Il-Kolonna: the true voice of the Labour Party, which cannot be silenced
Reno Calleja - one of Joseph Muscat's fresh new faces
Reno Calleja, once known as Il-Kolonna tal-Partit Laburista, is one of the old dinosaurs who has been welcomed into Il-Partit ta’ Joseph. And now he just won’t keep quiet.
The Labour Party has made some attempt at distancing itself from his statements about Libya and Gaddafi, but I sense that he is the party’s true voice, except that he won’t obey orders to keep quiet, like the rest of them.
They’re annoyed because he’s showing them up. Here he is again on timesofmalta.com:
Reno Calleja – Today, 15:26
many people were moved to support the intervention by Nato because the world was told that the Ghadafi forces were killing civilians.
But now it is the Nato strikes that are killing civilians in Tripoli, including women and children.
The U.N. resolution 1973 says nothing of regime change. Yet Obama, Cameron and Sarkozy, for their own selfish interest , wants Ghadafi and his family to go.
The supposedely people’s struggle has been taken over by foreign military intervention.
This ensures that whatever regime comes next , it will always be dependend of the U.S., France and the U.K.
Witness what is happening in the Ivory Coast. The supporters of Watara are killing and burning alive hundreds of men, women and children that supported Gbagbo. Will they take Watara before the Criminal Court of Justice now? Off course not.
That is exactly what would happen if Benghazi manages to enter Sirte and Tripoli. The indiciplined and disorganized rebels will butcher thousands of Ghadafi supporers.
I am sure that the U.S., the U.K.,. France and yes even the U.N. will turn their eyes somewhere else.
That is why the Ghadafi tribe and the other tribes that support them will fight to the last man before giving up the battle. That is why it is going to be a long bloody war which will drag for years. That is why Libja can be turned into another Somalia.
Reno Calleja
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Is Reno Calleja from the Gaddafi tribe?
Le
Ghaliex ghandna nemmnuk, Gaddafi? Fejn nafu li l-Kolonna mhux il-Hames Kolonna, il-Fifth Column?
RENO CALLEJA I used to read your comments on the time magazine when I was in the M navy I always enjoyed your comments with your comments lot of people around the know that there is MALTA thank you RENO.
Who is this guy? Does he really form part of the Mlp? I’m in my mid twenties and I never heard about him.
How do you mean “who is this guy”? He is a “kolonna tal-partit Laburista,” who, by the time you were born, had already been more than a couple of times to China, and has now been there at least 27 times at the last count.
ini – Reno Calleja was also one of the prominent faces of Labour in the 1970s and 1980s, which says quite a bit about him.
Respect this guy. He was shadow-driving tanks in Tiananmen when you were still an embryo. RESPECT!
Therein lies the issue. A lot of people your age don’t remember any of these names. It’s been a long time, every now and then I hear of this guy or that guy stressing some fine point of New Labor doctrine and then I realize it’s the same thug who was indicted for beating someone senseless for looking crosseyed at ‘is-Salvatur’ (ask around for who that is) just like you see on CNN reporting on Syria or Bahrain. That was Malta, buddy! Looks like it could be again.
@Tom
I absolutely agree with you Tom. However I blame PN for lettiing things disappear from memory lane and also for not updating the new generation with things of Labour’s past. Which by the way is not different from Labour Progressive. Does the figure 35,000 remind anyone of anything?
Does he have a criminal record?
@ e.muscat
Why do we always have to blame the PN for our own short memory? Each and every citizen has a duty to get to know the history of his country and to develop an analytic and critical mindframe.
Secondly, there should be a professional take on things; trying our hand at some form of objectivity – rather than perpetuating this duopoly we love so much. Why do we have to continue believing that only the PN and the PL are in a position to keep the political memory of us citizens alive? I guess this is just another facet of our island mentality where Joe Citizen expects the government to do everything, from providing him a wage to doing all the thinking.
