Anti-Immigrant Publicity Stunt Lands Italian Xenophobe Separatists in the Drink

Matteo Salvini of Italy’s Northern League (Lega Nord) political party often likes to point out that Lombards like himself and the League’s founder, Umberto Bossi, are not really Mediterranean people but Anglo-Saxon—Nordic, even.  That may be, but last week Salvini proved to the world that he’s no Thor Heyerdahl.

According to Maltese media, seven League members, including Salvini, who is the party secretary, had to be rescued from the Mediterranean by the tiny Republic of Malta’s navy.  They were in the midst of a publicity stunt to prove how easy it was for undocumented “boat people” from Tunisia to illegally emigrate to Italy.  But their small rubber dinghy’s engine caught fire.  After the fire was put out, one of the crew fired a distress flare but held the flare gun the wrong way around and fired it into the boat instead.  The craft capsized and all seven had to be rescued by a Maltese military vessel.

Matteo Salvini, Northern League secretary, with a Padanian flag

The Northern League was founded in Lombardy in the 1980s and now has party branches throughout the northern third of Italy, pushing for greater autonomy for the regions and eventually independence from the south as a Federal Republic of Padania.  The League was an unlikely junior partner in Silvio Berlusconi’s ruling coalition, but when Berlusconi was swept out of office in 2011 in the wake of the European currency crisis, the League found itself fighting for its political life.  As a consequence, it chose to amplify the nascent xenophobia that runs through the movement.  One Northern League senator from Lombardy, Roberto Calderoli, last year infamously compared Italy’s minister for integration, Cécile Kyenge—an immigrant who was born in the Democratic Republic of the Congo—to “an orangutan.”  And Bossi has been known to refer to Africans as “bingo-bongos.”

Umberto Bossi, founder of Lega Nord

“Instead of covering themselves with glory,” a Maltese newspaper said, “they only succeeded in covering themselves with ridicule.  And they actually proved that it is easy for sea trips of this sort to end in tragedy—and in Malta, where neither they nor asylum seekers want to land.”

Perhaps the adventure will teach Salvetti and his colleagues a little more sympathy for those who risk life and limb to provide for their families by emigrating to Italy.  But probably not.

The Viking seafaring genes must have skipped the Lombards.

[For those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with a forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements, Independence Struggles, Breakaway Republics, Rebel Provinces, Pseudostates, Puppet States, Tribal Fiefdoms, Micronations, and Do-It-Yourself Countries, from Chiapas to Chechnya and Tibet to Texas.  Look for it some time in mid 2014.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.]

Obituary: Dom Mintoff (1916-2012), Who Ushered the Republic of Malta into Being

Media reported this past week on the death, on August 20th, at age 96, of Dominic “Dom” Mintoff, who was the 8th Prime Minister of Malta—first, from 1955 to 1958, when it was a Crown Colony of the United Kingdom, and again from 1971 to 1984, during which time he ushered the five-year-old independent commonwealth domain into its new status as a republic with no ties to the U.K.

A tiny, ancient archipelago, the reputed home (the Maltese island Gozo is presumed to be what the ancients called Ogygia) of Calypso from Homer’s Odyssey, as well as the isle on whose shores St. Paul the Apostle was shipwrecked, was Phoenician, Greek, Roman, Norman, Italian, and French, before the U.K. wrested it from Napoleon in 1814.  At 122 square miles, it is the 9th-smallest independent state in the world.

Odysseus had a grand old time in Malta.

Dominic Mintoff—known as Duminku Mintoff in Maltese (a dialect of Arabic using the Roman alphabet and heavily lexified by Italian, English, and other languages)—was born in Conspicua, Malta, in 1916, one of nine children, to a devout Catholic family.  (Malta, an Apostolic See, is 98% Catholic—though Mintoff later became a combative nuisance to the Church).  He was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University in England and in the 1940s returned to his homeland to enter politics, as a socialist in the Labour Party.  He was instrumental in rebuilding Malta after the pummeling it took in the Second World War.

St. Paul the Apostle didn’t have nearly as much of a grand old time in Malta as Odysseus had.
Then again, read the New Testament: Paul didn’t know how to party.

When Malta became independent from the U.K. in 1964, but still as a Commonwealth domain with Queen Elizabeth II as its head of state, Mintoff boycotted the independence celebrations.  Taking power in 1971, he did everything he could to limit British cultural, economic, and political influence in Malta, even going so far as to ban the Times of London.

The flag of the Republic of Malta

Finally, in 1974, Prime Minister Mintoff succeeded in establishing a Republic of Malta, and when the military agreement with the U.K. ended in 1979, he sent Her Majesty’s armed forces packing, never to return.  Aid from Italy and—less felicitously—the People’s Republic of China and Moammar al-Qaddafi’s dictatorship in Libya helped plug the economic hole the British left behind.  Malta joined the European Union (E.U.) in 2004 and the Euro Zone in 2008, but never the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

Moammar al-Qaddafi and Dom Mintoff celebrating
the departure of the last British troops from Malta in 1979.

Mintoff’s state funeral was held August 25, 2012.

[Also, for those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with a forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements, Independence Struggles, Breakaway Republics, Rebel Provinces, Pseudostates, Puppet States, Tribal Fiefdoms, Micronations, and Do-It-Yourself Countries, from Chiapas to Chechnya and Tibet to Texas.  Look for it in spring 2013.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.]