|
Lino Spiteri’s memoirs are bound to ruffle a few feathers, especially with the Labour party. Yet one of the boldest comments in his book ‘Jien U Ghaddej Fil-Politika’, launched last Thursday, is the former Finance Minister’s statement that he does not exclude that the Labour thugs at Tal-Barrani in November 1986 may have been agents provocateurs paid to cause trouble.
In his own words: “Qatt ma eskludejt li fost dawk, u f’incidenti vjolenti ohra, kien hemm x’uhud jilghabu loghba doppja – jidhru Laburisti feroci, izda jkunu mhallsa biex jaghmluha ta’ agents provacateurs.”
Lino Spiteri does not elaborate any further, nor does he suggest who could have paid the Labour thugs. But the observations will definitely take some wind out of the sails of the PN media machine, which was already rubbing its hands in glee at Spiteri’s expected embarrassing revelations about Labour leader Alfred Sant.
The Tal-Barrani incident in Zejtun, a Labourite electoral stronghold in the 1980s, was one of the most violent confrontations of the turbulent build-up to the ’87 elections, including the use of firearms against Nationalist supporters by Labourite thugs and a renegade special police unit known as the SMU.
In his memoirs, Spiteri also describes in detail Alfred Sant’s unilateral decision to do away with VAT before the 1996 election, without consulting anyone in the executive and party. The leadership election with Alfred Sant in 1992, with its allegations of vote rigging by Pawlu Muscat, is also narrated in some detail.
But the book does more than reveal niceties about Alfred Sant. It traverses more than 40 years of politics from the early 1960s, which saw Lino Spiteri facing a Church ban for his association with the Labour party, his election as a 23-year-old parliamentarian in 1962, to the time when he served in Mintoff’s 1981 cabinet.
|
