Publishing house Horizons is coming out with a series of books on recently dead and even living Maltese persons. This book is the first of such books, all subtitled Bejn Storja u Miti. Others include books on Dun Victor Grech and a very enjoyable one which I am reading at present on Herbert Ganado.
The formula is more or less the same: a collection of articles on the person being written about, written by people with a more or less close relationship with that person.
In this case, this being as far as I am aware, the first book in the series, there was not enough time between the death of Dom Mintoff and the publication of the book. Nor, as will be seen, can one say that the writers had close relations with the former premier. Unless the people who worked and lived with Dom decide to speak and write their memoirs, unless documents are found and retrieved (I was told that a significant amount of such documentation ended up in a fire) and unless other documentation still secret not just in Malta but also abroad, are analysed, it is premature to carry out an objective assessment of such a life which had incredible impact on Malta.
As was seen at his death, Dom Mintoff caused two extremes of reactions - either people laud him to the skies or they consign him to the deepest hell.
One can only read the articles in this book for what they are.
The book opens with a contribution from a rather unlikely source - Mario Azzopardi. Everything considered, there is an affinity between Dom and his melodramatic temper and Azzopardi the dramatist. Mintoff's life was pure theatre. He was a larger than life person, his meetings were pure theatre but at the same time dated. He mesmerised crowds with his interminable and many times meandering speeches with a wealth of sexual undertones, but he became a cropper when he was forced to adapt to television.
Mr Azzopardi tells the story of one of Mintoff's ambitions - to create MTADA built on the RADA template and how this dream, too grand for Malta at that time, was closed down by Albert Agius Ferrante, sometime later.
Azzopardi's second contact with Mintoff came some years later when Mintoff urged him to present once more Ibsen's Hedda Gabler. He had already presented the drama before, but Dom did not seem to be aware of this. Azzopardi does not tell us whether he obeyed Mintoff's suggestion.
Perhaps the best description in a nutshell of Dom Mintoff was that provided by Guido de Marco in one of Where's Everybody's programmes on TVM Bijografiji, "Mintoff is a politician with a democratic mind and a dictatorial style".
The second article comes from a source one would never have thought of. Joe Cassar was a PN parliamentary secretary and later magistrate.
Curiously, the families were friends. Dr Cassar's father was a great friend of Dom and when still a child Dom and his wife Moira used to play with baby Joe at Tal-Barrani. "Peppinu", as he was universally known, gives a light overview of the events from the 1970s when he became MP to 1998 when Mintoff brought down the Sant government. The subsequent election ended the political life of both Dom and "Peppinu" after which he was made a magistrate.
Similarly, the next article gives an overview of Dom's years. Former minister Michael Falzon grew up in the Mintoff years and he became crystallised in his political ideas because of the National Bank saga. Later on, they both became Members of Parliament and they naturally clashed. Mr Falzon, however, does not mention the time when Mintoff blasted him for the traffic alignment leading to the Addolorata Cemetery.
He tells, in a jokey manner, how as chairman of Water Services he used to humour Dom who had become convinced his water supply was contaminated. Later on, meeting Dom in hospital, still fiery Dom gave him a dressing down and said he would sue him.
I do not recall he did, but instead he sued me and Daphne for her public criticism of him. We had some jolly court sittings and at the end, all his cases were lost by him, some because he did not turn up.
Charles Flores writes in a different vein. He comes from a Labour background and takes us back to the days when priests refused absolution to a boy (himself) for going to buy his father's paper. Then he tells of his days as a journalist at Orizzont when he dared try to ask a simple question to Dom on his return from a trip abroad and how Dom, unused to such questions by the media, exploded. Then he tells how an attempt to be investigative brought him trouble with Labour minister Bertu Hyzler who did not subscribe to these efforts.
Novelist and poet Oliver Friggieri comes next with a very personal appreciation of Dom Mintoff. His article is rather short and does not say anything that Prof. Friggieri had not said elsewhere, especially in Fjuri li ma jinxfux.
