When Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici died last weekend, he was hailed a gentleman who stuck to his principles.

The man who, by his own admission, was a Nationalist by birth and a Labourite through conviction, always stood up to be counted in the way he expressed his love for his country and upheld workers’ rights.

By contrast, there is the historical record: the political atrocities and violent incidents that occurred in the mid-1980s, for which Mifsud Bonnici was eventually held responsible. Here are five episodes that have cast a dark shadow over his legacy:

1. The Church Schools’ debacle

    

When Dom Mintoff decided to anoint him as his successor, Mifsud Bonnici’s adversaries labelled him “Iż-Żero” since he had not contested the previous general election.

He had served Mintoff well when, as minister of education, he spearheaded the battle for free education for all, signalling the start of a bitter war with church schools and the parents of thousands of students. 

“Jew b’xejn jew xejn” (free or nothing) was the battle cry at the time when tensions ran high, as church schools remained closed and the education sector entered a disastrous phase.

Mifsud Bonnici did little to calm down tempers and instead described the thugs who ransacked the archbishop’s curia in 1984 as “the aristocracy of the working class”.

Meanwhile, many believe the church schools have yet to completely recover.

2. The hijacking disaster

Mifsud Bonnici had not been in office as prime minister for even a year when he was faced with a hijacking that, for a long number of years, remained the most tragic case of air piracy in aviation history.

As prime minister, he took the lead in the negotiations with the terrorists who had taken control of an Egyptair airliner soon after it took off from Greece and ordered it to land in Malta in late November 1985.

A string of rash decisions led to Egyptian commandos being authorised to storm the plane. The botched rescue attempt resulted in a bloodbath in which 62 passengers died.

In 2015, Mifsud Bonnici told Times Talk that since Malta had good relations with the Arab world at the time, he did not want the (better-trained) Americans to be directly involved in rescuing the passengers on board the aircraft.

Mifsud Bonnici assumed responsibility for what happened and wanted to step down. However, the cabinet asked him to reconsider his decision.

3. The Libya connection

Mifsud Bonnici’s judgment let him down again the following year. He publicly admitted that Malta had given Libya advance notice of a US air strike in April 1986 and that it was willing to do so again if it had similar information.

On the international plane, such episodes may have been the biggest blot on Mifsud Bonnici’s performance as head of government.

His loyalty towards Gaddafi persisted until 2011 as Libya imploded amid an uprising against its long-ruling dictator.

Mifsud Bonnici at the time described Gaddafi as an “arch-democrat of a dictator” and claimed Malta was an accomplice in military transgression against Libya for supporting the uprising.

4. The political violence

When Mintoff threw him into the midst of a political situation close to boiling point, it soon became clear Mifsud Bonnici could never be in control of it.

Things took a terrible turn for the worse in the last few weeks of 1986 when two episodes brought the situation to breaking point.

The Nationalist Party had decided to hold a mass meeting in Żejtun, as fierce a Labour stronghold as any at the time. A police permit had been issued but was subsequently withdrawn and the party in opposition sought court redress and won its right to hold the meeting.

However, the forces of law and order joined the Labour thugs who resolved that the Nationalists would only reach Żejtun over their dead bodies. And that is what almost happened, with people on both sides sustaining injuries.

Mifsud Bonnici, whose responsibility as prime minister was to ensure the court decision was implemented and that law and order prevailed, was unable to exercise any control, even over the country’s security forces.

As political tension reached unprecedented levels, a young PN activist Raymond Caruana was killed when he was hit by a stray bullet as he was having a drink at the party in Gudja just six days later.

Adding more fuel to the metaphorical fire burning across the island, the police charged a farmer Pietru Pawl Busuttil with Caruana’s murder. Very soon it became clear it was a frame-up, with the murder weapon having been planted inside Busuttil’s farmhouse.

In an interview with Times of Malta in 2009, Mifsud Bonnici blamed the Nationalists for “provoking” the violence in the 1980s.

“We had a violent opposition. And nowadays, everybody turns a blind eye to this,” he said.

5. Objection to EU membership

Mifsud Bonnici’s foreign policy emulated Mintoff’s, and added anti-European rhetoric to his discourse, some of which was based on pure fiction – even once infamously linking AIDS with the EU.

He always argued that the EU was taking over far too many powers from sovereign states and claimed it was becoming “militarised”.

Despite being out of politics, he went on to lead the eurosceptic group Campaign for National Independence before joining Mintoff’s Front Maltin Inqumu to fight against EU accession.

He disagreed with Joseph Muscat’s U-turn on EU membership, persisting in the belief that the European bloc’s economic and social value are not socialist.

Malta’s EU membership is now widely acknowledged to be one of the finest-ever political decisions.

Mintoff steps in

In 1986, Mintoff managed to broker an agreement between the two parties enshrining majority rule in the constitution. This paved the way for a change in government in 1987, despite Mifsud Bonnici being accused of employing thousands with the government on the eve of the election.

But it was crystal clear that the man who had conveniently pushed Mifsud Bonnici forward now realised his protégé was a failure. Whether Mintoff had known that from the outset but did not have an option is anybody’s guess.

Notwithstanding his poor track record, even adversaries have sung the late Mifsud Bonnici’s praises, mainly because he was genuine in all he did – even when making grave mistakes.