This is the moment of utter shame, the moment that we knew would come before long, but that we never thought would come slapping down just six months into the new government’s term of office. Those who boasted about voting Labour (and I don’t mean the Labour Party’s 45 per cent of the electorate diehard core), who talked loudly about ‘being in’, who gassed on endlessly about the need for change, should now, if they want to hang on to the last remaining shreds of their credibility, keep quiet and pretend that they didn’t, and perhaps we’ll forget that they did. Or they could do the decent thing, the thing that will really claw back some respect, and say: “My judgement was impaired. I made a terrible mistake. I will now dedicate the next four-and-a-half years to trying to make up for what I helped bring down on Malta’s head. I will criticise this government I elected. I will hold it to account. I will not keep saying that we have to give them a chance. I will not give them a chance to do even worse things in the name of their 36,000 majority.”
If these individuals, who the rest of us probably now wish to strangle en masse (I speak metaphorically, of course, but you have to spell that out in literal Malta) didn’t have the insight to correctly interpret the fraudulence of the Malta Taghna Lkoll snake-oil enterprise, then I hope they could at least see what was coming to Inspector Elton Taliana, the police officer who made the terrible mistake of arraigning the real culprit in a robbery, on the basis of his confession, when two other officers had already – for some mysterious reason of their own – arraigned an innocent man.
We have had, over the last few days, the police collaborating with the government-friendly press, like the General Workers Union newspapers and MaltaToday (whose editor apparently has a long-standing axe to grind with Taliana), leaking information from classified documents that only the police themselves have access to and which only the police could have leaked. We have had a build-up of stories against Inspector Taliana, a coordinated effort which made it blindingly obvious that he was a police/government target for arraigning the one who did it, when two other police officers had already arraigned the one who did not.
And now we have the ultimate sham, a stunt of which this government’s Chinese friends would approve: the policeman who prosecuted the robber is to face disciplinary action and the policemen who arraigned an innocent man on spurious grounds will not. Are we surprised? The Police Board, which unloaded its Chinese report on a suspecting public yesterday, is chaired by a respectable retired judge, but it is stuffed to the brim with Labour stooges, or more specifically, Police Ministry men. There’s the Police Minister’s friend and colleague in the Car Rentals Association; there’s the man who the Police Minister’s chief of staff has delegated to run his business, Nexos, while he is running the Police Ministry; there’s failed Labour candidate David Farrugia Sacco; there’s Labour MP Silvio Schembri’s 27-year-old wife...it’s just incredible. Anybody with a complaint against the police has no chance of a fair hearing with a Police Board riddled with Police Ministry friends and stooges.
Perhaps I should file a few complaints myself, just to give them hell. I certainly have grounds, what with all the police harassment to which I have been subjected, the lies under oath, the conspiracy with witnesses, the turning up at my gate at all hours of the day and night when the law specifically does not permit them to, the sirens wailing for half an hour outside my house to force me out on days when the law does not allow them to serve me with papers (I stayed put), and let’s not forget the way two senior officers, one from the CID and the other from the Homicide Squad, turned up to take me away on the eve of polling day, at around 10 o’clock at night, armed with an arrest warrant designed for people who are suspected of murder or moving cargoes of green soap.
I think the last bit is particularly relevant. One of those two was the very same Carlos Cordina who arraigned the wrong man in the case under review. I was hoping that they would prosecute me for committing the serious crime of uploading a mocking video of Joseph Muscat on my website on election eve (yes, that was the accusation; that’s why they had an arrest warrant, would you believe) so that I could blast them all the way to the European Court of Human Rights and out the other end for charging me with breaking a law that in itself breaks the law because it is unconstitutional. They haven’t. I think I should file a complaint with the Police Board instead, so that I can sit there and give that line-up of Labour stooges a piece of my mind face to face instead of just in writing.
This is the thin end of the wedge, readers. Elton Taliana is not the victim of the Police Minister, the Police Board or the Police Minister’s chief of staff. He is the victim of all those who can’t assess people and situations properly, for a variety of reasons that include greed, gullibility and lack of intelligence and insight, and who voted Labour. You know who you are, and if you are reading this, know today that a police officer who did the right thing is being put through the mill because of your own excruciatingly poor judgement.
www.daphnecaruanagalizia.com