Great article by ECHR Maltese Judge Giovanni Bonello on Maltese nationalists

[Ederico]

EXCELLENT ARTICLE, THIS MOST EMINENT JUDGE AND MAN OF CULTURE SAID IT PERFECTLY, AND WITH NO MINCED WORDS. The author is On. Dott. Giovanni Bonello, the Maltese judge at the European Court of Human Rights.

INDEPENDENT online

The ‘internati’ – and who should be ashamed by Giovanni Bonello

Allow me to introduce myself. I am the proud and unrepentantly defiant son of one of the internati. My conceit increases exponentially because my father was not merely an internat, but a deportat too, one of the 43 Maltese patriots the imperial authorities interned and deported during World War Two.

I am not after apologies or monuments. Both would be welcome, but neither would be relevant or sufficient. I would gladly settle for truth and justice instead.

A few – fortunately very few – want to reduce the saga of the internati to a lame contest about who suffered most: the Maltese deported to Africa or the Maltese not deported to Africa. This is really a self-serving and self-delusional derailing of what is at stake in this discussion. I do not believe that anyone – certainly not I – would consider erecting a monument to the internati because of any anguish, real or perceived, they suffered in Uganda. Calibrating the degree of suffering of those in Malta against that of the deportati to tropical Africa is as misconceived as it is misleading.

The real issue is a totally different one: would you erect a memorial to the victims of a crime against humanity who were victims of that crime against humanity solely because of their political faith? Should a political party in government raise a memorial to those of its own convictions who were collectively imprisoned and exiled – exclusively because they had the courage of their political credo?

The deportation of civilians in wartime is officially classified as a crime against humanity – a fact of which that few of the few who support it seem to be aware or, if they are, glibly consider unimportant. Let those who organised those deportations and those who today try whitewashing them always remember that – they are identifying with a crime against humanity. Of course, there are more heinous crimes against humanity on the book – but the deportation of civilians in wartime remains a crime against humanity, all the same.

Never forget that the deportati were arrested and exiled without one shred of evidence that they had ever done anything on the wrong side of the law. The ruthlessly efficient and invasive British security services discovered not one fragment of proof that the internati’s actions disclosed a whiff of treason or sedition.

A distinguished English gentleman in charge of the Lt-Governor’s office responsible for internal security and counter-espionage in Malta during the war published his very telling memoirs. In them he described the deportati as “honest men… admired citizens” whose only crime was their faith. He referred to the deportati as “victims” and branded their deportation as a “shabby affair” of which he, as an Englishman, was ashamed. He was ashamed of what the colonial Neanderthals still find such a buzz. So much for the “quislings”, the “fifth columnists” and the “Fascist lackeys” who grow and fester exclusively on the bad conscience of those who have somehow to justify the infamously unjustifiable.

If anyone in Malta knew and had to know of any seditious goings-on, it would have been British security, certainly not the few fossil glorifiers of crimes against humanity who, frankly, don’t have a clue of how persistently the British secret services tailed the nationalist leaders in the hope of discovering anything they could nail them with – and never ever managed to come up with anything against the internati. Have they read Governor Bonham Carter’s diaries about how hard and unsuccessfully the British security services tried? That, of course, is irrelevant for those who would lay down their life to ensure that it is guilt by suspicion that counts.

But then, presumptuousness always goes hand in hand with ignorance and fatuousness. It is those who worked in the British security services who gave the deportati the cleanest bill of health, a certificate of the highest integrity. Does anyone out there know of anything about the internati that British intelligence did not? I would be very eager, and grateful, to share in this hoard of concealed wisdom.

The internati were arrested without ever, in five years of detention, being told why, or what charges they faced, if any. Their imprisonment was kept wholly outside the ken of the most minimal judicial scrutiny. They sought redress in the courts of King George VI when a warrant of deportation was served on them. That court, in the name of King George VI, declared this deportation to be illegal and unconstitutional. I rather suspect the nobodies who today squeak about the wonders of those deportations must know more than the highest court of the land. Sadly they refuse to let anyone know what it is they know.

The courts that found the deportation to be an outrage against basic British constitutional principles were not presided over by Nationalists diehards. On the contrary, in charge was a former leader of the pro-colonialist party just appointed Chief Justice. The judge of first instance too, who had ruled against the deportation, had honourably distinguished himself as a leading MP, and eventually Speaker of the House, for the pro-British party. One of the lawyers who fell back on a great heart and a brilliant mind to prevent that contemptible onslaught on human rights was, if memory serves, Victor Caruana Galizia.

Those who today defend the deportations ought to know they are applauding an appalling act of political and judicial banditry certified as such by the courts of King George VI and by honest British historians with intimate, first-hand knowledge of British intelligence. Personally, I still feel uncomfortable in the company of those elated when the British king’s judgements are mocked and of those who feel that the rule of law serves wonderfully for wiping the floor.

Those who were – very rightly and fearlessly – fighting Hitler and Mussolini for the triumph of freedom and justice over despotism, deported the internati all the same. Tyranny rules, OK? It is historically misleading and deeply flawed to state that internment was normal during World War Two. Yes it was. But here we are not talking of detentions, but about deportations of nationals to a foreign country – and that was abnormal, illegitimate and amounted to a crime against humanity. The British were very careful not to deport one single British national, however overt, active and vocal his militancy for Hitler had been in the UK. They reserved deportation for the Maltese – second class, and, if you close an eye, almost-human beings by definition. But that is acceptable, isn’t it, as long as the deportees were merely natives?

