Commemorating our failures

It was simple a 4,000 vote difference.

The PN had a marginal advantage which many had expected to be far bigger.

With all the talk of corruption and violence, most Maltese were more interested in retaining the status quo. Thanks, of course, to all the favour and considerate electoral pledges before May 1997. The same electoral ploy is repeated every five years.

In reality, to avoid losing their hold on power, the Labour opposition at the time did everything possible to retain their supremacy.

Just in the same way the Nationalists are doing now.

There is not much of a difference in the tactics applied then and the ones applied now.

Jobs for the boys, contracts for the boys and pjaciri for the boys.

There are of course no sub-machines being fired at people, no cars being burnt and no police thugs taking orders from Ministers on VHF radio.

But we do have institutional fatigue and a serious democratic deficit.

By this I mean a weak judiciary, dependant on the political class, and multiple boards with no teeth to bite and appointments linked to political lineage rather than meritocracy, and a TVM which is throwback to Remig Sacco's days.

But the rules of the engagement are very much the same.

Raymond Caruana was a very ugly episode.

It led to people such as myself - who were intrinsically suspicious of the Nationalists - to abandon any consideration for Labour and to drift slowly towards the PN.

At the age of 23, I even toyed with the idea of leaving the country, and never coming back.

The worst thing about Raymond Caruana was not the crime in itself,  which was abominable, but the fact that police chose to frame someone else, someone innocent.

This leads me to think that the police knew who killed Raymond Caruana. How else would they have planted the gun that shot him in Pietru Pawl Busuttil's farmhouse?

As if it was not quite bad enough to murder an innocent 26-year-old, the idea of a frame up was far more sinister.

The men who were behind the frame up must surely have known what happened when the shooting took place at Gudja.

Raymond Caruana is one of several incidents which remain unsolved.

But there are other incidents or episodes which were never solved.

The officers and the individuals who were left off the hook not only got on with their lives but also were effectively promoted in the police corps.

The same police who were there then are here now. And they have been promoted by the same people who have cried wolf for the past 25 years.

Those that did have only the Nationalists to thank, not the Nationalists who were at barricades getting gassed, but the poseurs who ended up as ministers and preached the art of compromise.

In the end, that compromise benefited the perpetrators no one else.

There were other incidents not involving the police - the cases of extensive corruption highlighted by individuals such as Wenzu Mintoff and Toni Abela - ironically portrayed as 'old Labour' by the spin machine - were used in the campaigns but conveniently forgotten by the justice system.

For standing up, they were kicked out of the Labour party. Now that they have returned to the PL, they are depicted as old Labour. 

Indeed many of the top senior managers at Mid Med (many of whom were Nationalist-leaning) who were definitely involved in that bank's corruption scandal were retained by the government-owned bank and promoted.

The people who decided all those were not the Chief messengers, nor the yes men or the chauffeurs. They were the ministers and the Prime Minister... in other words, Eddie Fenech Adami and Guido de Marco.

Judge Anastasi, who compiled an extensive report on the subject of Mid-Med, never lived to see justice done.

I thought later on that many of the Fenech Adami and de Marco decisions were motivated by the politics of reconciliation. That reconciliation turned out to be a big hollow promise.

Because every time Eddie Fenech Adami or Guido de Marco were in a corner, they would automatically revert to these issues to score political points.

Over the past 25 years, governance has been dominated by a resurgence of Mintoffianism with great finesse.

Not only have people been appointed because of their political colour but more importantly, because of the obligations that occur within the political Masonic system.

But back to Raymond Caruana.

Raymond Caruana's case remained unsolved.

If there is someone to blame for this case not being solved, surely they are to be found among the police and the executive?

It is rather strange that none of the political murders remain unsolved.

Lino Cauchi and Raymond Caruana remain unsolved murders. To go on commemorating anniversaries without having offered solutions to institutional reform goes to prove that many of the anniversary crap is there to pump up adrenaline into the janissaries who remain faithful to a political party, irrespective of whether a party has forgotten from where it is coming, and where it is going.

When, in the late 80s, I campaigned to have Lorry Sant arraigned and investigated for corruption and violence, the administration of the day was shockingly lethargic.

Nothing happened. 

I spent my early days in journalism spouting stories about the corruption in Labour before 1987. 

It suddenly dawned on me that while I was trying to catch up with the past, I was missing out on the present. Slowly, the same mistakes of the past were repeating themselves.

A repeat of Raymond Caruana will not and should never happen, but the symptoms of the political bigotry and hate that existed then, exists now, perhaps not as loud and vulgar, but nonetheless it does exist.

Instead of looking back for the umpteenth time, we should look to the future and start mapping out what needs to be done for our future generations.