Finally, it seems that you do not tune in regularly to Radio 101 if you think that the PN does nothing in this respect. The daily programme aired from 17:00 till 18:00 is replete with anecdotes of all the excesses from 1971 until 1987. Of course, this is nowhere near professional and investigative. However, the PN is just another political party and their forte would also be propaganda rather than historical commentary.
Well Reno Callejja tried to justify the the Tienanmen Square massacre in Bejing; he has been a fellow-traveller of the Communist Chinese Government since Dom Mintoff established diplomatic relations just after the 1971 elections.
@ini
You don’t know how lucky you are!
I fully concur with you, William Grech. It’s about time historians take on the seventies and eighties. Problem is, when they do attempt to do so, they’re stopped in their tracks. When Henry Frendo’s programme “Storja Minn Wara l-Kwinti” aired on TVM some years ago, was about to deal with the subject, it was dropped.
I forgot to add this but he doesn’t seem a lot like a NEW face for me.
Are you sure that’s his FACE in the picture?
It’s called irony, my friend.
If I remember correctly, he was asked to resign when he was a Labour minister in the late seventies. After that he was kicked out of the party, until Muscat appeared on the scene and began to accept all the Kolonni tal Passat, including AST.
I don’t think Calleja was ever “kicked out of the party”. He practically disappeared from the political scene during the Sant years, but has now lately a very partial comeback.
I was probably born too late to know about this. If I understand well you mean this Reno guy was kicked out of the MLP forty years ago?
Allow me to ask, what does “AST” mean? Thanks.
Alex Sceberras Trigona. You have A LOT of reading to do, ini – you’d best start trying to catch up.
About Reno, Ini can start here.
http://www.cpaffc.org.cn/yszz/detaile.php?subid=1340&id=503
Daphne had a post about this recently.
AST means Alex Sceberras Trigona
I’m younger than you but AST stands for Alex Sceberras Trigona – some MLP guy, ex foreign minister maybe? Not too sure.
And buddy – you understand ‘correctly’, not ‘well’
For Christ’s sake, do some reading. I’m roughly your age and I know who Sceberras Trigona is. Never heard of the Madrid CSCE summit, or HMS Brazen?
Are you University students, by any chance?
Can sombody inform us why he was demoted from minister.
Labourites, but especially Calleja, are obsessed with tribes. According to them, what’s happening in Libya is just a tribal conflict, because, you know, Libyans are not “urbanised” like us, not fully civilised, as it were.
True …. HOWEVER Arab society is still largely tribal in many places where the desert terrain is predominant. The only notable big exceptions are Egypt & Iraq. But even here clan dictat (reminiscient of tribes) is the rule.
Ask any anthropologist. Few examples will prove the point: Syria & Yemen. The former’s present president is from the Alawite sect which is a peculiar mountain related religion that thrived in the mountain chains close to the Mediterrenean & Lebanon.
All key posts in the Syrian goverment are held by Alawites. So the revolt of the Syrian people is in a certain way also a revenge against the Alawites. It is the same story in Yemen. Even tiny Bahrain has something similar.
Labour’s kolonni make these sweeping statements in a pejorative sense unaware that the socio-anthropological considerations do not in any way diminish the legitimate cries for freedom of these people.
The flare-up in Bahrain is very different to that in North-Africa: an Iran-backed Shiite insurgency against the ruling Sunni monarchy. Whoever said the West should have intervened in Bahrain because it intervened in Libya doesn’t know what he is saying.
God help us when this lot get in .
It’s a fair perspective. And mostly factual. The very fact that you’re so astounded by it only underlines your extreme bias and betrays a highly skewed, emotion-led view of the unfolding mess.
What Reno Calleja points out in this short comment holds much more than what any politician has chosen to say so far.
What facts, kev? Is it a fact that the international coalition is doing this for selfish interest? How is that a fact? Is it a fact that NATO strikes are killing civilians? And are they doing this intentionally?
Is it a fact that Ouattara (not Wattara!) will not prosecute members of his forces who have comitted crimes? Can he even do this if he wants unity in his country?
