Former NATO Base ‘Chronically Polarized’ : Political Conflict Splits Island of Malta

“It used to be that nobody discussed politics on Malta except at election times,” the schoolteacher said. “Now families are split down the middle and we talk about nothing else.”

As some others on this Mediterranean island do, she agreed to talk politics with a foreign visitor only on condition that her name not be published because of rising political tensions. The opposition Nationalist Party has resorted to clandestine radio broadcasts to get its message across, although the government asserts that free speech is guaranteed.

In 13 years in office, Prime Minister Dom Mintoff, a socialist, has transformed the nation from one that served as a headquarters for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to a member of the non-aligned movement--a process that has left the island’s 330,000 citizens divided.

The conservative opposition, local businessmen and Roman Catholic churchmen all accuse Mintoff’s socialism-based Labor Party of becoming increasingly autocratic. Reflecting a view held by many Westerners here, a European diplomat said that politics on Malta, which is 60 miles south of Sicily, are now “chronically polarized with neither side feeling at all conciliatory.”

Mintoff, 68, has forged close ties with Libya and China and upgraded relations with the Soviet Union. Last year, Malta accepted $1.5 million worth of light arms free of charge from North Korea’s Communist government.

But at the same time, the socialists say they hope to renew a treaty with Italy guaranteeing the island’s neutrality. The treaty is scheduled to expire this year.

“We’d like to be as equidistant as possible from both the United States and the Soviet Union . . . that’s where our security lies, not in being a fortress,” the senior deputy prime minister, Carmelo Mifsud Bonnici, told visiting reporters.

For centuries Malta and its neighboring island of Gozo served as a Western military outpost in the southern Mediterranean--first as the headquarters of the medieval Knights of St. John, and later as a British colony and the southern headquarters of NATO.

Mifsud Bonnici, a 51-year-old labor union lawyer, is Mintoff’s designated successor as leader of the Labor Party.

Intensified Feelings Anti-government feeling has intensified since elections in December, 1981, elections, when the Labor won a three-seat majority in the 65-member Parliament while the Nationalists won 51% of the popular vote.

The Nationalists boycotted Parliament for 15 months afterward, claiming that Labor had altered electoral district boundaries to favor its own candidates.

“We will attend Parliament’s next session but only selectively,” Nationalist leader Eddie Fenech Adami said in an interview. “The government doesn’t respect its rules.. . . And there’s a gradual but definite erosion of democracy taking place.”

‘Marginal Appeal’ The government is also accused of using the state-run radio and television to distort the views of the Catholic Church and the Nationalist Party.

“We now run a clandestine broadcasting station in order to offset the government’s media campaign against us,” Fenech Adami said.

Asked about the radio station, Mifsud Bonnici said: “It has very marginal appeal. We let them do it . . . and it disproves their charges that we run a police state.”

The government and the Catholic church are seriously at odds over a measure that prohibits parochial schools from charging tuition. The government holds that the church should pay for education out of its own funds.

Many Maltese praise the socialists for improving housing, welfare and pension schemes and health services during their years in power. But critics say Mintoff’s policy of touring Eastern bloc and non-aligned countries in search of political support and economic aid has brought Malta few gains.

Mintoff, who earlier in his career sought union for Malta with Britain, closed the British naval base on the island in 1979. Two years later, the socialists signed a neutrality pact with the Soviet Union and a bunkering agreement for Soviet merchant vessels.

“The Soviet Union doesn’t make full use of its bunkering facilities . . ., and Malta can’t possibly produce enough to fulfil the requirements of a $260 million trade agreement signed last year with the Soviets,” a leading businessman said.

The socialists hope that Malta will become a transhipment center for freight traffic in the Mediterranean with the completion of a new $160 million port facility built by Chinese experts.

In the meantime, the island faces declining revenues from its traditional sources of income--tourism, drydock facilities and exports of blue jeans.

The government says that unemployment is running at 9%, while unofficial estimates range as high as 18%. A wage and price freeze keeps inflation down, but a system of import quotas means that islanders must wait months to buy such items as a color television sets or cars.