Let those who today feel orgasmic at those deportations be aware that they are applauding a crime against humanity, rubbished by pro-British courts in the name of the British king. Personally, though I acknowledge this to be a matter of taste, I would not be all that jubilant to identify with any infamy, let alone that. The decorum of some others obviously suffers qualms of lesser intensity.

The deportati’s only crime happened to be their unhappiness at being servants in their own home. They aspired to better political self-sufficiency, they believed Malta to be entitled to more autonomy from the colonial diktat. They believed that the centuries-old Italian culture of Malta should not be eradicated because it did not suit Westminster, that a nation that had an strong historical identity should not be forcibly and laughably anglicised and that we had the right to resist being turned into a parody of our masters. On the other side of the fence stood those who were so happy to be servants in their own home and thought it outrageous that others failed to share their passion for drooling over the colonial raj.

They genuinely believed their genetically etched compulsion to grovel gave them the high moral ground from which to savage their political adversaries. I confess that, try as hard as I may, I find it difficult to share their view. But had I been around then, I would certainly not have dreamt of punishing their bizarre convictions by caging their freedom somewhere in the marshes of Uganda. On the contrary, to really punish them I would have allowed them the utmost freedom to think colonial and look pathetic.

I believe the question of who suffered most, the deportati to Africa or the Maltese in Malta, to be merely a meaningless red herring. One would be very foolish to deny that the Maltese who stayed behind suffered dreadfully during the war. Of course they did. But that is very conveniently forgetting that those distressed Maltese also included all the families of the deportati left behind in Malta. They suffered exactly the same ordeals, the same dangers and deprivations suffered by their fellow Maltese – but with the extra and not insignificant addition that their husbands and fathers had been torn away from them and, more illegally still, caged in foreign concentration camps.

More often than not, the deportations deprived families of their only breadwinner, of any source of income, of a pension and of any mite of social assistance. For the whole duration of the war, and a considerable time after that, my mother, my sisters and I survived, if that is the right word, exclusively on charity – aha, you’ve guessed it, we contrived that deliberately to enable me to be an attention-seeker today. Shame! Irrelevant as the index on the scale of suffering is, the families of the deportati would still win comfortably by a couple of measures.

Not that the deportati thrived on a bed of roses, either, in their African concentration camps. Apart from the forcible separation from their loved ones in times of extreme danger, they were locked up for years behind liberal lengths of barbed wire in the unhealthiest part of Africa. Virtually all contracted incurable malaria, and the often-deadly black-water fever, most suffered infestations of the excruciatingly painful chiggers and other tropical pleasantries. The silliest ones today claim how lucky the internati were to be sent to Africa – almost as if those odium-fuelled political fanatics who deported them were merely bent on doing the exiles a favour.

It is strange that no other Maltese volunteered to join those deportati so passionately kissed by fortune.

The deportati’s passage to Egypt on the HMS Breconshire convoy played some part in their run of wonderful luck. The Germans hit and sank every single ship in that convoy, apart from the one carrying the deportati. A good thing too, as it turned out. During the inferno, the Maltese prisoners were officially warned that if the ship was hit, the deportati had to drown with her. Anyone seen heading for a lifeboat would be shot on sight, they were told by those who, I now discover, only longed to give them the holiday of their life. I rather believe that those who today wax lyrical about the good fortune of the deportati must have episodes like this in mind. Great picnic, great fun for one and all. I really feel sorry for those who missed it.

On one thing I cannot fail to agree – the proposal for a memorial to those deportations is a divisive one. It would separate those who feel they must acclaim a crime against humanity from those who feel they owe solidarity to its victims; those who have both feet firmly planted on the wrong side of arbitrariness, from those who believe in the fundamental decency of human rights and values; the paltry ones unable to shake off the fetters of an old colonial enslavement, from those who proudly bask in the dignity of a long-overdue national freedom.

It would set apart those who fight the political battle by democratic dialogue from those who tried to win it by locking their adversaries up in far-away insalubrious swamps; those who believe respect for human rights to be irrelevant in times of war, from those who believe it never to be more relevant than in times of war. It is high time those on both sides of the moral divide stood up to be counted.

But the people have already spoken and oh, how loudly. The people elected the leader of the deportati Prime Minister shortly after the gates of the colonial concentration camps very grudgingly opened for him so many long years after his arrest. The people gave him the most colossal funeral in history when he died in office. The elected representatives of the people unanimously, Nationalist and Labour, voted him “the greatest of all Maltese”. Government after democratically elected government named schools, streets, gardens and squares after the deportati. They have received so many plebiscites of support and solidarity that I am not sure they really need any more.

Come to think of it, I cannot recollect ever seeing one single measly memorial willed by the people for the wretched little men and women who planned or justified that crime against humanity. Long before Independence, most of the surviving imperialisti had disappeared like snow in the sun, leaving only bits and blobs of sorry slush behind.

I notice that whenever the despicable saga of the internati comes up for discussion, a small, dismal platoon of those nostalgically still in inconsolable mourning for a defunct empire, invariably and unanimously join in with impassioned pleas to let sleeping dogs lie – a past episode that would best be forgotten. I fully understand why and sympathise with them. Had I been on the side of those who plotted or justified such a contemptible crime against humanity, I too would pray for nothing better than that something so sordid be forgotten.