The French in Malta

In reference to Charles Xuereb’s response to my letter of May 9, which appeared on May 23, I was fascinated by his mathematical legerdemain! He gives us the impression that only two Maltese patriots were executed by the French during their stay. 

I refer him to an excellent article in The Sunday Times of Malta of January 13, 2019, where the author, Joseph Grima, gives us the names of 43 ungrateful patriots (actually, most probably 45) slaughtered by the zealous forces of the French Republic in their effort to create Utopia in our miserable little island.

With regard to the plundering issue, it is very easy to agree to anything the forces of occupation desire when a gun is held to your head! As an ardent Francophile, given France’s experience in World War II, I would have expected Xuereb to appreciate this.

As regards the slavery issue, all we have are his assumptions. Napoleon freed the Muslim slaves in Malta not because of his antipathy to slavery but because he wanted to prepare the way for his invasion of Egypt. 

I greatly admire the French but a selective quoting of history and passing off assumptions as facts are not particularly helpful.

Charles A. Gauci, Chief Herald of Arms of Malta – Sannat

The chairman’s inertia

Reading last Sunday’s interview with the Planning Authority’s executive chairman confirms what we all know by now. The Planning Authority is to blame for our current environmental barbarism.

Sadly, his inertia to address our environmental deficit will further turn our island into one big construction site.

I was particularly irked by a statement of his, namely: “If someone has a garden and wants to do something in it, I cannot stop him from applying.,”

Not only I find such statement defeatist but, through such an attitude, whole streetscapes and green areas are being rampaged. Subsequently, next-door neighbours are ending up facing blank white walls. How many high-rise developments have blocked the sun and overshadowed neighbours’ gardens and property? 

How many have invested their life earnings in their properties only to end up without sunlight? How about those who invested in solar panels?

I am attaching a photo as one example from many to illustrate such inconsideration.  I am sure many people have similar photos.

We need to stop taking a piecemeal approach to planning and draw up a national holistic master plan and introduce solar rights. We need to protect the remaining gardens from further destruction by issuing a protection order over all front and back gardens. 

We cannot keep closing an eye ‘as long as it is not in my backyard’. Rest assured, sooner or later, your backyard will be next.

The time to stand up is now.

Albert Buttigieg – Mayor, St Julian’s

Bonaparte’ssojourn

Regarding last Sunday’s letter by Charles Xuereb, the most important effect of Napoleon’s sojourn in Malta was not the dagger or even the plunder of our churches. Xuereb must for once focus on the death of 20,000 Maltese who died of starvation due to Bonaparte’s invasion of Malta.

He must also comment why 4,000 French citizens were completely left at the mercy of their enemy, with Bonaparte showing not the slightest interest in their survival!

Bosredon Ransijat, “the man who was there”, says it all in his memoirs: “the Maltese could not possibly ever experience worse hardship then what they had to go through since the beginning of the French occupation... they rightly despise us.”

Xuereb also finds it extremely difficult to admit that the entire French garrison, including some Maltese sympathisers, was safely transported to their homeland on British warships!

Thomas Zerafa – Naxxar

Sharp wit

I am sure that many readers share my opinion when I pay tribute to the outstandingly brilliant articles of Kristina Chetcuti.

Above all, her heartening wit reminds me of the articles of ‘Page 13’ that were a beacon of light during the miserable dark years of the Mintoffian regime.

For, as the late G. K. Chesterton so aptly wrote: “Wit is a sword; it is meant to make people feel the point as well as see it.”

He qualified this statement by adding that all honest people saw the point and not a few dishonest people felt it.

Klaus Vella Bardon – Balzan

Out of tune with the times

Charles Xuereb continues to prove that historical accounts are at risk of being reduced to fairy tales based on personal bias, prejudice and illusions (May 23).

He resurrects the pathetic episode of Carmelo Borg Pisani, a naïve Maltese youth who fell for the Italian irredentism propaganda machine which Gabriele D’Annunzio and the Fascist Party started after the World War I Italian Alpine regiments’ success in driving the Austrians back home.

The Fascist Party emblem was borrowed from a Roman one and Mussolini regarded himself as a modern day Julius Caesar. They were heady days for many Italians and their sympathisers in Malta. The irredentist movement demanded certain territories be returned to Italy and claimed Malta was one of them.

For centuries, Malta had been administered as a little unimportant addendum of Sicily, being transferred from one owner to another and, when Spain gave it to the crusaders in 1530, it severed all administrative ownership from Sicily and Italy. On arrival, the crusaders had reported that the islands were in a terrible state of poverty, apart from a few nobles in Mdina. 

The peasantry spoke an Arab tongue. Centuries later, pretentious Maltese would speak Italian and might also go to Sicily to give birth so that the offspring would have Italian nationality that would distinguish them even further from the village peasantry.

The arrival of the British, brought about because the French failed to peacefully administer the island, meant further change. A sector of the population, and a political party, could not easily accept the change to Anglo-Saxon administration and culture. 

Furthermore, the irredentists did not accept British ownership of Malta, living in the Mussolini illusion that Malta was an Italian island. Borg Pisani was one of these but he went even further, taking up residence in Italy and returning to wartime Malta as a spy. This was very serious, not a youthful prank. He was lauded in Italy as a patriot but for British Malta, he was a nemico della patria (traitor).

Xuereb’s accounts are, thus, those of an irredentist who, in 21st century Malta, sound totally out of tune with the times.

Migration in search of a better life, between Italy and Malta, has been almost exclusively one way from 1530 right up to this day. There have been three migration episodes from southern Italy to Malta (not the other way round) in recent centuries, the first on arrival of the crusaders, the second on arrival of the British and the third after we joined the EU. 

Xuereb would like us to believe that we would have been better off if our working languages were Italian and Maltese and if our administrative and educational infrastructure was run on southern Italian lines rather on the little Anglo-Saxon left. 

Reality couldn’t be more different. Maltese patriots respect Italy for its artistic excellence and the greatness of its Roman period but they are a totally different kettle of fish from Italians – they are Maltese.

Albert Cilia-Vincenti – Attard

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