The banalisation of democracy

On the night of December 5, 1986, my father was attending the graduation party held for José Herrera when news reached him that there had been an incident at the Gudja Nationalist Party club.

Today’s motion is an affront to the work by successive home affairs ministers of Nationalist governments who have done their utmost to raise the Police Corps from the pits it was in under Labour- Mario de Marco

My father rushed to the club. He thought he would find the area choked with people but there was hardly anyone around.

Inside, a young man was lying in a pool of blood, face downwards. A few men were around him, astonished and in a state of shock.

The only policeman on site was serving more as an onlooker than as an investigating officer. Then, a number of high-ranking officers started arriving.

My father had to shout at them to ensure that precautions be taken for the street to be closed to traffic and no evidence be tampered with.

Raymond Caruana’s death was the culmination of political violence by persons who became used to being above the law and to finding that the police were there not to stop them, but to aid and abet them.

But the matter did not stop there.

Not content with the death of an innocent man, the police proceeded to accuse of murder an equally innocent man: Pietru Pawl Busuttil. Mr Busuttil’s claims of innocence were vindicated subsequently by the courts.

Five days before Dr Herrera’s graduation, police officers and Labour thugs teamed up to stop the PN and its supporters from holding a mass meeting in Żejtun. Twenty-three people were injured – four with gunshot wounds – and 16 cars were set on fire.

The nauseating smell of tear gas will remain with us. I can still recall the whizzing sound of rubber bullets shot at us. I will never forget the face of Rose Galea Testaferrata, splattered with blood, as my friends and I led her to medical attention.

She came to Żejtun with thousands of others to stand up for her right to freedom of peaceful assembly and freedom of expression, only to be stopped by the police, backed by the Labour Party then in government.

Four months after Dr Herrera’s graduation, police officers in Rabat shot at Nationalist supporters, critically injuring a couple, while the PN club was set on fire.

Why do I write this? You know as much as I do what happened. Many of you were there or had some relative or friend there.

I write this because there is today a motion presented by the PL, the same party then in government, today in opposition, presented by Dr Herrera and Michael Falzon asking for a vote of censure on the workings of the Minister for Home Affairs.

Had the members of the opposition been young MPs, free from the sins of their party when in government, I would have not written this.

Given that three of the present Labour MPs served as ministers and 10 having been active in the party pre-1987, they are not innocent of the crimes I have just described.

The PL motion is as insulting as would be a motion of the Fascist Party claiming that there is today no democracy in Italy.

The PL – under whose watch people were regularly arrested by the police and held beyond the 48 hours limit, detained in inhuman conditions, beaten on interrogation, on one occasion to death with the Police Commissioner himself being an accomplice; the Constitutional Court not being constituted for more than four years; judges were moved around depending on the defendant or case of the day; Labour thugs ransacked the courts, set fire to judges chambers, stole court evidence – is now asking for a vote of censure on the basis that the right to legal assistance during interrogation – a right made law by the Nationalist government – came into effect only in 2010; that judges chose not to attend two public events a year ago; and that over five years a court document went missing. The Nationalist government will be the first to acknowledge a responsibility to ensure not only an adequate and trained police force equipped to fight crime, but an equal responsibility to ensure that persons detained and investigated are granted all the rights to ensure that any confession is voluntary.

That is why the very first Act of Parliament of the Nationalist government was the incorporation of the European Convention of Human Rights as part of our domestic law.

But the irony of Labour presenting a motion on home affairs is hard not to miss. Other than by Labour. I know how I will be voting this evening.

To vote with Labour on such a motion is an insult to the memory of Mr Caruana, Mr Busuttil, Nardu Debono, the Vella brothers and the hundreds who suffered the ignominy of arrest for false grounds or who, like my father, were bludgeoned by police truncheons for exercising their political rights.

Today’s motion is an affront to the work by successive home affairs ministers of Nationalist governments who have done their utmost to raise the Police Corps from the pits it was in under Labour.

Parliamentary motions are a tool of democracy to be used, not abused.

Dr de Marco is Minister for Tourism, Culture and the Environment.