It is amazing how much one man can put up with. Last week, a bunch of migrants in captivity at Ħal Far, stranded on an island they never wanted to come to, having their asylum applications rejected and their dreams dashed, staged a riot. You can only feel sorry for them.
Someone had to stop them. Our boys in blue went in. They were pelted with stones. Someone has to do the dirty job and it can’t be fun. It takes guts to go into a building full of desperate people. Those men in uniform are heroes; as for the other men on the inside, they are a sad tragedy.
Our police commissioner stood up for his men. He said they followed the rules of engagement. He explained the use of warning shots, of taser guns, and said his men didn’t even need to use their truncheons. The riot was quelled. He should be believed.
All would have gone well for our police had not that blundering Home Affairs Minister Manuel Mallia stepped in.
Maybe it is because he is fearing for his job and needs to make some noise, or maybe it is because, just like the Prime Minister, he can’t tell the difference between government and police, and considers the force his private army.
A statement from his ministry was quick to tell us that no one was injured in the riot, no one was hospitalised, except for one who had, well, fainted. His statement was immediately contradicted – inevitably.
There must have been some sort of fight inside those barracks; someone was bound to get hurt. So what was the minister trying to prove? The NGOs, already not happy with the state the migrants are in, cried foul.
Cornered, the minister set up a board of inquiry. No matter how he tries to package it, it comes across like he doesn’t believe his own police commissioner when he said his men had followed the rules.
Nationalist Party Home Affairs spokesman Jason Azzopardi came out criticising the inquiry board. He said it was not independent as its members were part of the very ministry they were meant to investigate. His criticism does not make sense.
The board is not set up to investigate the ministry but the policemen who did their job: the fall guys. Azzopardi is right but for the wrong reason. It is the ministry, and its big-mouthed and cocky approach, that should be investigated.
It was the ministry that put police officers in the spot by coming out with statements that were later contradicted.
So the question is, how long can the Police Commissioner continue to put up with this?
Two weeks ago, the Prime Minister incredibly usurped the powers of the police by saying that some 1,000 thieves, who bribed Enemalta officials to tamper with their smart meters, would not be prosecuted in court. The government, our Prime Minister said, will not be putting ‘families’ in jail.
He probably meant heads of families but that wouldn’t go down well with the feminist and gay lobby he courts so much, so we’re supposed to think that five-year-old kids would be dragged to jail screaming for their mummy if police were allowed to do their work. In any case, don’t those corrupt Enemalta officials also have families? Why shouldn’t they also be let off the hook in the spirit of Malta Tagħhna Lkoll, if we use the Prime Minister’s perverse, populist logic?
Last week, a police inspector told the court he was not proceeding against those one thousand because of a political decision. All hell broke loose over that, but the suspicion is that this was his own deduction and that no one in the force, at least no one in his right mind, would have ordered him not to investigate those corrupt 1,000.
The police commissioner, who now said the police will investigate all suspects, is left with no option but to expedite the investigations, to salvage his dignity and that of our police force. He must also do it for the sake of those one thousand.
Unless a stop is put to the government’s meddling with our police, those brave officers who protect us each day will become demoralised
There are a thousand people out there, businessmen among them, who are at the Prime Minister’s mercy. They could face a jail sentence and are relying on the clemency of a prime minister who enjoys no such power. They are in an incredibly weak position and effectively open to blackmail, in its many facets.
The PN should get its hands on that list of names and publish it. It is in the interest of those same 1,000 that their names are made public because only then can they get out of the predicament they are in. Secrecy breeds corruption.
Our democracy never catered for such situations, because democracy does not give power to a prime minister to decide arbitrarily on who should be criminally charged.
Those names must be published specifically to prevent the very corruption this government pretends to fight. If the Prime Minister wants to give them an amnesty, then he should go to the President.
The biggest loser in all of this tragic farce is the police force. In less than a year, we’re turning the clock back to those very black years many of us don’t want to remember or relive.
I’ve had my fair share of brushes with Labour police. Once I was hit by a policeman on the head outside Castille, but I suppose I was asking for it because no one likes being called a fascist.
Another time I was stopped in a police roadblock by the notorious Special Mobile Unit, the closest Labour ever came to creating its own political police in those golden years of Labour we are fast slipping back to.
There were five SMU police officers, none of them wore a number, and all looked the same and sported identical moustaches. It wasn’t really a road block, they were just looking for a fight, and thought they had one when they found inside my friend’s car a pile a circulars by the 1980s protest group which went around by the name of Tan-Numri. The insults, the provocation, the taunting by those political police were humiliating. We stood our ground, and in the end they had to let us go, but not without a farewell threat that they will be checking on us and those subversive circulars they found in the car.
Those men were the pits of what a politicised police force can become. Unless a stop is put to the government’s meddling with our police, those brave officers who protect us each day will become demoralised and slowly leave the force until only the likes of the SMU remain.
The PN has called on the police commissioner to resign over that court blunder by one of his inspectors. He should not.
He should stand up for his men and tell this interfering government that knows no bounds to back off. He enjoys the confidence of the government that appointed him, so he should be in the position to draw the line where political interference should stop.
The commissioner has found a way to wriggle out of the terrible situation the government has put him in over those 1,000.
He intends to pass the buck to the Attorney General after investigating all the cases. This comes too late as the damage has been done to his force, and he must not let this happen again.
Our commissioner should start speaking up independently of government, get his version out when incidents like those at Hal Far take place, and not let the ministry, or the Prime Minister, who have no business in his work or to speak for him, make a mess of it, and get his men into trouble.
He is the Police Commissioner and should act like one. His men deserve much better.