Apologies out of season

The season for apologies is for them to be made when due. I fully understand Eddie Fenech Adami saying he was still waiting for an apology from the Labour side for Black Monday 1979 when he was Leader of the Opposition and Labour thugs terrorised his family and ransacked his home.

That happened on October 15, the same day when Labour thugs, possibly the same people, attacked and gutted the premises of the Allied Newspapers, run at the time by Mabel Strickland.

Immediately after those events Prime Minister Dom Mintoff sent a letter to Strickland wherein he made an abject apology. Was it enough to heal the wounds opened on Black Monday? Not at all, I'd say. The attack should never have taken place. It represented a grave threat to freedom of journalistic speech and thereby to democracy. But the Prime Minister's duty ran from well before it happened. He knew there were Labour thugs prone to operate outside the law and common decency too.

It was Mintoff's responsibility, in the years that he led the Labour Party, more so when it was in office, to use his political strength and the forces of law and order to weed out violent elements within the party. They were not that many and well enough known. It is impossible they were not known also to the top man.

The Labour leader did not take preventive action. More than that, though he apologised to Strickland he did not do so to Fenech Adami. That is why at a public event on politicians and journalists organised by the Tumas Foundation for Education in Journalism I said that, though I was not in politics at the time (I was head of the Central Bank) as a Labourite I was ashamed that the events of Black Monday took place.

I did that in the context of an address which had just been made by the foundation's invitee, Labour leader Joseph Muscat, after it had hosted the Nationalist leader and Prime Minister, Lawrence Gonzi, weeks earlier. Muscat referred to Black Monday. He said events like those weakened not only the politicians and institutions that suffered from them, but (also) those who carried them out and the party whom the people perceived that they represented.

He recalled that years ago as a journalist he had interviewed Archbishop Joseph Mercieca. The Archbishop, said the PL leader, had shown a great sense of historical responsibility (by) excusing himself for what Labourites had suffered during the 1960s.

Muscat said that as soon as he was elected Labour leader he had made a historic apology to those who might have been hurt by people who used the Labour Party and then cast it aside, leaving the party to bear the blot of their actions.

"I repeat that today, 30 years after incidents I referred to," he said, "because I honestly believe that people of goodwill, wherever they may be, agree with me that those events should never have happened".

Placed in context, that was nothing short of an apology. But the Nationalist leader doesn't think so. Responding to a dig by the Labour leader that the Nationalists too had their apologies to make, on Sunday Gonzi shouted out a list of Labour shortcomings, ironically demanding whether it was for them that the PN should apologise.

The rhetorical questions played to the gallery betrayed not a little effort by the PN leader to draw fire away from his beleaguered government, including for the failure of the Finance Minister and himself to apologise for the fact that, when the minister had travelled private to a football match in Spain, he had technically breached the ministerial code of ethics, though he did nothing else that should impugn his integrity.

That aside, it doesn't seem to cross the PM's mind that the Nationalists might have a little apology of their own to make for profiting from the interdict and mortal sin imposed on the MLP by Archbishop Michael Gonzi, to win the elections of 1962 and 1966, and for the fact that there were Nationalists who were not at all pleased that the Church signed a peace concordat with the MLP before the election of 1971, which was duly won by Labour.

On a personal note, entering the House of Representatives for the first time after a by-election gave me a seat in 1962, I was deliberately kicked hard in the shin by a well-known PN activist who rose from the Strangers' Gallery to do so. Delighted by my evident pain he rushed downstairs to boast to the police and whoever else could hear him that he had savagely kicked a Labour MP, identifying me by my physical difference ("Il-**** x'daqqa ta' sieq tajtu lil dak ta' bla driegh!").

Nobody from the PN ever offered me an apology during the 47 years that have elapsed from that date. Good thing I didn't hold my breath waiting for one. General apologies, like those of Mercieca and Muscat, do not beget general absolution. So what does the absence of an apology to one individual matter, huh?