Dom Mintoff

Mintoff, Dom (1916- ) prime minister of Malta Dominic Mintoff was born in Cospicua, Malta, on August 6, 1916, the son of a Royal Navy cook.

This small Mediterranean island had been a British Crown colony since 1814 and housed bases for a large military and naval presence. Mintoff briefly attended a seminary before passing through the University of Malta to study engineering. He subsequently won a Rhodes scholarship and attended Oxford University in England. Mintoff enjoyed the high ideals he encountered on campus but greatly resented the condescending attitudes of British colonial administrators. He nonetheless served with the British War Office as a civil engineer during most of World War II, and in 1944 he went home to help rebuild his war-ravaged island. That year he joined the Maltese Labor Party and assisted in its reorganization. Mintoff was then elected to a series of bureaucratic posts within the colonial administration until 1949. His politics, which were sharply socialist, conflicted with the more moderate views of party leaders, and he resigned from office. A vigorous contest for control of the Malta Labor Party ensued, and Mintoff, a fiery, charismatic figure, was elected chairman in 1955. He was singularly determined to recast the colonial nature of Malta's relationship with Great Britain.

In 1955 Mintoff was elected prime minister, and over the next three years he championed Malta's complete integration into the United Kingdom. When this plan failed he resigned from office in April 1958 and began campaigning for complete independence. He also entered a protracted contretemps with the archbishop of this primarily Catholic nation over the future role of the church. Mintoff denounced the institution for its part in helping maintain the status quo and in 1962 he was barred from receiving the sacraments. That year a massive turnout by Catholic voters elected the conservative Nationalist Party into power, where it remained seven years. Malta finally gained its independence in 1964 and Mintoff, upset by what he considered a lingering British presence, boycotted the ceremony. But realizing he had made a serious tactical error, Mintoff then assiduously mended fences with church authorities to enhance his political prospects. After nine years in the opposition, Labor finally prevailed in the 1971 elections, and Mintoff became prime minister once again. He was finally positioned to effect radical change in island politics.

Malta had nominally been a member of the British Commonwealth since 1964, but Mintoff unilaterally declared the island a republic and booted out the English governor general. He then charted a nonaligned foreign policy by establishing friendly relations with the Soviet Union, China, and various Arab countries. Foremost among these was the radical regime of Muammar Gadhafi of Libya, only 200 miles distant, although relations chilled over the issue of oil drilling on the seafloor between them. In 1979 British military leases on the island expired and Mintoff set such egregious restrictions for their continuance that the Royal Navy pulled out after nearly two centuries. In 1981 the prime minister again confronted the church over the status of religious schools, and in elections that year the Nationalists won the popular vote. Labor, however, managed to retain a one-seat majority in the legislature so Mintoff remained in office. Faced with this reduction in power, intractable fights with conservatives, and declining poll numbers, he resigned as prime minister in December 1984. He then served as a special adviser to Labor prime minister Carmelo Mifsud Bonnici until the opposition regained power in May 1987.

Mintoff retained his seat in parliament and relished his new role as a political gadfly. Vociferous as ever, in December 1998 he opposed a measure by Labor prime minister Alfred Sant to lease land to an American consortium to build a yacht marina. The 82-year-old Mintoff cast the deciding vote that defeated the measure, and Sant called for new elections. Labor, which controlled parliament by a single vote, subsequently lost by wide margins to the Nationalists under Eddie Fenech Adami. Mintoff has since retired to private life, a contentious and controversial elder statesman.