In my opinion, the best article in this collection is that by Simon Mercieca who has done his research and he produces new background to Dom's childhood in Cospicua. Dr Mercieca hails from Cospicua too and his sociological and anthropological analysis comes handy. He tells of Dom's family antecedents. His grandfather came from Ghasri in Gozo and his grandmother came from Xaghra, also in Gozo. His father came to work in Malta and joined the Navy. Like other single men who came to Malta, they lived in hovels in the Bastjun area of Cospicua, until such a time he got engaged to a woman from Cospicua and they got married (1908) and lived elsewhere - in Bull Street in Cospicua as well.
Dr Mercieca's grandmother was a close friend of Dom's mother. They both came from Cospicua, they resembled each other - short and stocky. And they both had a home job, rolling cigars and also lending money against gold. The silver frame for the sottoquadro under the main altarpiece in the choir of the Cospicua church was donated by women who rolled cigars.
The couple had 11 children, of whom nine lived. Dom was the third child and the first boy. Dom's first education was by a priest, Dun Spir (Penza) a holy man who travelled from Birzebbuga to Cospicua and gave private teaching to needy boys. Dom even delivered the Christmas sermon - he was the first of four boys who learned his sermon by heart the day after he was given the text. This precocity got him noticed and he entered the Minor Seminary. There is nothing in Dr Mercieca's article that confirms or denies the story or legend that Dom was refused an exemption from paying the Seminary dues because his family by then had moved up in the world - an incident that coloured his later life.
Later on, Dom entered university, became an architect and a Rhodes Scholar ending up studying at Oxford for the duration of the war. Back in Malta he became a minister in the Boffa government and got married when he was acting prime minister because Boffa was in London for Princess Elizabeth's wedding (November 1947). His wife-to-be arrived from England, Dom was at work, they got together and got married that very same day, and Dom returned to work after the ceremony. As minister for reconstruction he had a lot to do with Malta devastated by the war.
Robert Micallef, who used to work at the Commission office in Malta before accession (the write-up at the back fails to mention he was an EP candidate in 2004) writes about Mintoff's foreign policy, mostly from 1971 to 1979.
Mark Montebello takes it upon himself to fill in what Oliver Friggieri fails to mention: his characterisation of Dom Mintoff in his Fil-Parlament ma jikbrux fjuri. He then quotes extensively from one who is missing from this anthology, Mario Vella who characterised Mintoff as having an "anti-philosophical philosophy". Then he gives us his own biographical analysis of Dom, similar to that given earlier by Simon Mercieca in that it dwells on Dom's childhood and upbringing and the early figures he would later on battle against - il-Kurat as typical of a church based on power and Il-Gross - Carmelo Mifsud Bonnici, seen as the conservative father figure for Cottonera.
He then maps out Mintoff's mature political philosophy but before he tackles that, he writes about the macho culture of the people who lived on the Bastjun in Cospicua. After some time of active involvement in politics, in which he rapidly became secretary general of the Labour Party, he went to Britain to further his studies and there he spent the war years. There he fell under the influence of the Fabians which reinforced the convictions he had bred in his earlier years. It was this that led him to counteract Paul Boffa's cautious, liberal idealism and strike out on his own. He had meanwhile reached an innermost conviction that he had to do what he had to do without bothering what people thought.
This is what led him to choose integration with Britain rather than the more gradualist Dominion Status and what led him to take the Church head-on. All this was cloaked in those elements in his personality that made him simply Dom - paternalist, aggressive, pragmatic, and two other qualities that I must admit I did not see much in Mintoff - antipositivistic and exclusivity.
It was genial for the compiler of this anthology to include a negative appreciation of Dom Mintoff by a person who had to suffer exile from Malta because of his political beliefs - Richard Muscat ended up spending years in Sicily, living under continuous threat of being kicked out of Italy, because of his involvement in the PN radio station broadcasting from Sicily. In particular, he quotes some damning quotations from a minister who today would probably not subscribe to such words - Leo Brincat who wrote that Mr Muscat's association with Famiglia Cristiana was damning for Malta. Mr Muscat promised to write the history of AZAD and I do not think he has done so. He tells of receiving threats from Maurice Pace, then Mintoff's PRO man. Later, he was to try and justify his actions by claiming Mintoff was putting him under a lot of hysterical pressure.
