Tiny Island of Malta Celebrates 25 years of Independence, Confident of Its Future

Twenty-five years ago many people doubted that a small Mediterranean island with no raw materials could survive on its own after 160 years as a British colony.

But Malta this month celebrates the Sept. 21, 1964, anniversary of its independence, confident of its economic future and determined never again to serve as a base for a foreign power.

The 122-square mile island that was once Britain’s main fortress in the Mediterranean is today constitutionally committed never to join NATO or the Warsaw Pact.

Doubts over Malta’s economic viability have faded. Tourism and textiles are thriving industries and the accent is now on developing electronics and light engineering.

Malta is striving to establish itself as an off-shore financial center and is developing a container depot and free port to meet the challenge of the single European market in 1992.

In a delicate political balancing act, nonaligned Malta is cultivating closer ties with the West and the European Community while maintaining good relations with the Soviet Union and Libya, its nearest neighbor.

The opposition Maltese Labor Party, which says real freedom only came when the last British servicemen left the island on March 31, 1979, is boycotting the celebrations.

It maintains the independence Malta was given in 1964 was a sham because key areas such as the ports, the only airport, telecommunications and broadcasting remained in British hands.

The Labor Party’s Dom Mintoff, in fact, prolonged the British presence in Malta by seven years by agreeing to lease the base facilities.

But since then both the ruling Nationalist Party of Prime Minister Eddie Fenech Adami and the Labor Party, in a rare show of agreement, have vowed that Malta will never again serve as a foreign military base.

The Nationalists have promised to take Malta into the EC when conditions are right, and Fenech Adami has been to the United States and Britain in search of closer ties and economic help.

The relationship with the United States has not so far delivered the results that many had hoped for, possibly because the Americans are not convinced that things have changed all that much since the days under the Labor Party when Malta had an extremely close relationship with Libya.

While declaring that Malta will never allow itself to be dominated by any one country or bloc, Fenech Adami has neither broken nor scaled down relations established by the Labor government with Libya, 200 miles to the south, other Arab countries and the Soviet Union.

Relations with Libya, a good trading partner for Malta and a high investor on the island, remain excellent. But gone are the days when ties with Libya were so close that Arabic was a necessary requirement for university entry and many a Libyan might have felt Malta was an offshore post of his own country.

Malta faced an uphill task when the British left. It had to find new jobs for the thousands of people who worked for the British forces. It chose the textile industry and tourism and had to start from scratch in both.

Textiles absorbed surplus unskilled labor, and joint ventures with foreign firms later provided management expertise and ready export markets for Maltese goods.

Junior Industry Minister John Dalli has traveled extensively in an effort to attract industrial investment, particularly from Japan and the United States.

A free port and container depot under construction at Marsaxlokk, southwest of Valletta, is designed to re-export third-country goods to Europe, particularly after the 1992 EC single market.

Tourism remains one of the main sources of foreign revenue. Earnings in 1988 totaled more than $290 million and Malta hopes to host a record 800,000 visitors--nearly three times its population--by the end of the year.