Charles Micallef may not claim to be a historian; nevertheless, he is ethically bound to respect hist-orical facts and not to twist and flaunt them to his heart’s content (‘George Bernard Shaw at the Natural Library’, The Sunday Times, March 27).
He writes: “Two years after Shaw’s visit (in 1931) the Home Minister Carmelo Mifsud Bonnici (Il-Gross) moved an anti-sedition law in Parliament which was approved, and on May 18, 1933, sent police to the residence of prominent Labour Party supporters to look in all the rooms for any seditious matters.”
The facts are otherwise: the law in question was not an Act of Parliament but an ordinance enacted by the imperial side of the Diarchy – the Governor of Malta on September 15, 1932, called, in fact, Ordinance XIX of that year.
My father, Dr Carmelo Mifsud Bonnici, Minister for the Treasury and Police, had absolutely nothing to do with that law nor the Legislative Assembly – Parliament.
The second twist of fact is that in May 1933, My father sent the police to search for seditious propaganda. But it was again the governor who ordered the searches, as is clearly stated by Article 4 of the Ordinance:
“Where it appears to the Governor that there is reasonable cause to suspect that any seditious matter exists in any building, vessel or place, the Governor may by warrant in writing empower any police officer not below the rank of Superintendent of police, to enter and if necessary to break into ...”
The seditious matter consisted of propaganda literature of the Communist Party, which accounted for 99 per cent of the requisitioned material. Among these were two innocuous books by Bernard Shaw and Leo Tolstoy. It is typical of biased eyes to see only the last two. Mr Micallef also adds: “The Sedition Law of 1933 did not destroy the Malta Labour Party as the Nationalist government of Sir Ugo Mifsud had hoped.”
This is very different to what the leader of the Labour Party said in the Legislative Assembly on April 12, 1933. It bears translation from the original Italian, to show how mean Mr Micallef’s allegation is:
“Dr C. Mifsud Bonnici – But what was said by him (Dr P. Boffa), however, was not stated by the Constitutionalists. They want to say that it is a persecution of the Nationalists against the Labour Party.
“Dr P. Boffa – But it is not so.
“Dr C. Mifsud Bonnici – I declare that the Nationalists have nothing to do with these raids. In this matter the action taken is over and above party politics.
“Dr E. Mizzi – Are you persuaded of this?
“Dr P. Boffa – I am more than persuaded. I know of the origin (of these raids) and everything. I have known this for some time and not now.”
There is a correct fact mentioned in the article when he writes: “Three of them (the accused) lost their employment at the Naval Dockyard.” This should have served the author as an eye-opener, as clearly the Nationalist government had no say in the running of the Naval Dockyard. That was part of matters reserved for the imperial government and its interests and this is why they took this step to protect the infiltration of suspected communist elements in the Naval Dockyard. But nothing blinds like bias.
If Mr Micallef had bothered to carry out some research, he would have come across a public conference on Bernard Shaw held at the ‘Rest’ in Cospicua in 1926, a year after he was awarded the Nobel Prize – by Carmelo Mifsud Bonnici, which was also printed as a monograph.
A persecutor indeed.