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10 NEWS maltatoday | SUNDAY • 30 APRIL 2023 The garden of forgiveness: healing the trauma of the Interdett A Church property in Valletta is being eyed as a reparative gesture for the 1961 Interdiction of Labour voters. But not even the Labour administration has yet sought a national site to honour the victims and memory of this great intergenerational wound, writes Matthew Vella THE bust of Nerik Mizzi, the short-lived Nationalist prime minister who died in office three months from election in 1950, faces the St John's Cathedral in Valletta – 250 metres off Castille Square where the statue of his successor, George Borg Olivier, stands proudly, over a 10-foot pil- lar. Fitting for the 'father of Mal- tese Independence'. Unlike Mizzi, exiled in 1942 without trial by the British forces to Uganda along with other sus- pected Italophile luminaries from the PN, Manwel Dimech – the socialist intellectual the Maltese Catholic archdiocese deemed dangerous – enjoys pride of place in Castille Square. Not a politi- cian but exiled by Malta's colonial governor over false accusations of being a German spy, (and having suffered excommunication from the Church) he would die in an Egyptian prison after seven miser- able years spent incarcerated. And while Dimech earned right- ful recognition under the Mintoff administration in 1976 with a statue by Anton Agius, the jury is out on why Labour has failed to honour the victims of the 'Inter- dett' - that other historic shunning of 1961, which is much closer to home, the party and even its living members. 62 years after the notorious in- terdiction of the Labour executive, a pitched war between Church and Labour that effectively made voting Labour a "sin" during two election rounds won by the PN, no monument to the excommu- nicated victims yet exists. The enduring exemplar of what the Interdett meant is Guże Ellul Mercer, the former deputy prime minister whose death in 1962 consigned him to burial in an un- consecrated grave on the margins of the Addolorata cemetery – a 'punishment' that was part of the interdiction package administered by Archbishop Mikiel Gonzi in his war against Dom Mintoff. It was an old weapon used by the Church that mimicked the colo- nial forces' power of exile: in 1910 it excommunicated Dimech for two years; in 1930 it announced a vote for Strickland's Constitution- al Party and Labour was a "mor- tal sin"; and in 1960 it interdicted the young socialists Lorry Sant and Joe Camilleri for insulting the Church in a party pamphlet. "It is time for a goodwill ges- ture," says Jason Micallef, former Labour secretary-general (2003-9) and now chairman of the Valletta Cultural Agency, who has a bone to pick with the Curia. From the roof garden of the VCA's Valletta Design Cluster, a community space that replaced the old abattoir, he can lay his eyes on the walled gardens of the Arch- bishop's Palace right opposite it. "It should be open to the public," Micallef says, who is gently lay- ing claim on it by proposing that it can be run and managed by the VCA itself. "It is one of the few ur- ban gardens available in Valletta and it is not being used." This, Mi- callef thinks, is suitable reparation for the Interdett. The archbishop disagrees. His Valletta palace houses the eccle- siastical tribunals that hears mar- ital annulment proceedings. Such a private forum cannot abut on a public garden. In 2020, Micallef roped in for- mer arts minister Jose Herrera to petition Charles Scicluna for the garden to host a public monument to the victims of the interdiction. The archbishop suggested that the government sticks to an ear- lier suggestion for a monument erected on the Floriana Mall. "It certainly won't be the Church to dictate where the State gets to erect a public monument," Mi- callef hits back. "You can't wash this wound away with the apolo- gy of 1978 or the blessing of the graves in 2021. This is no reconcil- iation for a nine-year martyrdom," he says. Psychological warfare The clerical activism of the late 1950s and 1960s in Malta was fuelled by a junta of Catholic or- ganisations (il-Ġunta) which had heeded the call from the Maltese archbishop to prevent Labour from "relegating the church to the sacristy". The short-lived Mintoff admin- istration had resigned in April 1958 after mass dismissals at the naval dockyard. Two years earlier, the 1956 referendum for total in- tegration with the UK had floun- dered due to mass abstention from the Nationalist Party and the Church's opposition. Now Mintoff had changed gear and joined the mainstream call for full independence from Great Britain. At the height of the Red Scare, Archbishop Mikiel Gonzi was fixated that Mintoff, a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and member of the Fabian Society, was com- munism's wolf in sheep's clothing. Gonzi considered Mintoff an en- emy who would drain his church of its earthly powers, whether by class conflict or central economic planning, or by his avowed plan to seek international assistance for Malta's independence from either West... or East. This veiled threat of godless communism was the last straw for Gonzi: in April 1961, he interdict- ed the Labour executive, declared voting Labour, the sale of or read- ing of socialist newspapers and attendance at Labour meetings, mortal sins. The Ġunta exhort- ed the Catholic faithful to see the forthcoming 1962 elections as a crusade against 'Mintoffian dev- ils', forging a path for the Nation- alist Party to win the election. What was particularly damn- ing in the 1961-1969 interdiction (a resolution finally came in a six-point 'peace treaty' between Mintoff and Archbishop dele- gate Emanuele Gerada) is that even though it was the Labour executive that was interdicted, it had a scatter-gun effect on ordi- nary people seen reading socialist newspapers and attending Labour meetings. "The tangible results of Gonzi's war were very immediate. Fam- ilies were torn apart. Labour ac- tivists were ostracised from social organisations. Children of Labour activists and known sympathis- ers were bullied at school and in the villages. Priests wielded more power and Labour youths' chanc- es of finding jobs decreased even further, exacerbating their already miserable economic situation. This was the bleak backdrop of Independence: in the 1960s as much as 60,000 men and women had left the islands in search for work – back then comprising as much as 20% of the population," writes historian Mark Camilleri in a piece for this newspaper back in 2021. "And here lies a very impor- tant reason why going to hell was much worse than it sounds today. For the oppressed and hard-work- ing Catholic-Labourite, mired in a dire economic scenario, who struggled to make ends meet, the Catholic religion could provide some hope and light at the end of the tunnel – death at least prom- ised a good afterlife. Now, all the hard work and lifetime devotion to Church and God mattered no longer as the Labourite was bound for damnation anyway. In other words, Gonzi took away from the Eyes on the prize: the Archbishop's garden in Valletta is suitable reparation, Jason Micallef thinks