Pawns on a chessboard

You move the different pawns only as it suits your ultimate targets. From one corner of the board you move to the other, occasionally in a straight line, occasionally diagonally, sometimes through more complex manoeuvres, sometimes even by sacrificing one of your own pawns trying to make bigger gains later. When it is only a game of chess, no one is hurt, but the Labour Party is treating our country as one chessboard. It tries to move its own people on that board as it deems fit, treating them like pawns on a board.

Two recent episodes make the point. Only this week the Labour Party manoeuvred its pawns on the board to bring about the resignation of Cospicua mayor Paul Muscat. He was given a Hobson's choice: either resign or your own Labour colleagues will propose a vote of no confidence in you.

It was all worked out by the Labour Party machine - pawns called to order, given instructions on how to proceed, pressurised to do what the party expects of them, to bring down their own former champion and colleague. Before handing in his letter of resignation last Monday, Mr Muscat said that in the present circumstances he had no alternative but to resign since "a number of those who used to support him felt that he no longer enjoyed their trust."

The chess game goes back a couple of years when the Labour Party's Vigilance and Disciplinary Board had behind closed doors "investigated" allegations of tampering by Mr Muscat with the internal party vote that had elected Dr Alfred Sant as leader in 1992 even though it was Lino Spiteri who won the first round of the leadership race.

The Vigilance Board in its wisdom concluded that there was no tampering and that the comments made by Mr Muscat himself about tampering were only meant originally to hurt Mr Spiteri and later to annoy Dr Sant since Mr Muscat had not agreed with his imposition of hefty water and electricity bills when he was Prime Minister.

As a result, the Vigilance and Disciplinary Board had barred Mr Muscat from representing the party in any capacity. Mr Muscat since then became the independent mayor of Cospicua. Previous attempts to force Labour councillors to oust the mayor and replace him with a person who could still represent the party failed. The councillors knew that the mayor enjoyed broad consensus, was working very hard for Cospicua and was an achiever. As a minister in close contact with most local councils and who has in particular built a strong and positive relationship with all councils in the Cottonera area, I can personally attest to Mr Muscat's relentless drive and energy in favour of Cospicua. My last meeting with him was at the tail end of an official visit by President de Marco in Cospicua on June 6.

We went into the mayor's office and commented on the slogan he had chosen: "Malta ta' kulhadd imma Bormla taghna". (Malta belongs to all of us but Bormla is ours). It displays a particular love to the town that nurtured him and to which he proudly belongs.

He would never miss an opportunity to lobby for more funds, further projects and commitments in favour of Cospicua. Considering the innumerable occasions that he successfully lobbied for Cospicua with me, I shall never doubt his love for his town. Nor shall I never entertain any doubt that Paul was, is and will remain as staunch a Labourite as they come!

And yet none of all this matters to the Labour Party. When one of the Labour councillors referred to his resignation as "a heartbreak" and praised his work, Mr Muscat could not help remarking that he was surprised that the other councillors were heaping praise on him and yet had threatened to pass a vote of no confidence in him! He could have told them: With friends like these who needs enemies?

The same Labour councillor remarked that the time was ripe for Cospicua to have a Labour mayor. No matter how much they deny it, a change of heart does not come about without some one making sure that the change comes about.

The Labour councillors had until last week defied their party and refused to bring down Paul Muscat. More pressure prevailed and they knew what they had to do on the chessboard. They had to bring in checkmate position their former leader. He would either resign or face a vote of no confidence.

The Labour Party has shown that it does not care about local councils. As far as it is concerned, they are not there to be of service to the people. If they believed that, they would have never removed a person who worked hard in favour of his town. The Labour Party cares only about itself. It had to settle its scores with one of its own. Whether or not he tampered with the vote at the election of the party leader, he was not to make any comments about it! Whatever the party leader as Prime Minister deemed fit to impose in his wisdom between 1996 and 1998, Paul Muscat was not to comment! Truly a case of theirs is not to reason why, but to do and die.

At the right moment, the party machine struck back and whatever Bormla may or not need, Paul Muscat is no longer its mayor. Last Monday it was payback time.

The persons who plot the moves on a chessboard, do not care about how the pawns are forced to move about.

The other episode that cannot be left unnoticed is how the Labour Party handled their mayor in Birzebbuga, Joe Farrugia. Another staunch Labourite, but as far as the Labour Party machine could be concerned, here was another pawn to be moved about the chessboard as the machine deems fit.

Joe, or as more popularly known among the residents of Birzebbuga, and beyond Rikki, approached Peppi Azzopardi and the Xarabank team to have a programme put up with regard to the proposal that Benghajsa could be one of the sites to be considered to have an engineered landfill.

In identifying this site as a possibility before any final decision is taken is no whim of the present government, much less some bad dream I had over the past months. The place was already identified three times over in a report presented in 1997 to Dr George Vella when he was Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs and the Environment. Nowhere did he state that he disagreed with the report, even if he did not do anything about it!

But as far as Rikki and all of the Birzebbuga councillors are concerned, the issue was that they wanted to protest against the proposal irrespective of whoever made it! The Xarabank team accepted their suggestion and began preparations with the local council to put up a programme on this subject. Film clips were prepared, including an interview with the mayor on site, and the local council even distributed tickets to persons in the area who wanted to turn up for the programme - as indeed they did, equipped with protest posters!

When the Labour Party discovered that a mayor within their fold was about to participate in the Xarabank panel to discuss the issue, he was forced to boycott the very programme that he had suggested himself! He told The Malta Independent that the decision was taken after the four other (Labour) councillors held a meeting at MLP headquarters two days before Xarabank went on the air. Persons in the know have told me how at that meeting words were expressed to the effect that the Labour Party was hurt by the Birzebbuga mayor's decision to participate in the programme.

The end result: the pawn was forcibly moved off the programme floor and rendered incomprehensible to the very residents he forcibly wished to defend. In retaliation the Birzebbuga Labour mayor is boycotting Labour Party events, including his leader's activity in the area the following Sunday.

Last week, in Parliament, Dr Vella rose on a point of order to tell me that "no one had exercised pressure on him (Mr Farrugia) not to take part in Xarabank"! How does such a statement tally with what the Labour Mayor himself declare? Who is telling the truth?

Any person, ministers particularly included, taking part in Xarabank knows it is no joy ride. You have to accept being grilled for a couple of hours and the audience present participates pro-actively! It is clear that the Labour Party is afraid of that kind of grilling and has ordered all its activists to steer clear of the programme. The Labour mayor of Birzebbuga would have handled it well but the machine forced him to tow the line with other activists and stay away!

If Labour treats its own activists as pawns to manoeuvre and handle at will, one does not have to be too intuitive to imagine how it would go about running the country. Our memory of the way it governed the country from 1996 to 1998 is clear enough, and what it is now doing with its pawns on the chessboard adds further clarity to our recent recollections.