PREDICTABLE

My piece in I M BECK on the comedic value of Dom Mintoff, of all people, being nominated for, of all things, a prize in a stunt organised by, of all groups, the Executive Bureau of the International Committee of the Gaddafi, of all people, Award for Human Right, sitting in, of all places, Algeria, caused the predictable stir in elf-dom and brought out an assortment of the usual suspects from the woodwork.

The column attempted to highlight the incongruity of Malta former Prime Minister being nominated for this prize, which includes a cash payment of no less than a quarter of a million of George W Bush’s (he could have been another contender) finest greenbacks. The reasons for this incongruity are legion and can be checked off against the human rights that our Constitution, like most others, handily lists.

Let us take, for instance, freedom of expression.

No sooner did the Times (of London) criticise Mintoff in some way, I remember not what, than it was banned from coming in to Malta. I have no idea whether this was on a direct order from Mr Mintoff himself or whether, which strikes me as more likely, some spineless sycophant somewhere in his entourage thought it would be sweet to render his own nose even browner than it was already. All I’m saying is that Mr Mintoff must have known about this flagrant abuse and did nothing to stop it.

When a perfectly harmless visual joke involving Macho Dom windsurfing in Msida during one of the repeated episodes of flooding that still plague the area, was published, its author, who worked for a government controlled bank, was heavily victimised. The way any publication or transmission that was not fully subservient to the regime was treated is a matter of public record, with criminal prosecutions for libel and slander proliferating.

When in 1979 the building from which The Times (of Malta, this time) was published was burnt down, it was not burnt down by Mr Mintoff himself, of course. He was horrified by the brutish crime. He even wrote to the owners telling them this.

Unfortunately for him, though, in many people’s minds this episode, and the one involving the ransacking of Dr Fenech Adami’s home on the same Black Monday, remains indelibly associated with Mr Mintoff’s government, not least because these horrendous attacks were the result of spurious reports of an attack on Mr Mintoff’s life, reports which, conveniently, no-one in authority made any attempt to deny.

We can move along and consider the right of freedom of association, a right particularly abhorrent to every regime that believes it is the acme of perfection, as Mintoff’s clearly did.

Students who chained themselves to the railings of Castille were arrested and their colleagues in the attendant demonstration beaten, with the Police significantly failing to cover themselves in glory, though they did have the decency to stop attacking the students when someone thought to start singing the National Anthem. Childish, perhaps, but it worked. I’m not saying that Mr Mintoff was responsible personally for the way the police acted that day, but he had just scuttled up the stairs to his office when the demo started, so he knew darn well what was going on.

Malta’s finest failed to distinguish themselves on many other occasions, of course, in breaking up demonstrations or – even less valiantly – failing to stop thugs sympathetic to the regime from doing just that. Recall, unless your powers of recollection are those of a Labour Elf, the way housewives protesting water shortages, doctors at the start of their work-to-rule, students on any number of occasions and many others were treated. In none of these instances was Mr Mintoff present, of course, but these and many other instances of thuggery happened on his watch.

It would be unfair to tar Mr Mintoff personally with the brush of thuggery, Rhodes Scholar and all that he is, but his successor but one has always been lauded by Labour’s Lil’Elves, without their noticing what they’re doing, for having eradicated the MLP’s thuggish arm. Talk about burying one Caesar’s memory while praising his heir.

All of the above, and many more such instances, make it difficult for me and people like me, to associate Mr Mintoff with the promotion of human rights, even if this is only in association with a patently self-serving and terminally delusional outfit such as the one that nominated him.

This is not to say that Mr Mintoff was some sort of Hitler or that he didn’t like puppies or behave like a perfectly normal guy in the bosom of his family, but the time of his hold over the country is indelibly scarred by a series of such excesses in the area of human rights that in and of themselves that these render him ineligible, except in the eyes of his adulators, for anything other than a booby prize for human rights.

This notwithstanding, we still get the tired old elves trotting out the same tired old stories in defence of all things Labour. And Mr Mintoff, clearly, is certainly all things Labour for these people.

Thus we have “Muscat Peter” (who used to call himself Peter Muscat) who raises the hoary old joke about all the bad stuff being perpetrated by the Nationalists as part of their quest to assuage their thirst for power. Any common or garden shrink will tell you that “Muscat Peter Muscat” and his fellow conspiracy theorists are in need of a good dose of reality, but that won’t stop them coming out with this, as they have been doing for the last 21 years.

And then you have the apologists, the ones who, like Joanne Micallef, in their hearts, know that Mintoff’s Malta in the Seventies and Eighties was a horrendous place to live but who hark back to days of former glory, when Mr Mintoff (he was the only one who ever seemed to do anything within Labour’s ranks, according to these people) got women the vote, introduced social services and free health care and generally stood up for the poor, the oppressed and the down-trodden.

Never mind, of course, that these things were going to happen anyway (even if the Nationalist Party of the time had inertia as its watchword and procrastination as its motto) and that it suits the Mintoff-era revisionists to pretend that he had a hand in doing what was going to be done anyway.

In the area of health care, it doesn’t occur to these people, incidentally, to be ever so slightly wary of raising that particular subject, given the chaos and mayhem wrought upon our national health system by Mr Mintoff’s way of dealing with industrial action when it wasn’t the General Workers’ Union taking it.

The same can be said of the way Mr Mintoff is characterised as having “wiped out illiteracy” (comment by one CJohn Zammit)

Talk about damning with faint praise: the educational system we were left with after his reign (1971 – 1987, for those whose memory is clouded) was a monument to incompetence, inept social engineering and classist myopia, which are not necessarily to be laid at Mr Mintoff’s own door but – hey – the buck stopped with him.

Perhaps for people like Zammit, Muscat, Micallef and Zarb Darmanin, all of whom saw fit to introduce their own personal take into the mix, rendering themselves susceptible to the compliment being returned, “Dom Mintoff deserves respect, not ridicule [because] he is the father of modern Malta.”

For the rest of us, whose ridicule is reserved not for Mr Mintoff but for the outfit that put the way he ran this country into the same paragraph as promotion of human rights, Mr Mintoff is, indeed, the father of modern Malta, but only because his machinations led to Dr Sant’s political demise and our taking our place in the Europe Mr Mintoff so despised (with such sweet irony).

As for the rest, let’s just agree to differ, before even more instances that should embarrass rather than reward him are dredged up.