Updated | Dom Mintoff’s death on the foreign press

While Malta is mourning its former Prime Minister Dom Mintoff, the news has also made it on a number of foreign newspapers, especially in the English-speaking world.

The news was reported by most international news agencies and carried by newspapers the world over.

The Financial Times, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, BBC, The Guardian, La Repubblica, Corriere Della Sera, Reuters, Associated Press, ANSA and Bloomberg were among many to carry the news.

In its obituary, the influential Financial Times described Mintoff as "one of those nationalist leaders whom the British media loved to hate, in the generation which saw the end of the British empire."

The newspaper said Mintoff will be remembered "mainly as the leader of a very small country who too often felt obliged to assert himself by rude and quarrelsome behaviour. This made him many enemies."

FT said Mintoff had traits in common with Ferhat Abbas of Algeria, Mohammed Mossadeq of Iran, Archbishop Makarios of Cyprus, and Gamal Abdul Nasser of Egypt, "but perhaps more resembled those Commonwealth leaders who, like him, had been to Britain for higher education (in his case at Balliol College, University of Oxford), married British wives, and came away with a deeply ambivalent attitude to the 'mother country'."

"Mintoff's talents as a politician and administrator, and even his personal charm, were widely acknowledged."

It added that Mintoff's long career as leader of the Maltese Labour party, from 1949 to 1984, was marked by repeated trials of strength with the Catholic Church. "His animosity towards it was widely attributed to his early experience as a trainee priest of the Dominican order, which ended abruptly when the seminary demanded fees from his parents after discovering that one of his sisters had had a costly wedding reception."

The FT added that when Mintoff relinquished his post as Prime Minister in 1984, "he left Malta in the midst of a sharply polarised and often violent conflict brought about by his attempt to stop church schools from charging fees."

The New York Times described Dom Mintoff, as a "fiery postwar socialist leader of Malta who closed NATO bases, evicted British interests, courted China and Libya and even banned The Times of London to chart an independent course for his tiny Mediterranean island nation..."

It added "Mr. Mintoff was secretive, unpredictable and, to enemies, a ruthless tyrant. But to admirers, he was the father of modern Malta, a charismatic Labor Party fixture for 35 years who was prime minister from 1955 to 1958, when Malta had limited self-rule as a British colony, and from 1971 to 1984, when his vision of a nonaligned, self-sufficient republic was substantially realized."

"He was a short, compact man, with a high forehead, a tight smile and a quick temper. He hated small talk and tended to walk out of long meetings. He spoke cultivated English, but deployed peppery Maltese oratory on the stump. Visitors to his office in the ornate Auberge de Castille in Valletta, the capital, or at his nearby home in Tarxien, found him genial, but not always."

The BBC news portal highlighted Mintoff's confrontational style, fiery speeches and his conflict with the Catholic Church and the British governbment.

However it also said Mintoff's government "introduced a wide range of social benefits and raised living standards."

Reuters described Mintoff  as "Malta's former socialist prime minister and dominant political force for more than half a century..."

The Associated Press said Malta's longest serving politician was known for his "confrontational character, Mintoff engaged in tough disputes with Britain over its role, the Roman Catholic Church over its influence and western Europe over his ties with Libya, China and North Korea. He also brought down his own government in 1998 in a party dispute. Labor has been in opposition ever since."