Those of us who lived the era ushered in by Black Monday often look back in disbelief. Can anyone imagine a mob burning down a newspaper’s offices and press today? The ransacking of the Leader of the Opposition’s house?
Times have changed, and not only in Malta. The 1970s were after all a decade of violence throughout Europe. The German Autumn that same year marked the height of the assault of the Red Army Faction. Italy faced its ‘Anni di Piombo’ of political terrorism, culminating in the murder of kidnapped politician Aldo Moro in 1978. Nobody has ever alleged that there was a direct link between these events and the simultaneous political violence in Malta. Still, it was the flavour of the times: the borders between terrorism and legal use of force blurred forever in the chaos that was the Middle East.
Before the bombs and the arson, there was a war of words. Antonio Negri, a Marxist sociologist and political philosopher controversially jailed for insurrection against the state and indirect involvement with the Red Brigades, has accepted responsibility for inspiring an era of political violence. Words can and do kill. In the minds of many, the end justified the means, even if the means meant the death or injury of innocent bystanders.
Malta in the 1970s and 1980s provided a fertile ground for intolerance and polarisation. Resistance to the interdict against the Labour Party in the 1960s had founded a ‘counter-crusade’. Mintoff’s political adversaries became his ‘enemies’. For years the subtext of political discourse was exclusive, at times demonising. With the demise of minor parties any semblance of a no-man’s-land had vanished from the political landscape, setting the scene for all out war. Once committed to one side or another, there was no turning back – everything one held dear was at total risk.
Truth was the first casualty and those with memories of those days have a version of history determined by the newspapers they read; hardly surprising, then, that Labour and Nationalist tend to have such different memories of the same events.
Above all, the perverse result of the 1981 election result engendered hatred and internal ‘racism’. Political opponents of the government were dehumanised.
Clearly, the Labour Party in government must carry the lion’s share of responsibility for this awful situation. Its rhetoric encouraged hatred and violence. Its failure to act against one outrage only promoted the next. Worst of all, the machinery of the State was used and abused in the war. The PN resisted as best it could; but ultimately it had no choice but to rely on its own thugs for protection. The Żepp il-Ħafi incident brought it all out decades later.
The change in government in 1987 led to the end of physical violence in politics, though not immediately. The Żejtun wedding, in which 23 policemen were injured with gunshot wounds, and the firing of a machinegun at a tourist coach injuring nine, took place after that election... as did the umpteenth attack on the law courts.
While the Nationalist discourse in the early 1990s was of dialogue and stakeholder consultation, its years of glorious resistance were never allowed to be forgotten. However, reliance on memories of the black years in the 1996 election proved a miserable failure. The country wanted to forget, to look forward and not to be forever in debt to the people who had brought about a change a decade before.
Political violence is unlikely today because people will no longer stand for it; but the war is still on. Verbal violence is a daily occurrence. The institutions which are the basis of civil coexistence in any democracy are daily ignored or devalued. The government is not accountable to the people in between elections. It does not acknowledge that it holds power and enjoys authority on trust, and that the Opposition deserves a basic and inviolable level of respect because it represents half the population.
In many ways time has stood still. We have had a truce since 1987 but the reconciliation process did not reach the long hoped-for level.
On the occasion of the 30th anniversary of Black Monday the PN media have left no stone unturned to smear the present Labour Party leadership with responsibility for those distant events. The overemphasised rejection of the PL leader’s apology follows on the PN’s refusal to bank the PL’s U-turn on EU membership. Instead of accepting the new reality and allowing the country to move on, the PN rejects it in order to preserve what it perceives to be a major political advantage. We may have 1996 repeated.
And yet, the country wants to move on. The PN cannot offer Dom Mintoff an award for 50 years’ parliamentary service or grant immunity to Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici for his actions as Controller of BICAL Bank... and then expect anyone to believe that Joseph Muscat should shoulder all the responsibility for the mayhem when these same two people led the country at the time.
From this persepctive, the PN’s refusal to accept Muscat apology may prove to be a disservice, to a country which feels it's time to move on.
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