Labour limits the damage

It has been reported that the Labour Party tried to stop Reno Calleja from accepting an invitation to ‘star’ on Xarabank the day before yesterday.

Labour’s kingpins were not so much worried about his stand on Libya – after all, people like AST and Karmenu Vella are bound to share it – but worried that he would reveal that stand and put us off.

But Il-Kolonna Tal-Partit Laburista was having none of that.

This was the man who praised the way the Chinese government handled the protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989, when it sent in tanks to mow students down.

He wasn’t going to let a kid like Joseph and an old boiler like Karmenu Vella stand in his way.

In the light of this knowledge, we can frame in its proper context the sudden ‘conversion’ of Joe Grima to champion of the Libyan people, a stance that surprised many. Grima has spent much of the last two weeks telling us, on the internet and on his Super One chat-show, that Gaddafi did good things for Malta, that he paid for our social services, and that he gave us cheap oil.

Where would Malta have been without Gaddafi?

But on Friday, he bent over backwards, if such a thing were possible, to express his horror at the shootings and killings (“X’gharukaza!”), somehow managing to do so without saying Gaddafi’s name: condemning the sin without mentioning the sinner.

Now that we know the Labour Party tried to keep Reno Calleja away from the cameras, we can see that Joe Grima was there to limit the inevitable damage, playing the good cop to Il-Kolonna’s bad cop.

A Labour Party spokesman said after the show: “The party has no intention of getting embroiled in a controversy about Libya, our stand is clear – we share the same national interests. Reno Calleja does not represent the party’s views in any way.”

No intention of getting embroiled in a controversy about Libya? This can only mean that they’re going to stay out of it and say and do nothing while Libya burns. This accounts for the blanket silence and the visits to carnival floats while trying to distract us with peripheral matters like what Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando thinks about divorce.

They’re not saying anything because they don’t want to get ’embroiled’, like the parents of a warring couple refusing to take sides, when what they really are is the alternative government of a country 200 miles away from Libya.

“Our stand is clear,” this unnamed Labour spokesman said. No, I’m afraid that stand is not clear at all, because as with divorce, Labour hasn’t taken one. All we have had from the Labour Party on Libya is the précis of something that Joseph Muscat said on Super One Radio last Sunday: that he condemns the violence, that his party is “collaborating” with the government and that the prime minister “consults” him constantly.

The Labour Party has not been categorical in saying that Gaddafi must go. That is almost certainly because its sentiments on the matter, as with so many other issues, have more in common with EU commissioner John Dalli’s internationally embarrassing stance than with Lawrence Gonzi’s unequivocal one.

When Joseph Muscat finally decides to pop out of the woodwork – or a carnival float – to tell us that the Labour Party’s position is that Gaddafi should go at once and that the Libyan people should receive all the help they want in getting rid of him and achieving their aspirations for freedom, then we shall know where the leader of the Opposition stands on the matter, though we shall not necessarily know where his party does. As with divorce, he might have an opinion which his party does not share. But I doubt it.

“Our stand is clear – we share the same national interests,” this Labour spokesman said. But the stand we are talking about here is not in regard to Malta’s interests but Libya’s and more pertinently, Gaddafi’s. I, for one, am not interested in what the Labour Party thinks about what the government should do with those two Mirage fighter-jets or whether it should have permitted the RAF and other military forces to launch rescue missions from Malta. I have no doubt there were quarrels about that at Mile End, given their multifarious fixations, but they at least had the good sense to understand that arguing against a rescue mission would make them look really bad. So they shut up and spared us, having probably learned a couple of lessons from their ex leader Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici’s handling of the Egyptair hijack in 1985, which led to death and disaster because Labour didn’t want highly trained US commandos rescuing US citizens on Malta’s neutral territory.

But now the Labour Party really needs to tell us what it thinks about Gaddafi. It’s easier to do it now that the entire international community except Hugo Chavez has taken a stand against him, and when it has become obvious that the shootings and killings are not, as our excruciating EU commissioner suggested, faked for CNN.

The Labour Party needs to take a clear stand because of its own particular circumstances. Since Mintoff became prime minister in 1971, it has had a personal and much embroiled – to use its own word – relationship not with Libya as such but with Muammar Gaddafi himself. Gaddafi visited Malta seven times between 1971 and 1984, under Labour’s watch. He addressed at least one Labour Party mass meeting at a time when the government would permit no ‘foreign interference’ and when it went on to arrest and detain an Italian politician who spoke at an Opposition meeting, citing the Foreign Interference Act.

When British prime minister James Callaghan turned down Dom Mintoff’s request that he be in Malta to see the Union flag taken down for good on 31 March 1979 – Callaghan was fighting an election against Margaret Thatcher at the time and put him off in irritation – Mintoff invited Muammar Gaddafi instead and Gaddafi came. It was a symbolic moment for Malta: the Union flag going down while Mintoff watched with the Libyan dictator.

When Joseph Muscat became leader of the Labour Party in the summer of 2008, Karmenu Vella whisked him off to Tripoli within weeks, to introduce him to Gaddafi. Two years later, he took him again, and this time they flew home for free on the dictator’s personal jet, almost certainly the very same one which brought Al Megrahi back from a British jail. They cannot claim not to know the significance of accepting something like this, because a few months earlier they had claimed to be scandalised when the finance minister took a trip on a co-national’s plane.

It is not surprising that the Labour Party prefers to stay silent rather than ‘become embroiled’. That particular word is telling. Labour knows that whatever it says will lead to problems: internal ones if it rejects Gaddafi and external ones if it stands by him or displays the same attitude that John Dalli has done – or Reno Calleja.

A public rejection of Muammar Gaddafi will mean for Labour the undoing in retrospect of a mainstay of its Golden Years, 1971 to 1987, even as it holds an exhibition to celebrate that period. It cannot do this without coming undone itself.

This article is published in The Malta Independent on Sunday today