It could have been a scene straight out of a Greek tragedy but what Mosta council employees were doing was for real as they obeyed the mayor’s orders to rip out an article from the council magazine and burn the page.
The action took place in the Greek theatre at Ġnien l-Għarusa tal-Mosta yesterday, where at least six council employees were busy tearing up a page with the article by the Mosta deputy mayor and blackening out a paragraph on another page.
The torn pages were subsequently burnt in a metal bin. The council printed 7,000 copies of the magazine.
Labour mayor Paul Chetcuti Caruana objected to the article penned by fellow Labour councillor Josette Agius Deceli, which featured a series of parliamentary questions on Mosta roads tabled by her husband, Labour MP Anthony Agius Decelis, to Roads Minister Austin Gatt.
The exercise in censorship was condemned by the magazine’s editor Ivan Bartolo, who only got to know about the affair through secondary sources on Monday night. Ms Decelis had ended her article saying that “Unfortunately, (roads in Mosta) were never repaired by the three previous councils and the central government”.
When confronted about the matter at the Mosta council offices yesterday Dr Chetcuti Caruana refused to comment, insisting he was “democratic” and had “no issue” with anybody. He referred The Times to a statement that was issued some time later.
In the statement, Dr Chetcuti Caruana said he had ordered the Christmas edition of the magazine to be withheld because the article written by Ms Agius Decelis constituted an unfair advantage to an MP on the Mosta district.
He also claimed that, as chairman of the editorial board, he was not shown a draft copy of the magazine.
However, according to Mr Bartolo, there was no standard policy that dictated he had to show a draft of the magazine to the mayor before it went to print. “I thought the mayor trusted me and whenever he asked to see articles I always showed them to him. This time around he never asked to see Ms Agius Decelis’s article, although I had informed him of the content,” Mr Bartolo said, adding the article was a continuation of a report on the state of Mosta’s roads published by the council earlier this year.
Attempts to contact Ms Agius Decelis proved futile.
ksansone@timesofmalta.com