THIS is the sort of thing that warrants a speech to the nation, by the prime minister
19 June, 1987: Eddie Fenech Adami has been prime minister for just over a month, but still the Labour Party refuses to let go after 16 years in power.
The ministry thugs and dockyard workers who surrounded Labour politicians have spent the day pillaging, ransacking and shooting. They shot at tourists on a bus and tried to set fire to hotels. They rode into Valletta on trucks and dockyard vehicles and looted shops, breaking their windows.
And worst of all, they ransacked the law courts. The mob of Labour Party-sponsored thugs charged in, sacked the halls of the court, smashed the furniture and fixtures, ripped documents from cabinets, tore up as many as they could, and tossed the rest into the street outside, one giant heap of paper just like a Nazi looting.
The police, who still considered themselves to be a limb of the Labour Party and not allowed to touch the thugs but to help and protect them, stood by and did – literally – nothing. They watched as the law courts were sacked.
This was still such early days of the new Nationalist government that Malta still had that absolutely horrible national emblem, the one with the ‘dghajsa’ and the prickly pear. And the Labour Party weren’t having any truck with being in Opposition.
Labour leader Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici did nothing to stop them. On another such ransacking outing to Valletta, I think it was a year earlier, when he was prime minister, he called the violent mob ‘the aristocracy of the workers’.
And now you allow Joseph Muscat to tell you, persuade you even, that those were the Golden Years. And you vote back in some of the very people who allowed that mass of thuggery to come to the fore and who did nothing to stop it, who instead enjoyed it.
Compared to this second ‘address to the nation’ by new prime minister Fenech Adami, Muscat’s second one, broadcast tonight (the first for both was on assuming office, as standard) is absolutely ridiculous and pathetic.
While Fenech Adami speaks of organised thugs shooting tourists on buses and setting fire to hotels, looting shops and ransacking the law courts, Muscat shows us a video of a transgender hairdresser, blow-drying her client’s hair in her salon, and of two men courting on a seaside rock, and tells us that Labour is civil liberties personified.
It’s like the Son of Goebbels telling a transgender Jew to be grateful to the neo-Nazis for allowing her to marry.
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Privitera will soon write in to tell us not to live in the past.
His words were admirable. However, he should have done more to expose Mintoff and KMB for what they were, so that people would have been able to see how they were being fooled and why.
Sadly, that didn’t seem to happen. We never saw a drop in the number of core voters for the PL. Which means, as admirable as Fenech Adami’s words were, they didn’t change much.
How on earth can they change? Wine can turn into vinegar, but vinegar can NEVER turn into wine and those who hope that it can ever happen are only dreaming or wishful thinking.
They can change. However, at the moment they still live in the fairy tale world where you can do what you like once “your” party is in government.
Who knows, now might be the time they realize.
I wonder who those thugs are and where they are now.
I wonder where our present police commissioner was then.
where was he?
The sad fact though is that no Labour-sponsored Mintoffian thug ever ended up behind bars to answer for his actions – thanks to Fenech Adami’s call for ”national reconciliation”.
No wonder there is still so much rancour, more then 25 years after.
I fully agree with your comment. I always maintained that there can be no reconciliation without justice – real justice.
It is why I place Lawrence Gonzi as the best Prime Minister the PN has ever produced and then Eddie Fenech Adami – exactly for this reason – Eddie, with his fixation about reconciliation did a disservice to justice and to Maltese history.
Several Labour thugs were in fact taken to court once the PN came to power but, thanks to the extra five and a half years that the Malta Labour Party (now PL) illegitimately hung on to power, those so prosecuted then had to be released by the court because the charges were time-barred.
I agree. Whenever you read about the theory of conflict resolution, perpetrators being brought to justice is always listed as a necessary step.
Unfortunately, this step was never really taken in Malta, leaving the thugs free to tell future generations that their actions were somehow justified. And thus the myth of the Golden Years being ‘golden’ persists.
I think the situation can be rectified in future when Maltese history is read with more objectivity. I mean, Dominic Fenech is still the Head of the History Department at University; I don’t necessarily doubt his credentials, but I can never trust him – or most Maltese history academics at present – to speak objectively about the Mintoff years.
Well done Daphne for revealing and scrutinizing every single gruesome event that the labour mob performed in the past. It is healthy to remind us, especially the young generation, of what we have gone through in the 80’s !
http://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=relmfu&v=w0pKAtuGY0g
Not much has changed since 1987.
Back then, KMB led the “aristocracy of the workers” for a show in Valletta.
Now, the PM and his wife mingle with the high society and organise shows in Castille and Girgenti.
Let’s not forget the efforts, however unsuccessful, of the late Harold Harrison (then Police Inspector) to halt the rampage.
He paid for it dearly a little while later by having a bomb placed outside his residence in Gzira.
There are still thousands of people who are extremely grateful for his dedication to duty, especially on that day – when, in the words of the then Commissioner of Police to Dr Fenech Adami, “my men let me down”.
Eddie did the right thing to offer the hand of reconciliation. Those of us who lived through those times will know that Malta was a tinderbox waiting to explode.
God knows what arms were secretly squirreled around.
With the police force at best in doubt as to their loyalty (and same for the army), going for the short term satisfaction of retribution would have brought us to the edge.
Having written that, the long arm of the law should have been made to bear down on selected villains in the months that followed, where tempers had cooled down somewhat.
Kemm kien kbir Eddie. No need for acting here.