Memento of internees

The controversial subject about the exile of the internees during the last war has returned with different and sometimes opposite views being expressed.

Some correspondents in the past have claimed that, before the last war, various notable members of the Nationalist Party were fascist sympathisers, a statement unlikely to be true as one of the main concerns of the Nationalist Party at the time was solely the preservation of Italian culture which had been part of Maltese history for centuries. However, if some Nationalists had a professed sympathy for Fascism, they seem to have belonged to quite a select company.

To the list of fascist sympathisers one should perhaps add the names of Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, R. Kipling and other personalities who, with their lavish praise of the Fascist regime, perhaps unwittingly, contributed to bolster Mussolini's ego to the extent that, by the late 1930s, he began to believe that he was infallible and turned into an irrepressible megalomaniac.

For a number of years, at least until the middle 1930s, Fascism offered what looked like a respectable face. Rightly or wrongly, to many it represented the answer to the dreaded menace of international Communism. After World War I, the fear that Communism, following its success in Russia, would gain a stronghold in central and western Europe was a dreaded and real one. That was the main reason why Fascism took off in Italy. Churchill was reported to have said: "Mussolini has shown us how to stop the expansion of Communism".

A Nationalist politician, at the time of the Commonwealth conference in Malta in 2005, suggested that the Queen should apologise for the injustice committed by the British authorities against the internees. As the Queen had nothing to do with this episode, this particular demand was out of place and would have only soured relations with Britain and marred the proceedings of  a successful Commonwealth Conference.

All nations at some time or another in their history have committed acts of injustice and wrongdoing and, as power corrupts, perhaps the more power a nation wielded the more misdeeds it was likely to commit. To expect countries to apologise to each other for past sins is unrealistic. Surely an interminable interchange of  apologies would block the international communication system for years. The ultimate apology should perhaps be addressed to the Almighty who understands and forgives human frailties.

According to legal experts, the exile of the internees to Uganda was an illegal act. No matter how many photographs of smiling internees were published by the papers, there was an infringement of the law by the authorities of that period. Incidentally, with reference to the incident on the ship Breconshire when a naval officer threatened the internees at pistol point, I was told that a niece of Sir Arturo confronted the captain of the Breconshire at the bar of the Union Club and, in front of every one present, gave him a piece of her mind about his deplorable conduct: a well deserved retribution.

It is interesting also to note  that New Zealand officers and soldiers, assigned to guard the internees while they were in Egypt, were baffled and could not understand why on earth they were brought all the way from New Zealand to guard a bunch of "perfect gentlemen".

I feel that a public memento should be erected to record the plight and sufferings of the internees and their families.