Mintoff's letter to Mugabe: portrait of the man in his twilight

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He tells José Manuel Barroso that US president George W. Bush has “stealthily” managed to curtail freedom of thought in Malta through EU membership. He believes the Commissioner of Police has held him prisoner in his own home for the past three years for being a “danger to national security”.

Such are the bold statements in the letters the former Labour prime minister Dom Mintoff wrote in letters published on a blog by his ‘honorary secretary’ Mario Borg: the unmistakably crisp insights and recollections of a man who held sway over the Maltese islands for 16 years, peppered with the paranoia that seems to have taken over the recluse at The Olives, his Tarxien residence.

To Robert Mugabe, the Zimbabwean president, he presents himself as “Doctor Dominic Mintoff, Emeritus Prime Minister and Founder of the Republic of Malta. Held under surveillance by the CIA as directed by G.W. Bush”.

He tells Barroso that “little [had he] dreamt that suppression of information and freedom of thought would land me for the past three years into a prison on parole in my own house that had endangered my life several times and made it impossible for me to reach the ears of the Maltese people”.

And he tells Gonzi that he is “held like a leper incommunicado in his water-infected home” and that the Commissioner of Police “has chosen to become the local head of intelligence in the service of NATO and CIA.”

So this is how the former Labour leader Dom Mintoff describes himself – a poignant picture of an elderly statesman kept under watch by international intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

Even more bizarre is his velvet treatment of the controversial Mugabe – a man notorious for his disregard for human rights, his violent campaign against homosexuals, a man accused of corruption, suppression of political opposition, mishandling of land reform, and according to the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, the architect of the continent’s worst economic performer. Indeed, in his letter dated 1 December, 2007, Mintoff asks Mugabe: “How can I help you and at the same time help Malta and the rest of humanity (India, China, Korea north and south, South Africa, the Emirates) where I have friends to whom I could introduce you if you do not already know them?

“… For a start it might help you to go to your meeting with sovereign states via Libya and seek the cooperation of the President of Libya to secure your personal safety. It might even be advantageous both to Zimbabwe and Libya if you and my friend President Gaddafi stopped in Malta and spoke to our people in the best way you may devise.”

Stranger still is Mintoff’s assertion that Mugabe’s “record is similar to mine”. Like him, Mugabe was a post-colonial leader, hailing from the left-wing spectrum of resistance, although Mintoff was a Fabian socialist, and Mugabe a communist.

Mintoff writes he met Mugabe in 1980 – the year of independence for Zimbabwe – when Britain’s prime minister Jim Callaghan asked Mintoff to mediate a closer cooperation between rivals Joshua Nkomo, the Zapu leader, and Mugabe. They are probably the peace negotiations which started in London a year before when Callaghan was still prime minister: the ones which deprived Mugabe of “the ultimate joy”, a military victory, resulting instead in a coalition government urged by Britain, with Nkomo, and integrating their two rival guerrilla armies into a new national army.

Mintoff writes that he met representatives from Mugabe’s Zanu-PF (Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front), and Zapu, twice at his Delimara retreat “after my customary bathe in Peter’s Pool”, coming to “an understanding” on a strategy on dealing with Ian Smith. Indeed, Mugabe and Nkomo had visited Malta and held talks at the Verdala Hotel in Rabat in 1980.

Mintoff writes to Barroso, the European Commission president, on 14 June 2007, introducing himself as someone who wants to “establish a friendship for the mutual benefit of [his] country and with whatever is left of the former European Union.”

His most revealing comments are contained in two letters to Lawrence Gonzi, again suggesting a “way forward” to the prime minister whose premiership he describes as “your perversely stormy snatching of the helm as PM of our sun drenched Islands.”

In his letter dated 5 July 2007, he discusses immigration, oil exploration, disaster plans, US imperialism, moral decadence in Malta and the “generations of comparatively well-to-do lads and lasses falling by the wayside as suicidal drug addicts or condemned to a slow death by HIV infections… this malaise is endemic throughout all the nations of old and new Europe, and presents a gloomy prospect for the bravest amongst us.”

He then proposes to Gonzi that an international fact finding commission, amongst them formerly non-aligned champions like China, India, Algeria, Libya, but also Russia, the EU, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Australia and the USA. But his concluding paragraph carries a bizarre proviso: “But it is impossible to do this without first and immediately getting rid of the Commissioner of Police who instead of protecting civilians from being harmed by criminals has chosen to become the local head of intelligence from the service of NATO and CIA. Kindly let me know possibly by next Tuesday whether you agree.”

His longest letter to Gonzi, dated 3 October 2007 is even more revealing. For example, Mintoff effectively documents his disdain for former rival Eddie Fenech Adami and instead reserves enormous respect for the PN predecessor Gorg Borg Olivier.

To him, Borg Olivier was “stealthily deprived of his leadership of the PN by the ‘no problem’ magician, the Hon. Dr Eddie Fenech Adami, who had scrounged a seat in Parliament by a bye-election. The anti-Giorgio bold move earned the Hon. Fenech Adami the leadership… and eventually the premiership. The Hon. Fenech Adami’s stunning cunning reached its climax four years ago when he managed to appoint himself President of the Republic.”

To Fenech Adami goes the blame for systematically slaying “our Nation’s young body politic in 1987”, while in the same breath he launches into a poetic extolling of the Republican Constitution for eliminating racial and religious discrimination, “and invigorated the live roots of our Christian faith. Christ was not king anymore: he was the Son of God and his crucifixion helped us to be the sons and daughters of the same Father who awaits us all in Heaven” – surely an unknown revelation of the anti-clerical leader’s faith in his twilight years.

And once again, the bizarre post scriptum, too telling of the condition of Mr Dom Mintoff:
“Your Commissioner of Police has held me prisoner in my own house by claiming that I am a danger to national security although it is taking him more than three years to prove it. Also the speed with which you have lately bolstered your tottering Nationalist Establishment has taken my breath away.”