Carmen Sammut's article, the penultimate of the book, is one of the best articles. She traces Mintoff's tempestuous relations with the press over the years. It is a sad story in which Dom loses time and again, even when he was practically the dictator of Malta.
He began his political life attacking the predominance of the British in the Maltese media world, railing at Rediffusion, Then, out of office after the April 1958 riots, he tried to boost the leftwing media not just through the ramshackle Freedom Press, manned by obsolete machines donated by friendly socialist parties in Germany, but also (although at some distance) the new Union Press and its new and successful papers Orizzont and It-Torca.
Back in office, Mintoff took over Television House and Rediffusion but then ran into more trouble. The nationalised State broadcasting found a new and competitive ally in the way - Joe Grima's Broadcasting Authority which began to broadcast as well. Wistin Abela admitted the government's aim was to create a Socialist generation.
The Nationalist Party, previously unable to really get for themselves good media, set up a clandestine alternative broadcasting station from Sicily and, when Mintoff at last managed to get that closed down, spawned a number of unofficial and clandestine stations. More importantly, the PN called for a boycott of State broadcasting which was very effective: the losses at Xandir Malta escalated from Lm88,000 to Lm376,000 (one of the merits of this article is that this is based on interviews carried out by Ms Sammut with the protagonists at that time). The name of the Leader of the Opposition was banned from State broadcasting.
All this was destined to fail, and fail it did. Dom Mintoff resigned and handed over to Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici. Worse was to come: the schools saga, the pitched battles of Tal-Barrani, etc. but in 1987 Labour was gone.
Ironically, the Dom Mintoff who was more at home addressing crowds from the back of a truck, found in 1998 he could use the media to wage battle and, ultimately, bring down Alfred Sant.
Just as the book began by an article of a person in the arts field, so does it end - this time with an article by Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci. This article is more about the author than about Dom Mintoff. Coming from a deeply Labour family whose forefathers had supported Mintoff in the split from Boffa, the author, by the 1970s a convinced Marxist, spearheaded the Xirka Gustizzja Socjali with Lino Briguglio and spawned countless radical students groups leading to a split from other equally Labour persons, such as Sammy Meilaq, Dominic Fenech, Reno Borg and Lino Briguglio who preferred to stay with Labour rather than declare themselves Marxist. Joe Zarb Adami and Evarist Bartolo fell somewhere in between.
The author then tells the little-known story how this small but highly articulate and active group came up with activities such as a protest against the French nuclear tests in the Pacific that brought down on its head the anger of Dom Mintoff and he ended up arrested for 48 hours. But another protest against the murder of Pinochet was supported by the government and a huge success. The group disrupted a bourgeois play at the Phoenicia by Mario Philip Azzopardi. And then, on 1 May 1973, Sammy Meilaq hoisted the author up and the statue of Queen Victoria in Valletta ended up draped in a red flag. Dom Mintoff, passing by at the head of the 1 May march, showed he approved.
But the reaction of the party grandees proved too strong and Giuseppe and those with him ended up kicked out of the party. The author obtained a study grant and left for Russia where he studied Law, Philosophy and Arts. Ostracised by the party in Malta, he nevertheless kept up good relations with Dom who surprisingly appointed him Charge d'Affaires in Moscow. His close relations with Dom in those days of the Helsinki Conference showed him that Dom was sceptical as regards the Soviet Union (which is not as the population of Malta saw him).
As the Soviet Union neared its collapse (and so did the Mintoff government in Malta) the author turned the Maltese embassy into a cultural centre where Maltese artists mixed with young and promising Russian artists. It was a Moscow Spring.
Nevertheless, the government in Malta remained oblivious to what was happening in the big wide world, and mostly interested in promotions and appointments. The last straw came when Carmel Consiglio, a relative of Lorry Sant, was appointed ambassador behind Giuseppe's back. That was when he left and dedicated the rest of his life to art.
This is altogether an interesting book, but for a more complete appraisal of Dom Mintoff, his life and work, one waits for more research, study and especially more information provided by those who worked at close quarters with him - people who are completely absent in this book.