Confessions of a former minister

Former Labour Minister Joe Grima made a startling confession in his article in last Sunday's The Malta Independent on Sunday.

Ostensibly he was referring to an exchange of e-mails with an old friend, but he thought it worthwhile to recall an incident that emphasised this friendship - an incident that gives more than an inkling of the way Labour used to run Malta before 1987.

At the time of the incident, the former minister's acquaintance was a "long-standing Nationalist" and also a restaurateur while Mr Grima was Minister of Tourism. According to Mr Grima's chilling testimony:

"He suffered from what was a common and frequent misfortune at the time. He had been identified by someone as wiehed minnhom (one of them). The attempt was to ruin him by destroying his business."

Mr Grima's recollections go on: "Like many restaurateurs in the early 1980s, he also employed an Italian chef. His chef was targeted for expulsion and they were harassed beyond belief."

Eventually, Mr Grima who now says that he "couldn't stand that blatant, rampant discrimination between people just because they belonged to a different political faith" managed to avert the chef's expulsion from Malta.

In the process, Mr Grima recalled, he had to endure "a loud shouting match with Mintoff" and "something that was akin to a fist fight with Lorry Sant, who was then Minister of the Interior responsible for work permits".

Mr Grima's "heroics" apart, I think this is the first time that someone has openly admitted that discrimination against Nationalists and political dissenters was a conscious, systematic and organised 'covert policy' of the 1971-1987 Labour administrations.

In this sense, Mr Grima's revelations are a new, documented aspect of our country's political history.

Cynics of my age might well react by asking: "So what's new? This is old hat." Younger citizens might be tempted to stare in disbelief and shrug off the implications with some comment like:

"I wasn't around and therefore I'm not interested."

I beg to disagree. I consider both attitudes to be wrong and unhealthy for the democratic credentials of the country.

The truth is that the myth that political discrimination under Labour was the pursuit of some quixotic fanatic individuals working on their own has now been exploded. There was no such thing.

Mr Grima has confirmed that Nationalists were hounded to ruin as a result of a conscious, concerted effort of the people of the party in Government, the people that were running our country.

Once this obnoxious behaviour of the 1971-87 Labour governments has now been established beyond reasonable doubt, where does the present MLP stand?

To date it still officially glorifies those years and pooh-poohs all accusations of impropriety. It refuses to apologise formally for these misgivings and ignores anyone who expresses himself in the sense that an apology is in order.

The MLP insists on sweeping the murky conduct of its past under the carpet and pretend it never existed.

The Nationalist Party contested the 1987 elections with an electoral programme having national reconciliation as one of its more important goals. Whether this noble objective was attained is a moot point.

Unfortunately, efforts towards reconciliation were not linked with efforts to establish the truth as has happened in South Africa and in some Central and South American countries where, admittedly, much more dastardly crimes were committed under past regimes.

Ironically, not bothering to establish the whole truth about the system of conduct prevailing before 1987 actually undermined the efforts for national reconciliation. Real reconciliation cannot be possible without establishing the truth and everyone recognising it as such.

Some particular cases were investigated either by ad hoc inquiries or by the Commission for Investigation of Injustices. However, the results of these piecemeal efforts could never put together the whole picture.

To be fair, I do not think that during the 22 months that Alfred Sant led a subsequent Labour Government political discrimination was rampant and on the scale of the Mintoff years, although cases of such discrimination did occur in specific instances.

Yet the signals emanating from the MLP leadership since Dr Sant assumed the party leadership have always been ambiguous - attempting to reassure serious voters that the discriminatory sort of conduct of the past will not be repeated while trying to allay the hard-liners who still ache to do more of the same in future.

Looking at it from this angle, the experience of Dr Sant in Government is not very encouraging. Having started off with the idea of a 'new Labour' cut-off from the follies of the past, within a few months he found that he could not really resist the pressure from the old hard-liners who could not visualise a Labour Government behaving differently from the 'established' ways of the bad old Mintoff days.

Post Scriptum. Incidentally, the sort of behaviour described so explicitly by Joe Grima is one of the factors that instigates me to describe the 1971-87 period under Labour as "the bad old Mintoff" years.

I understand that Dom Mintoff himself - who used to refer to dissenters as "enemies of the people" - cannot comprehend why I use this phrase so often.

On my part, of course, I cannot comprehend why he still cannot comprehend...

Even today, so many years since he was prime minister, the truth still seems to be escaping him.