The inevitable consequence of bird-shooters being given to understand that they would be able to do almost as they please under Joseph Muscat’s government is that this is exactly what they are doing. And they perceive any attempt by this government at clamping down on their bad behaviour as a pretend attempt at clamping down, done just for show to impress that part of the electorate which has no sympathy with bird-shooters and trappers.
The shooters and trappers say to themselves that secretly or not so secretly, Joseph Muscat and his party/government are truly on their side but they have to go through the motions to keep the rest of us quiet. When the half-hearted attempts at pandering to the more environmentally conscious elector get too much for the shooters and trappers to contend with, as over the last few days, their anger and lack of control is such that there is only one way to interpret the situation: that they believe a bargain struck has been broken.
Their confidence and security under this government is such that they feel free and able to take up the habits of old. A mob of around 30 of them broke away from a demonstration in Valletta with the atavistic cry of ‘ejjew immorru ghalihom’ and headed to the bird sanctuary at Buskett, where they proceeded to set upon a group of birdwatchers, attacking them with stones. The police were nowhere to be seen. Afterwards, the acting police commissioner said that his men were indeed there, but “in another place at Buskett...we can’t be everywhere at the same time.”
You’d think that Buskett is enormous, the way he went on, a sort of massive forest in which one can get lost for days like Hansel and Gretel, only to be cooked for breakfast by a nasty old bird-shooter living in a little house made of candy-rifles. Presumably, the police are not only blind and in the wrong place, but also deaf to the sound of shouting and stones being thrown.
“God forbid we knew what was going on and failed to do anything about it,” the acting police commissioner said. Oh really? That wouldn’t have been the first time, would it – maybe not under this police commissioner or a couple of his predecessors, but the days when the police either looked the other way or worse, joined in, when mobs went about their criminal business, are still within living memory. And not the living memory of pensioners, either. So the acting commissioner had best not push it.
The shooters’ and trappers’ demonstration in Valletta was out of control, too, but then protest demos often are and that’s where the police come in with peaceful and organised means of control – or they should, but don’t. If they don’t yet know how to do it, they could take lessons, and not from Beijing. The shooters are furious because the standard shooting season has been cancelled. If only they and the rest of us were to show such passion over the far more significant cancellation of local council elections – but there’s greater fervour for bird-shooting than there is for democracy. Their fury is exacerbated because this sudden decision runs contrary to the messages they have been given by the government and the police, not least by the decision to prosecute “for illegal possession of protected species” the environmentalist volunteers who were filmed with the dead and dying birds they had found. That stupid (insane, really) decision reads like an act of deliberate vindictiveness against the shooters’ worst enemies, and that is exactly how the shooters themselves see it: “the government and the police are helping us by persecuting our enemies”.
All these problems stem from the Labour Party’s inability to form a united front with the Nationalist Party on the subject of shooting and trapping. Now that Labour is widely perceived by shooters and trappers to be their agent in government, whether this is correct or not, that united front becomes more crucial. The Labour Party actively encouraged shooters and trappers to believe that it would do their bidding if they helped vote it into power. It now has to deal with the consequences of this one of its several Faustian pacts. But there has only ever been one way for the political parties to deal with this incessant problem, and that is to face it down together. Labour and the PN, whether in government or opposition, cannot carry on with the cheap tackiness of encouraging the shooting and trapping lobby to play them for votes. The situation is untenable. The problem is common to both, and a common front is called for.
www.daphnecaruanagalizia.com