Distorted truth about the Labour party's past

Those who are familiar with my Cyber Space column in a Sunday paper know how I always encourage the complimentarity of the printed media and the online media. This newspaper is managing to combine the two in an admirable way. That doesn't mean, however, that readers of both types of media are necessarily getting the full picture about each particular debate inspired by a piece of writing.

A stark example is that of the different responses to the article penned by Desmond Zammit Marmara' The Truth About Labour's Past (June 26). No letters appeared here about it. Yet the online version elicited 10 responses. They were mostly critical of the writer, accusing him of attempting to rewrite history about Labour's violent past. One accusation showed that the hurt caused years ago is still acutely felt. So wrote an E Azzopardi: "Desmond you might try to re-write history but you can never erase the fear and dread from our memories".

And there were some poignant reminders to Mr Zammit Marmara that the number of thugs that were allowed to terrorise ordinary people were not "only a small group of Labour supporters who instigated and carried out these acts of violence". There were hundreds of them in Birkirkara on the night the private residence of Eddie Fenech Adami was ransacked. Another point refuted by an online writer was his theory that it was Labour's spectacular victory in 1976 that heralded a period of violent disturbances. Totally untrue. Labour had embraced violence in the 1950s during the integration campaign and persecuted Nationalist supporters who celebrated Independence Day between 1971-76.

What one writer found most objectionable was Mr Zammit Marmara's view that "only two or three ministers, renowned for their violent language and personal retinue of thugs and criminals, who were mostly to blame." If he is so keen to establish the whole truth, why didn't he name these two or three ministers? He opened his article by calling on all Labourites "to be honest about the party's past". Then why doesn't he implore people like Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici, George Vella, Joe Debono Grech, Joe Mizzi and others to come clean about what they knew what was happening around them and why there were no persecutions and why the memory of some failed them so badly, when they gave testimonies in court during prosecutions that were conducted after the 1987 change of government?

Mr Zammit Marmara' has opened a Pandora's box. Does he recall the frame-ups of innocent people? Does he recall how a Gozitan surgeon was marched out of the operating theatre by Labour thugs during the doctors' dispute which lasted 10 years and how this same surgeon was blatantly accused later of abandoning a patient? Does he recall Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici's praising the thugs who ransacked the Curia calling them "the aristocracy of the workers"?

No amount of window-dressing which is being indulged in at present by the love-in guru Joseph Muscat will change Labour's shameful past history. What is needed is true contrition by weeding out those who still militate in the Labour Party today and whose hands are tainted by Labour's violent past. But that would be asking for a real conversion and not for politically convenient gestures.

My appeal to online writers is not to refrain from sending their views to the printed media. After all what appears in this newspaper appears online too but not the other way round.