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Matthew Vella has written an incisive assessment of Mintoff’s character in his article “From saviour to survivor – Dom Mintoff is 90” (6 August, 2006), but he has repeated inaccuracies about Mintoff’s role in the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) which need to be corrected if history is to be respected.
Mintoff’s last minute brinkmanship in the CSCE in 1975 was in Geneva and not in Helsinki and this is evident from the conversation between Kissinger and Gromyko carried on the same page. Mintoff did indulge in other bouts of brinkmanship in the CSCE in Helsinki in 1973, in Belgrade in 1978 and in Madrid in1983.
Helsinki produced the first threat to exclude Malta from a final CSCE consensus. In Belgrade we caused a minor ripple and a delay of two days. In Madrid we delayed the end of the conference by over 50 days, until Malta gave in when it realised that all the other CSCE participating states were going to register a consensus among themselves, leaving Malta out in the cold.
On all four occasions the issue was not one of including a reference to the Mediterranean as is generally believed, but one of including this reference in the terms that Mintoff demanded. These demands were at times unreasonable and pursued by tactics described as deceitful by the other CSCE participants.
I know because I was Malta’s representative at these meetings, and for the sake of history I shall have to reveal what really went on in my memoires.
Evarist V. Saliba
Ta’ l-Ibragg
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