You (PL) as if you’re some kind of miltary experts, when you know nothing. You all speak right through the nape of your necks…and if you’re right about Reno why don’t you egg him on to take over the leadership of the PL?
You’re getting worse by the minute, but we can all thank God for small favours. You’re becoming less and less relvant, kev. But keep it up. It is your sanctimonious right to express yourself – a right, the enjoyment thereof we don’t owe to you or your ilk.
Dr Calleja, in international politics, as you might know, there are very few instances of “facts”. Instead, there is always an abundance of interpretations.
Even though I find kev, and his better half even more than him, unlikeable, I must say that the interpretation that the coalition is acting unselfishly cannot be put forward as a fact. It is just that, an interpretation.
Facts are provable. How can you prove that someone is motivated by selfishness or selflessness? These are imponderables.
(Now, some savvy Village People fan here will tell me that I’m being philosophical or something like that… Pazienza!)
On the other hand, it seems to make a lot of sense to suspect that Sarkozy is not exactly immaculate in its enthusiasm to see Gaddafi go… at least the Italians realized this… and remember, is takes a thief to catch one.
HIS enthusiasm
IT takes
(sorry)
So what’s a fact, Etienne? That Western motivations are altruistic?
The fact is that international community acted upon the insistence of the Libyan Freedom Fighters. They were so reluctant to act that it was almost too late.
If that is the action of a state, or states, seeking their own self-interest, then I don’t know. One thing is certain however. If mine is an interpretation that the coalition is acting due to an overwhelming humanitarian need, then so is the assumption that it is acting out of an imperliast zeal to reap benefits after the crisis resolves.
And I’m sorry to disagree, Min Weber. There is an abundance of fact in international politics, you just have to know how to look for them and see facts for what they are. And just because one is interpreting doesn’t mean the facts aren’t there. In fact Reno Calleja isn’t interpreting, he’s assuming – which is vastly different. Facts are not ‘provable’…they are self-evident and of themselves require no proof! The way you go about, not proving but detemining, that the coalition is not acting out of self–inerest is by observing their behaviour and the level of their intervention. Compare what is going on now, and the approach on Libya, with that taken by the US on Iraq. That ought to be clear enough.
And this is not about whether one has skeletons in his cupboard or not. Whether Sarkozy could pass for St. Francis of Assisi or not is beside the point. The point here is Ghaddafi and the fact that he’s got to go. It’s not about the West, its about him. Period.
What did I say earlier? You’re beholden to the glory days of Mintoff.
Kev, if you dissect the piece you should realise that Reno is quite happy happy to allow the Gaddafi lot to kill and torture but hey those cretins from Benghazi , Misurata, Zawija , Zintan etc fighting for their lives now that that is an other story.
On what basis have both of you (you are in agreement) decided that for a fact Nato is indiscriminately killing civilians?
A lot of the support is coerced. The foreign press is sick to death of staged protests. Don’t tell me you have not noticed. On what criteria are both of you drawing an analogy between Libya, Somalia and the Ivory Coast?
The demographics are different and each is a case study in their own rightful context. ‘ A supposedly peoples uprising, ‘ is a shameful way of describing events. Kev, you are entrenching your support firmly within an ideological mindset that should of been ditched years ago. Sadly Joseph has not consigned our rubbish to history .
yor/malta & La Redoute – which part did you miss out? That it’s a fair perspective and mostly factual? Or is it that this blog’s perspective is extreme? And did Reno Calleja not say more than any other local politico?
Please do read and understand the text before releasing your knee-pin. And keep in mind that yours is an extreme (and highly simplistic) view with which not even the allied forces can agree since their objectives differ to yours.
What did I say earlier? You’re beholden to the glory days of Mintoff.
Calleja has nothing to say about civilian life under Gaddafi, nor does he venture an opinion about whether Gaddafi should stay or go – though we can surmise he’d agree with the former.
And that, Kev, is a fact.
