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Karl Schembri
When Prime Minister Dom Mintoff signed the Malta-Libya Treaty of Friendship and Co-Operation in November 1984, the Nationalists were quick to tear it to pieces. Now they want to “revitalise it”.
That’s what Foreign Minister Michael Frendo declared upon his return from Tripoli a week ago in one of the ironic twists of history that went by virtually unnoticed.
According to Frendo, revitalising the agreement would “further ensure that the economic activity and social interchange between Libya and Malta and the respective peoples will remain strong”.
That’s not what the PN said 21 years ago. Since then, things have changed a lot of course, and so have positions.
A decade before the agreement with Malta, Libya had already sent shockwaves on the international stage when it declared the Gulf of Sirte a closed bay and part of its territorial waters extending over 300 miles, with ensuing military strikes battles in the region against US war planes.
Reports about Libya’s financing of rebel groups worldwide were quickly making the rounds, establishing Muammar Gaddafi as the gadfly of North Africa.
Four years before the 1984 agreement, the US government closed its embassy in Tripoli after it was burnt by a mob and following a series of assassinations of Libyan dissidents in Europe. And only two years later, Libya was implicated in a terrorist explosion in a Berlin nightclub. The US army casualties in the attack had prompted President Ronald Reagan to attack Col. Muammar Gaddafi’s own house in Tripoli, saved only by Prime Minister Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici’s prompt late night phone call warning him of unauthorised fighter planes transgressing Maltese air space and heading towards Tripoli.
There were 100 of them, headed from America’s air bases in the UK with Margaret Thatcher’s blessing. The raids killed more than 70 people, including Gaddafi’s infant adopted daughter, on the site where a monument with a hand of steel coming out of the ground gripping a US missile stands erected among the ruins of the colonel’s house to this day. Libya’s relations with the world would reach rock bottom in 1988 when a Pan-Am passenger plane was exploded over the Scottish town of Lockerbie.
It was in that context that Malta’s agreement with Libya was denigrated so harshly by the Nationalists, ignoring altogether the cooperation and commercial deals struck with Libyans in the light of the agreement.
Fuelling the PN’s relentless attacks was chiefly a five-year military agreement under which Libya was to provide an army training team and helicopters, and would consign some of its naval units for maintenance in Maltese shipyards. Libya also had agreed to study the possibility of providing Malta with military arms and material on condition that Malta does not allow foreign bases on its territory.
But with boatloads of irregular immigrants leaving the vast shores of Tripoli and a fishing zone dispute that is not fully solved, the 1984 cooperation agreement offers no lifesaver to the diluted relations between the two countries.
Malta’s offshore oil exploration ventures in oil rich areas bordering with Libya and Tunisia remain suspended because of border disputes, as contractual deadlines agreed with Pancontinental Oil and Anadarko International risk being disrupted.
According to Opposition spokesman on Foreign Affairs Leo Brincat, Frendo stopped short of explaining what tangible results he achieved through his latest visit on the illegal immigration front. No news of progress in the discussions of buying oil at preferential rates from Libya either, nor any dates set for the Libyan leader’s planned visit to Malta.
As Libya opens up to the world, it will take more than a two decades old agreement for Malta to revitalise warm relations with the Jamahiriya.
kschembri@mediatoday.com.mt
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