Earlier today, the Labour government unveiled plans to place a monument of Labour ex-Prime Minister Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici in Castille Square, potentially just right in front of the Malta Stock Exchange of all places.
The monument is an outright abuse of history by the government that exclusively serves the party’s interests. Monuments are meant to be national symbols, but Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici was anything but a national symbol. Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici presided over Labour’s authoritarian phase in the 1980s, when Malta experienced a breakdown of rule-of-law, widespread corruption and government-backed criminality, and political violence that included murder. Malta also went through significant economic stagnation in that period.
Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici is a historical symbol of one of Malta’s worst governments in history: this is a very hard fact for Labourites to accept because Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici is remembered by most of them as a generous and a good person. He was indeed generous and also had a big heart, but his generosity ended as soon as he was used by Dom Mintoff to caretake for his corrupt and collapsing government. His position and legacy in history is completely divergent from the way he chose to live his life after retiring from politics.
The Labour Party is also whitewashing its legacy of the 1980s with this monument, and this also helps it whitewash Labour’s corruption and criminality of the administrations by Joseph Muscat. This is of course a very opportunistic way to use history as Labour is dressing up its ongoing moral and political crisis with monuments, theatre and a state of indifference and complacency.
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