Anġlu Farrugia held a grudge for 6 months. He waited until Saturday to use a public event to reprimand protesters who last December shouted loud enough outside his penthouse office at the entrance to Valletta to force Joseph Muscat out of office.
He complained about eggs being thrown. Eggs, mind you. Not Molotov cocktails or M67s. And he complained about cars being damaged. If you’re looking for pictures of overturned cars set on fire in the street, you’ll need to look in the archives of a Medellin newspaper. None of that happened here. Owen Bonnici’s car was missing the cover of its petrol tank but that was when he got his driver to roll on a crowd of protesters and over the foot of a police inspector. Poor woman.
Significantly Anġlu Farrugia did not use his speech to call on his parliamentary colleagues to higher ethical standards: not to involve themselves in murder conspiracies say, or not to tip off murderers before their arrest, or not to take bribes in exchange of public contracts and schemes. None of that bothered Anġlu Farrugia. Protesters did.
What is ironic is that he reserved this speech for the Sette Giugno memorial: the 101st anniversary of protests in Valletta when the colonial authorities lost their nerve and fired on the crowd killing four instantly and another two later, of the injuries they sustained.
Perhaps Anġlu Farrugia should reflect about the right to rebellion: that when lawful means of resisting a tyranny do not work, the people have the right and duty to escalate their resistance. Everything in proportion of course. No one is arguing for a gunpowder plot for the Parliament building or dismantling the police headquarters like the knocking down of the Bastille. It has not come to that. But eggs, loud cries in the street, coming up to the police barricades and gesticulating furiously? Anġlu Farrugia should really have expected that when he heard Melvyn Theuma testify.
As Robert Abela should have. Yesterday our lily-livered prime minister sought the comforting shelter of his party’s TV station to tell us those troublesome blacks said some words holding cutlery and threatened to blow up the boat they were imprisoned on using a gas cylinder. There was no reporter in the room to ask him how they planned to blow up the gas cylinder? Was it by some sub-Saharan voodoo and a rain dance? You never know with these savages.
What did he expect? That they’d continue to sing uncomprehendingly Viva l-Labour as the mistral waves tossed them about while they slid over projectile vomit? The same arrogance that makes Anġlu Farrugia think no one would protest when they found their prime minister sheltered thieves and murderers, is the arrogance to think that Sette Giugno protesters of 1919 are entitled to freedom but black people should be grateful for their watery graves.
I’m a fat, slow, cowardly man. I know not what to do with cutlery except to wolf down food. And it would not occur to me to threaten anyone to blow up a gas cylinder because I wouldn’t know how it’s done. My mind has been numbed by comfort, my body is made lazy by the readiness of my chairs and the fullness of my refrigerator. Robert Abela is perhaps right to calculate that my love of creature comforts is likely to come before any effort to resist his tyranny.
But how does he expect that of men in their twenties whose Darwinian destiny brought them to our shores? Of all their mates back home, they are the ones to drop everything and hitch a ride across the largest desert of the world. They walked over dunes, lived through thirst and beatings, worked as slaves and sailed over the first sea of their lives on rafts unsuitable for river crossings. And they survived, unlike so many of their friends.
Their determination to find freedom makes protests like ours look timid and capricious. They fight for their right to live and they’ve shown not merely the will to survive but the strength to do so against all odds.
Robert Abela, the coward who is too scared of local journalists to answer their questions and speaks instead from behind the walls of Fortress Labour, was confronted by these brave men he thought he would break by forcing them to bob in the water 13 miles out under a beating sun and the stern watch of Paceville chucker-outs.
You can use strip-club bullies to chase out a lanky twenty-five-year-old gaming company geek whose credit card has gone tilt soon after he touched what he shouldn’t have. But it’s another job altogether to hold down 400 young men with nothing to lose except their will to live.
No wonder the hollow musclemen collapsed and panicked at the sight of a cruise boat cutlery knife and a ridiculous bluff about a gas cylinder. No wonder Robert Abela surrendered quicker than Ferdinand Hompesch.
Now Robert Abela, in fear of his own supporters, promises to flout other laws and crush other rights by making a mockery of the migrants’ asylum applications and putting them on planes back over the Mediterranean and the Sahara before anyone has checked what would happen to them when they got back.
Unless the migrants hire the prime minister’s father and his wife as they lawyers. They had managed to block similar policies of past Maltese governments before. No doubt they can do so again now.
