Instead of a socialist intelligentsia dominating the arts and national culture, Malta was regaled with ‘run, rabbit, run’ vulgarity: the enduring image of the national broadcaster’s subservience to the State, marking the pinnacle of cultural depravity. Unable to withstand almost any form of resistance, Mintoff closed the Faculty of Arts altogether, supposedly the hotbed of free and critical thought. Rather than attracting intellectuals, he stood accused of allowing his party to slide towards mediocrity: a mediocrity epitomized by a slavish adulation of the leader he himself actively encouraged. Elsewhere, Mintoff’s schizophrenia between liberal Europe and Maltese autarky was immortalized in his clash with eminent sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf, whom he invited to become chairman of the Commission of the Royal University of Malta shortly after his election in 1971. But Dahrendorf soon fell out with Mintoff, denouncing the workersstudents’ scheme as one producing “either unhappy workers or underqualified students, or both.” Ironically it was Mintoff’s authoritarian streak which paved the way for Eddie Fenech Adami’s broad church. Despite courting a clique of big businessmen and speculators, in his speeches Mintoff emphasised his party’s appeal to the working class. Just a year before Fenech Adami’s investiture, Mintoff underlined the exclusive working-class identity of his party. “Everywhere he goes,
On an international level, Dom Mintoff remains arguably Malta’s best known export