The progressive PL is beginning to look more and more like the Roman Forum.
I would have preferred to hear some views about what Mr Calleja SAID. If you disagree with his message say why. If you do not like Mr Calleja I do not care…..dawn qadba moghoz.
Here’s a view of what Mr Calleja said. He’s firmly in the fold of the cynics who criticise action against Gaddafi “because civilians are being killed”. Like those other cynics, he has nothing to say about the civilians killed by and because of Gaddafi – just as he has nothing to say about the thousands killed by the Chinese regime.
Cynic = Ancient Greek Philosopher. A member of a sect of ancient Greek Philosophers who beleived that virtue is the only good and that the only means of achieving it is self control. You little fool, you did not pay enough attention in school. I would have thought that Mr Reno Calleja might be more of the Confucian type..
@Mario P. Sciberras
That’s ‘Cynic’ with a capital C. Reno Calleja is a cynic with a small ‘c’ – a person who (and I quote this for convenience, not because I assume you didn’t pay attention at school) believes the only motivation is self-interest and whose outlook is scornful and habitually negative.
Do any of you know what democracy means?
He talks of Libya in terms of regime.
Go figure.
He thinks all governments should rule with iron fist.
Any dissent should be met with force including prison without trial and torture.
Using his own rules, Gonzi is in power.
He is in dissent.
So he won’t mind if Gonzi locks him up and tortures him.
And if anyone bothers to ask why Gonzi has locked him up, the answer should be that:
1. contrary to the advice of the Leader of the Opposition, he has not been “prudent”;
2. he has spoken out in favour of the Gaddafi tribe, and therefore has not “protected the national interest”;
3. by favouring Gaddafi in the open, and not saying that he is “inevitably on the way out”, he has compromised Malta’s “militarily neutral” “position” (do not try looking that up in the Kama Sutra, as La Redoute has suggested);
4. and finally, by defending the Gaddafi regime, he has not taken the “side of life.”
Quite some heavy charges.
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20110416/local/Hundreds-of-jobs-at-stake-if-Libya-crisis-drags-on.360519
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20110416/local/Italian-secret-service-expects-migrant-wave.360518
Why bother to silence “il-Kolonna”? It would be such a shame. I find him so entertaining. Pity there aren`t more clowns of his type around to make us laugh.
Tahseb?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DJ34MOu_yQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPblq3NWHKY
Ghandek ragun! There a few others. What a circus!
“The supposedely people’s struggle ”
Where does this guy live? It is most definitely the people’s struggle with the UN imposing the no-fly zone in order to ensure Gaddafi stops killing them, you fool!
I don’t care who is Reno Calleja, but what he stated is the truth. The fly-zone intervention was proved fruitless and unless the rebels are given weapons to match Gaddhafi’s (weapons sold to him by our democracies !!!)they don’t stand a chance to topple him. We have been listening to “Gaddhafi must go” for the last two months but he is still in power.
How was the no-fly zone ‘proved fruitless’? The whole point of it was to prevent Gaddafi’s forces attacking from the air.
The main reason that Gaddafi is still there is because China and Russia oppose the action needed to remove him.
Doesn’t the Partit tal-Progressivi realise that Reno Calleja and his has-been buddies are more akin to the other Kolonna planted in the Luqa roundabout?
Kolonna wants to impress – that’s all. Sometimes he gets a free holiday to China to break his boredom in Zurrieq.
You are right. And after his contribution reproduced by Daphne above, he is likely to get some free trips to Tripoli too very soon, courtesy of Gaddafi.
People like Reno Calleja like dictatorships because that is their mentality and made for their success in Maltese politics.
When I read ” the fly-zone intervention was proved fruitless” I am lost for words.
The predicament of the one million Benghazi residents one month back has already been forgotten.
No wonder the fifteen-year onslaught by the MLP government on poor Malta has also been forgotten. That was thirty years ago in the pliocene period.
