Former foreign minister says PfP application circumvented democratic rules

Former Labour foreign minister George Vella, who in 1996 informed NATO that Malta’s participation in the Partnership for Peace had been terminated, has insisted that the government’s re-entry into the PfP in 2008 was “undemocratic”.

Shadow foreign minister George Vella

Vella has criticised the secretiveness of Malta’s bid to re-enter PfP without taking the matter to parliament or even making it part of the Nationalist party’s electoral mandate.

“The government didn’t even have the decency to tell the public of its intentions. Instead the prime minister informed a foreign ambassador before the general elections, before even telling parliament… I’d say he despises democracy. This is an autocratic style of doing things,” Vella said.

According to US embassy cables published on Wikileaks, Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi informed former ambassador Molly Bordonaro of his intention to rejoin the PfP in January 2008 – at least two months before the general elections.

As foreign minister, Vella wrote to NATO secretary-general Javier Solana on 29 October 1996 saying Maltese participation in the PfP was being “terminated”. In the note verbale, Vella wrote that in terms of Labour’s electoral mandate, Malta’s PfP membership was considered “incompatible with the Constitutional provisions that define Malta’s neutrality.” [READ the Note Verbale]

“When we withdrew from PfP we felt we did not know where NATO was going with this programme. The Cold War had just ended and NATO was looking for its own significance,” he told MaltaToday.

But since then, Labour’s foreign policy on PfP has changed.

Vella said Labour sees Malta’s participation in the Partnership for Peace as important for the Armed Forces of Malta. “We’ve also seen countries like Switzerland and Russia join, because the programme allows the member state to decide for itself to what degree it participates in – and that means we can still safeguard our neutrality.

“As long as we have total control of what we want and don’t want to do in the PfP, we have no problem with it,” Vella said.

Vella reiterated claims he made to former US ambassador Douglas Kmiec, also revealed in leaked embassy cables, that thegovernment had circumvented Malta’s Treaties Act.

He has also criticised the way Malta’s permanent ambassador to the EU, Richard Cachia Caruana, crafted the case for Malta to re-enter PfP without having to seek parliamentary resolution, by asking NATO to “reactivate” the application.

“I am reliably informed by a NATO source that there was division inside the NATO council of the way Malta wanted to reactivate membership. There were members that said Malta could not just reactivate it,” Vella said.

According to the cables, Cachia Caruana argued that Malta’s participation in the PfP had only been suspended. This allowed Malta’s re-entry without seeking parliamentary approval. The NATO website also refers to Malta's decision in 1996       as a 'suspension'.

But it also allowed Malta to resurrect PfP membership without seeking an additional NATO security agreement. The latter was a condition demanded by Turkey to block Cyprus from attending the EU-NATO meetings as a retaliation for its treatment of Turkish Cypriots. Both Malta and Cyprus had been barred from attending EU meetings that discussed NATO classified military information, because they were not PfP members.

“Government presented us with a fait accompli when we met in the parliamentary foreign affairs committee, because we were never informed of it intention to join PfP.

“Now we know that there was talk of a Status Of Forces Agreement, being done without parliamentary approval and instead doing it incrementally without an official agreement.

“It is true that Wikileaks has done damage to diplomacy… but the fact is they wanted to do it behind our back,” Vella said.

SOFA talks

Foreign Minister Tonio Borg has told MaltaToday that informal discussions had taken place with the United States embassy on a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) under NATO auspices, but no agreement was reached.

“The matter then stopped three months ago. Even if we were to reach an agreement this would need parliamentary approval,” Borg said.

While Borg told MaltaToday that a SOFA has to be approved by parliamentary resolution, Malta’s head of defence Vanessa Frazier was said to have proposed to former US ambassador Douglas Kmiec a gradual approach according to the embassy cables:

“The best course would be to execute SOFA incrementally by means of dip notes” – suggesting that any military presence could be built-up incrementally, perhaps with frequent visits by US ships.

Kmiec welcomed this tactic as a “useful interim” step, since NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander James Stavridis had requested at least six ship visits “to reacquaint Malta with [their] economic and associational value” while SOFA discussions were kept alive.