Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1484063
15 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 13 NOVEMBER 2022 NEWS tion of the 1980s 'troubles' from a Labour perspective; chiefly also, his palpable antipathy for the Mintoffian chaos inside the part-nationalised manufactur- ing factories of the day. Sant believes KMB's moder- ate style had engineered new openings for Labour, even at- tracting back "the goodwill of people in the literary/artistic community who over the 1970s were alienated by Prime Min- ister Mintoff's confrontational way of doing politics." But it was KMB's wholesale inheritance of Mintoffianism and his inability to defuse the violent elements it had harboured that would be his own legacy – a number two try- ing to carry the man who made him king: an impossible task for someone who wants to be lead- er. "We were well aligned, at least so we believed, with the views of Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici, now in harness as the leader-desig- nate, though he remained very guarded when it came to ex- pressing his own preferences, rather than Mintoff's," Sant says. Take the church schools saga. Labour wanted to democratise education by making all schools free, a 1981 manifesto pledge. But the 1970s changes inside state schools had scared off as- pirational parents – Sant calls them "young parents whose parents were working class [and] now had middle class as- pirations" – who wanted to send their children to fee-paying 'middle class' Catholic schools. Mifsud Bonnici was totally committed to the idea of making church schools free, apparently a long held personal conviction since when he was an activist in the Catholic Church's youth movement. Sant says it should have been Labour to devote all available governmental resourc- es to make state schools better than private, Catholic schools. "But the die had been cast. The option of conflict with the Catholic Church and its allies of all stripes on the centre-right was to be pursued." Street demonstrations sup- porting the Curia became the or- der of the day by 1983. "Whether this was the right campaign for Labour to mount at this point in time and whether the methods it chose to do it were opportune or made political sense remain cen- tral questions about the events of those years. It is quite clear that the choice of political strat- egy on this front was wrong – so with hindsight I believe," Sant says. On 28 September 1984, eight church schools were ordered to remain closed after being re- fused their licence. That same day, Drydocks workers organ- ised a rally at their workplace to protest against the Curia. They persuaded Mifsud Bonnici to address them. Sant says the ral- ly developed into a "spontane- ous" demonstration: a carcade left the Drydocks for Valletta, taking the senior deputy-PM with them. "A sizeable segment peeled off from the demonstra- tion at Floriana, headed towards the Curia, burst into it and ran- sacked the place. It was another of the stupid exercises in Labour tough guy tactics that served no purpose except that of turning well-meaning people against the party." The damage was done; KMB's presence at the demonstration sealed the sullied image he car- ried thereon. Sant blames La- bour frontliners who believed strong-arm tactics were neces- sary to achieve compromise – a revanchist spirit from the 1950s and 1960s. "They would even claim PM Mintoff backed this stance and had known about what was going to happen at the Curia. One only had their word for this. In my presence, KMB strongly criticised what had hap- pened at the Curia, stated he had not been aware that the attack was going to happen and blamed the stupidity of 'hotheads' for it. On the other hand, little to no police action was taken to bring the 'hotheads' to justice for their misdeeds." Labour's nadir: violence and social tension With the mass closure of pri- vate schools, social tensions on- ly grew. Parents were grouping children in 'clandestine' classes inside private homes. And Sant knows what this has meant for decades thereafter: "Pupils at- tending these lessons – and those organizing them – ended up imbued with the feeling they were being victimised for who they and their families were, be- cause of the private 'Catholic' education they sought to follow. The experience would mark them for life, turning most in- to new generation citizens har- bouring deep anti-Labour senti- ments." KMB may have developed a calm 'listening' style "in contrast to the rumbustious style of the Mintoff years" – as Sant report- ed in those years to the Econ- omist Intelligence Unit – but street violence, mainly associat- ed with militants close to min- ister Lorry Sant, would darken the 1980s. Sant even believes Mintoff himself could have used "hidden capillary contacts" to foment this violent resistance. On the eve of the 1986 Tal-Bar- rani meeting, when the PN and its supporters were blocked by police and Labour activists from entering Żejtun, Sant was called to Castille by Mifsud Bonnici. Labour was having its own pub- lic meeting in Ħaż-Żebbuġ on Sunday, and KMB wanted no La- bour supporters to go to Żejtun "for any reason. He explained that there was a strong sense of outrage among the people of Żejtun that the PN had chosen to carry out such a 'provocative' action in their hometown, which was in a very large majority red." Sant had seen those 'hotheads' and even some hardened crimi- nals leaving Castille, after meet- ing KMB, believing they had found a new opening: Mintoff. On the fateful Sunday morning, the Tal-Barrani road leading to Żejtun was being blocked by makeshift barricades. Sant says two different sources told him Mintoff had encouraged pro- testers who went to see him to resist the PN meeting. "Accord- ing to another source who was involved on Sunday with friends in putting up a barricade at an entry point to Żejtun from the Fgura side, Mintoff visited them in the morning. Beyond these reports, I had no other direct ev- idence of Mintoff's alleged collu- sion in the Żejtun fracas." The ineptitude of KMB The PN's Tal-Barrani meeting may have been a high-stakes gamble, well aware as it was of the Żejtun hardcore resistance to its convening there. "Still, the point remained that the PN had every right to stake out for a po- litical meeting at Żejtun. I think to this day that the failure of the KMB administration to let them do so without problems and shrug the whole story off, cost Labour the 1987 election." Gloom shrouded Malta in Christmas of 1986: Raymond Caruana was shot dead at the PN Gudja club; the frame-up of Pietru Pawl Busuttil, with the planting of Special Mobile Unit guns and hashish in his Safi farm, and his subsequent acquittal, captured the frayed state of the island. But KMB was no hapless protagonist to all this breakdown in rule of law. Far from it. His inability, or maybe unwillingness to take control of his party and government by extricating it from the violence that his ministers invited, would forever tarnish Labour's image. The incidents that seal Mifsud Bonnici's ineptitude are forev- er linked to the violence of the times, that provoke emotional reactions in people like Therese Comodini Cachia. Journalist Dione Borg, who interviewed Mifsud Bonnici for Libertà Mhedda, a chroni- cle of the 1980s violence under Labour, perhaps encapsulates KMB's shortcomings best: pol- itics unravelled the man with a gentle face, humble, intelligent and meticulous in his profes- sional life. "He was placed into politics in an unnatural manner, at the height of the worst of Maltese politics... evne the way he was inserted in the MLP leader- ship, was unorthodox and not democratically correct. Mintoff wanted to keep under control a dangerous political current inside the MLP – so he landed Mifsud Bonnici right into that boiling cauldron. And if that was Mintoff's will, then the party would accept it as such. It was unjust to Karmenu himself." But Borg also says KMB did have the opporunity to practice what he preached, and that he was obliged as Labour leader and PM to change the country's direction from the political vio- lence and murder, the discrim- ination and injustice. "He had that opportunity and obligation not to the let the country go the brink. I think Karmenu did not do that; he did not use his belief in social justice to change the country's direction. Indeed he ended up at the centre of these episodes of political violence, despite being the opposite to what he represents as a person." The "face I see when I drive through a secondary road to get to Zejtun, the same road my family used to escape the tear-gas and beatings from thugs at Tal-Barrani." KMB evokes a generational wound for people who grew up in the 1980s Top: a massive public demonstration in Dingli Street, Sliema in 1984 over the Church schools saga. Left: KMB was planted into Labour's leadership by Dom Mintoff as his successor, and inherited his regime without having the power to curtail its excesses