Touched by the hand of Kim…

It is said that the young, plump, be-spectacled Kim Jong Il was first sighted here in Malta under the tutelage of erstwhile premier Dom Mintoff some time in the early 1980s - so claimed the Guardian's former editor Peter Preston.

In the morning while on his Maltese vacation he would take English lessons along with a group of students. His tutor, Professor Daniel Massa, was also unaware of his presence when I spoke to him in 2003: "I was teaching a group of students at the University in those days and Kim Jong Il, we later learned, was in fact one of them. When some other students learned who he was, they refused to sit in the same classroom."

Whether or not Kim's mastery of the English language bore any fruit, Malta's flirtation with this Stalinist dictatorship of the East truly represents a dark chapter in the island's international relations.

In 1982, then foreign minister Alex Sceberras Trigona signed the notorious 'secret' agreement with North Korea for the donation of weapons to Malta "with a view to further strengthening and developing the friendship and solidarity established between the peoples and armies of the two countries in the common struggle against imperialism and safeguarding the independence".

The agreement had been revealed by then Opposition leader Eddie Fenech Adami during a PN mass meeting on 4 December, 1983. Two agreements had been signed for "a free offer of military assistance" with North Korea. The first agreement was signed just three months after the 1981 election in which Labour was returned to power with a majority of seats, but not with the majority of votes. The second agreement provide Malta with weapons and ammunition, and the training of Malta's riot squad by North Korean instructors.

After the 1981 elections, Superintendent Charles Cassar created the Special Mobile Unit - originally conceived as an anti-terrorism force, according to Dione Borg in his book Libertà Mhedda. The riot squad was deployed during most Nationalist Party meetings in the 1980s, in full military regalia. According to Borg, the SMU was also responsible for fomenting trouble during such meetings. Upon Nationalist election in 1987, the SMU was turned into the Special Assignment Group.

In his twilight, Dom Mintoff allegedly penned a series of letters to world leaders and then had them published on a makeshift blog. In his letter to Robert Mugabe, the Zimbabwean president, Mintoff recalls meeting representatives from Mugabe's Zanu-PF and Zapu, twice at his Delimara retreat "after my customary bathe in Peter's Pool" and coming to "an understanding" on a strategy on dealing with Ian Smith in 1980.

Six months after Zimbabwean independence in October 1980, Mugabe signed an agreement with dictatorship of North Korea, for assistance in training a new army brigade to deal with internal dissidents - 5 Brigade, as it came to be known.