China yes, Libya no

"These commies sure have an iron grip..."
And who knows? Perhaps we already do. After all, the sheer cheek some people have been displaying since Gaddafi’s downfall is quite literally out of this world.

As I write, NET News is on in the background, making the dramatic announcement that – according, please note, to “confidential CIA documents retrieved from government buildings in Tripoli” – the Labour Party had ‘close ties with the Gaddafi regime’ in the 1980s.

What? Really? Labour had close links with Gaddafi? You don’t say! Honestly, how on earth would we ever get by in this day and age, without USA’s Central Intelligence Agency to inform us of such earth shattering matters?

But if you ask me, what makes these ‘revelations’ in any way ‘revealing’ is the sheer selectivity of detail. For instance: in suitably shocked tones, the newscaster tells us that Gaddafi had bankrolled the Labour party before the 1987 election; and above all that Prime Minister Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici had turned down a US offer of military assistance during the 1985 Egyptair crisis, precisely because of his government’s ‘excellent relations’ with Gaddafi.

Well, I happen to remember that particular incident in graphic detail. Like pretty much everyone back then, I too found myself glued to the TV (mostly RAI)… and unlike some others I also followed the subsequent court case of Ali Rezaq, the only surviving hijacker; first in Malta, and later in the US.

I also vaguely remember a certain TV programme on the subject hosted by Georg Sapiano, featuring interviews with survivors, relatives of the victims, as well as with the lawyer representing Ali Rezaq at the time. And as I recall, Xarabank had a crack at it also.

The interesting thing in all this is that practically every single aspect of NET TV’s ‘revelations’ had already been extensively and exhaustively explored by all of the above. Some of the details were already well known while the plane was still smouldering on the runway. Of these, the most striking was KMB’s decision to disallow any US military involvement in rescue operations… which was widely reported in the international news at the time, and was even candidly admitted by KMB himself.

Exactly why it should suddenly resurface as a ‘shocking revelation’ all these years later is at best a mystery. An even bigger mystery, however, is why NET seized only on this detail, but not on the arguably much more damning factoid (equally well-known back in 1985) that the Egyptian crack commando unit that stormed the plane had been deprived of all access to their commander in chief, specifically on the grounds that he was American.

As a result, the commando unit launched its chaotic attack on the plane without any input from the military tactician who had drawn up the entire plan to begin with.  The consequences? Well, let’s just say it isn’t referred to as ‘the greatest hijacking disaster in world aviation history’ for nothing.

Nor is this the only detail to have been omitted in NET TV’s reinvention of events. It also overlooked entirely the public outcry in the USA when the surviving hijacker – Ali Rezaq – was suddenly and mysteriously released after serving only seven of his 25-year sentence… under a PN administration led by Eddie Fenech Adami.

Interestingly, The US reaction at the time was to accuse the PN government of the same shortcoming the PN now associates with Labour: i.e., taking controversial decisions to ingratiate itself with Gaddafi. The upshot was the approval by US Congress of House Resolution 118, which (among other things): “strongly condemns the release by the Government of Malta of convicted terrorist Mohammed Ali Rezaq”… “believes such action seriously undermines the efforts to foster good relations between Malta and the United States and undermines the international and United States efforts to discourage and deter international terrorism:… “urges the President to review the United States relationship with Malta, including foreign assistance and economic relations…”

The US government at the time made no secret of its suspicion that the reason for Rezaq’s release concerned Malta’s camaraderie with Libya. Here is how the New York Times reported the incident in July 1993: “Mr Rezaq, the lone survivor of three Palestinian hijackers, was convicted in Malta and sentenced to 25 years in prison. But he was released in February – in response to pressure from Libya, officials believe – and fled to Ghana…”

It seems, then, that while Libya could so easily pressure KMB to resist US intervention and mess up a vital military intervention – blackening Malta’s name in the process, and resulting in a truly horrendous massacre – Fenech Adami proved just as amenable to a little Libyan arm-twisting when his own time came to be tested.

So my question for NET News is this: why should we all now baulk at KMB’s glaring blunders of 25 years ago… but then, not even blink when similarly suspicious ‘mistakes’ were made by Eddie Fenech Adami, and continued to be made under Lawrence Gonzi? 

But there is something else. The day after this earth shattering ‘news’ report was aired, I received an email from the DOI about Foreign Minister Tonio Borg’s ongoing official visit to Beijing: informing us about the ‘excellent relations’ that exist between our two countries, and about how Borg discussed various topics with Chinese government officials (no specific details provided, but I assume that ‘human rights’ were not on the agenda).

You might remember Tonio Borg, by the way. He is the Maltese foreign minister who, as recently as September 2010, defended Gaddafi’s outrageous demands for €5 billion, in return for doing what he should have been doing all along anyway, and enforcing local and international law.

Most ordinary people would instantly recognise that demand for what it clearly was – i.e., blackmail – but not our Tonio. Oh no. As far as Tonio was concerned, this was Gaddafi being ‘reasonable’. And alongside other PN exponents such as Carm Mifsud Bonnici and MEP Simon Busuttil, he also defended the Gaddafi-Berlusconi deal involving an automatic ‘push-back’ policy regarding migrants.

In other words, Borg is the Foreign Minister who did (and continues to do) exactly what his party’s media now consistently bludgeon the Labour Party for having done in the 1980s: that is to say, curry favour with dictatorial regimes in return for nameless benefits which may or may not extend to party financing. (Who knows? After all, if there isn’t a law governing this thorny issue, it’s thanks to the resistance mounted by PN governments for over 20 years).

And oh, look: there is the same Tonio Borg on an official visit to the capital city of what is arguably the world’s largest active dictatorship… just the day after the PN reiterated its demands for ‘explanations’ over Labour’s relations with that other dictator, Gaddafi.

Out of curiosity: how do PN officials decide which brutal dictatorships are OK to do business with, and which ones are absolutely off limits? Reason I ask is because it’s not at all clear from their own behaviour. If ‘opening fire one’s own people’ is what it took for Simon Busuttil to finally decide that Gaddafi is now a monster… then what about the Tienanmen Square massacre of 1989? Why condemn one government for murdering its own people, but then publicly praise another which has also done exactly the same thing?

And besides: while we’re on the subject of things that happened 20 or 30 years ago… wasn’t it another Maltese politician (a certain ‘Mintoff, Dominic’ as I recall) who first forged diplomatic relations with China under Chairman Mao in 1972... becoming in the process the first European leader to do so? And wasn’t he severely criticised at the time by the PN (then under George Borg Olivier) for his flirtations with undemocratic regimes? And yet, Mintoff’s overtures to Mao took place almost 20 years before Tienanmen Square. Borg, on the other hand, is taking place more than 20 years later.

So why is one diplomatic relationship so utterly reprehensible, while another identical relationship forged with the same country (only in the light of much worse atrocities) is openly boasted about in DOI press releases, as it were the best thing since egg-fried shrimp noodles? The answer is by no means clear… except, of course, to all those who were dipped as babies into the bubbling cauldron of Maltese political hypocrisy.