Restless Subjects

Britain's Mediterranean island colonies of Malta and Cyprus are both giving Mother Britain trouble, but in very different ways. Cypriots (or at least a highly vocal percentage of them) want out of the Commonwealth; the Maltese, on the other hand, want to cuddle even closer to the mother country. In some respects, the Maltese desire is more embarrassing.

A delegation of Maltese, headed by 38-year-old Prime Minister Dom Mintoff, was in London last week buttonholing top officials in both British parties. Their goal was to secure seats in the British House of Commons, just like Northern Ireland, which has a government of its own along with representation in the British Parliament. Mintoff also wanted his people (pop. 320,000) to be cut in on the Welfare State.

Such complete integration is an old dream of young Prime Minister Mintoff, son of a onetime British navy cook stationed at Malta's dockyard. A Rhodes Scholar and civil engineer, ambitious young Mintoff has been a leader in Malta's Labor Party since 1936, and Prime Minister since last March. "If I fail in this," he said last week, "I shall resign, and the others will have to govern Malta as best they can."

Faced with the startling notion of accepting a distant relative as an intimate member of the family proper, Britain has tried to allay Malta's demands with a vague plan for government through the Home Office instead of the Colonial Office, but Mintoff will not be fobbed off. "We are prepared to accept all the facts that you accept here in Britain--taxation and all the rest," he told officials last week, "but we can no longer be just a naval base. We are a mature people who want our full constitutional rights, and you cannot treat us as though we were a collection of tribes that are only just coming to learn the ways of government. If we cannot get full integration, we shall quit the Commonwealth and govern ourselves."

Cyprus is different. The majority of its people (400,000) share the Greek language and religion, and feel a far closer kinship with the nearby Greeks than they do with their rulers in distant Great Britain. Bearded Archbishop Makarios has been leading an agitation for enosis (union) with Greece. The 100,000 Turks on the isle prefer British to Greek rule. As for the British, who have made Cyprus their Middle East bastion since evacuating Suez, Churchill's government last year announced that Britain would never leave Cyprus.

Last week Eden's government, giving an inch, announced that invitations had been sent out to both Greece and Turkey to come to London to discuss the problem. Only one point was lacking to make the projected conference a success: the Cypriots themselves were not invited.

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