Berlusconi, a Mafioso, and a dead dictator: toasted by our Republic

Malta’s national honours’ list celebrates the good and the great of our fair island, but a few honorary members may no longer be fit for the roll-call.

The familiar name-and-shame routine recently cropped up in the House of Representatives, with Nationalist MP Beppe Fenech Adami citing North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung as one such candidate for revocation. Having fostered one of the world’s most autarchic of communist dictatorships, the Korean leader may arguably be eligible for a revocation of the honour as happened with Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.

Labour now wants to loosen the restrictions on the national awards and open them up to a wider number of beneficiaries: Joseph Muscat’s choice of an 11-year-old winner of the Junior Eurovision contest perhaps betrays his dim view of the awards, but the unstylish nomination still managed to fire up yet another unimportant debate on the subject.

Malta’s ‘honorary’ awards for foreign dignitaries accorded the Gieh ir-Repubblika, the highest possible award which remains restricted to 20 living recipients, and the National Order of Merit, often tend to be inspired by the politics of the age. For example, while Labour honoured Gaddafi in 1975 with the Gieh Ir-Repubblika, the Nationalist administration decorated Gaddafi in 2004 as an honorary Companion of Honour, with collar – a notch higher than the ‘standard’ K.U.O.M. – and a year later in 2005, awarded Tunisian dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali the same honour.

Both awards have been revoked in the aftermath of the Arab spring. But the trouble with national honours is that – as Beppe Fenech Adami’s outburst in the House indirectly raised – as fast as the Maltese government is in giving them out, it is more reticent about revoking them.

His former prime minister, Lawrence Gonzi, an ‘embracer’ of Gaddafi as much as anyone else, never took on the dead Korean dictator. Unlike the Libyan civil war on our doorstep, there was no ‘realpolitik’ warranting Kim Il Sung’s revocation.

There are however some candidates who could be proper candidates for a fast revocation, namely within the ‘honorary’ membership for foreign dignitaries: the most glaring examples are the Companion of Honour for former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi (awarded 2004), now booted out of the Italian parliament, not to mention the four-year prison sentence for tax evasion he was found guilty of.

On a slightly more serious note would be the Companion (with star) of National Order of Merit for Salvatore ‘Toto’ Cuffaro (2004), a former Italian MP and president of Sicily who in 2008 was found guilty of aiding the Mafia – he was finally sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment in 2011.

Less controversial, but again debatable, would be a similar beneficiary: Italian senator Roberto Formigoni, who is under investigation over alleged bribes paid by a health group to help secure favourable deals.

Labour’s frugality avenged

While Joseph Muscat wants to open the national honours’ list to more people, former Labour prime minister Dom Mintoff was as parsimonious with national awards as he was with the national budget.

The Xirka Gieh ir-Repubblika, the highest honour, was only conferred to Malta’s first president Sir Anthony Mamo and former archbishop Joseph Mercieca in 1992, under a Nationalist administration, and Gozo bishop Nikol Cauchi in 2005 – the first Maltese to be conferred the highest possible honour.

Mintoff conferred an honorary Gieh ir-Repubblika to Gaddafi in 1975, while successor Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici accorded the honour to Kim Il Sung in 1985, the equally controversial former President of China LI Xiannian (1984) who supported a hardline response to the Tiennamen Square protests, and before that to Italian DC founder and President Giovanni Leone (1975).

The frugality of national honours is evidenced by the fact that before the National Order of Merit was constituted in 1990, opening the Republic Day honours to a wider cross-section of people, Labour had only conferred three medals for service to the republic (MQR), and honorary medals for services to the republic to 13 foreign dignitaries.

The latter honours reflect the politics of the time: Dom Mintoff’s close ties to Gaddafi, and his nod to Italy as European counter-balance, saw him confer the MQRs to diplomats and ministers Abdul Ati al-Obeidi, Mansour Khikia, and Ali Abdussalam Treki, and Italian General Giuseppe Piovano, Colonel Umberto Pellizzola, and DC minister Filippo Maria Pandolfi. Another medal – like the previous ones, conferred in 1976 – went to US presidential advisor and former NATO ambassador Robert Ellsworth (it is no secret that at the time, Mintoff was dying to score a meeting with secretary of state Henry Kissinger).

Others included Pakistani Air Marshal Malik Nur Khan, one of the founders of Air Malta; and Lady Juliet Bingley, wife of Royal Navy commander-in-chief Alec Bingley. In Malta, she became closely involved in the Maltese health and social care system – a friend of Mintoff’s, she was styled as a "messenger" between the fiery prime minister and the UK government.