What is unbelievable is that the MLP ever got the order of the boot in a country where crass ignorance abounds.
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20110416/local/nato-redirects-vessel-which-left-malta-for-tripoli.360602
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20110416/local/Italian-secret-service-expects-migrant-wave.360518
“Mr Malcolm Seychell
Today, 15:45
Let them come. We betrayed Gaddafi.”
This is the best of the worst !
A rrue Communist! One of the cavaliers who sold our country to Libya in the seventies during Mintoff’s regime. This is what the Labour Party is still made of, but then looking closely at the Nationalist administration, they have done absolutely nothing but talk about the Libyan crisis, in the hope that it will go away.
Like our cowardly Italian neighbours who employ their resources in bullying us over an immmigration dispute, our politicans seem to distance themselves from the situation. Initially they hid behind the neutrality excuse and now the fact that we are too small to contribute.
However small we are, we are not too small to sit on the EU benches and stamp our feet for the sixth seat in parliament or to purchase one of the largest landmark buildings in Brussels to show our prominence in the EU.
We are only small when it suits us best and is most convieniant and when we prefer not to soil our hands, allow others to do the dirty work and expect to reap the benefits later!
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20110416/local/nato-redirects-vessel-which-left-malta-for-tripoli.360602
“Mr mark johnson
Today, 09:44
Just because Gaddafi kills people who don’t agree with him is not a good enough reason to stop Malta making a profit out of selling him stuff.”
Yes and not one word of argument!
It seems the more outrageous the racist drivel you spout on there, the more they lap it up.
“The more they change, the more they remain the same”.
This well-known quote was uttered by Evarist Bartolo the day after Joseph Muscat was elected party leader.Troglodytes like Calleja are a daily reminder of just how right Bartolo was.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-13110163
Truth be told, we brought it on ourselves, what with our PM and foreign minister’s Catholic posturing.
Speaking in London during the Libya conference hosted by the British government, Foreign Minister Tonio Borg stressed Malta’s humanitarian vocation, and also mentioned the country’s preparedness to host injured civilians.
Dr Borg pledged to do so and repeated his promise in Libya’s crisis conferences; however nothing has materialised. I refuse to believe that Dr Borg would renege on his promise if it were strongly endorsed by Dr Gonzi. So far there has been silence and if there have been any negotiations, nothing was made public.
Malta needs to differentiate between Sub-Saharan Africans coming to our shores for a better life and injured Libyans wounded in Misurata bombardments, who desperately need medical attention. Our country failed miserably in this humanitarian crisis affecting our neighbouring country.
We need to start evacuating injured Libyans in need of medical care. We will give them the necessary treatment and send them back.
We need to empathise with this country; we have Karin Grech and St Luke’s hospitals which we can temporarily use without jeopardizing the workload in Mater Dei Hospital. We also have St Philip’s hospital which we can rent.
What is stopping us? Money, human resources or selfishness and stupidity.
…and we can also use Ta’ Bighi and Lazzerett, or the Comino… never mind.
But seriously, were there any calls for help in this regard? Perhaps the injured are not as many as they would have us believe.
Perhaps Kev could do something useful – like reporting back on casualties from battle zones (no, Kev, not the one in the Brussels suburbs).
I feel young again, not because of a magic potion, but reading Mr Calleja’s words have made me relive an emotion mostly felt when I was young.
The English he used is abysmal. Can’t he hire a proof-reader to review his opinion pieces before they see light of day? It makes him look so amateurish.
His opinion piece in Monday’s L-Orizzont is shocking.
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20110419/local/Beware-of-extremism-Barroso-warns.361293
Maybe Barroso had a peep at the posts on timesofmalta.com !
Nothing related to this article but I think you might like this link http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/85591
It seems that Joseph Muscat is turning the PL into a far-right party. I don’t know whether you managed to watch him on Super One yesterday but certain comments were xenophobic to say the least.
If you read two particular letters in L-orizzont today you can see that this xenophobic message is getting through to the starving masses.
Disgusting