Wherever that Mintoffian fossil goes, he embarrasses Malta. I don’t mean Reno Calleja and his fixation with Communist China, which he actually preferred in its Chairman Mao days, but Joe Debono Grech. As though it’s not bad enough that he’s flapping around for Malta at the Council of Europe, things are made immeasurably worse by the fact that he is co-rapporteur on another dictatorship beloved of the Malta Labour Party: Azerbaijan.
I suppose they are operating on the principle that when the Council of Europe needs a rapporteur on a dictatorship, it should be somebody who loves and understands dictators rather than somebody who loves and understands the concept of human rights and knows what a human rights violation is.
Those human rights violations and the freedom of foreign journalists to report on what is happening in Azerbaijan without being denied entry to the country – to say nothing of the freedom of Azerbaijani journalists to report in the country itself - are the big issues on the European table right now where that state is concerned. But Joe ‘Give Me A Good Dictator Any Day’ Debono Grech is not concerned with all that rubbish. No, his big concern is that if Ilham Aliyev is removed, then Azerbaijan could go down the same route as Libya and Iraq.
Why he should think that is anybody’s guess. Azerbaijan does not have the same problems with religious fundamentalists and terror groups that Iraq and Libya have, and its social structure is entirely different to those two countries. Debono Grech has never been the brightest or best educated match in Labour’s tinder-box, but even he should know that dictators were removed by death, revolution or politics from the greater part of Europe in our lifetime – no need to go all the way back to World War II – from the Junta in Greece in 1974 to General Franco in Spain in 1975 to the predominant part of Europe which was locked behind the Iron Curtain, with people shot or imprisoned if they tried to make a bid for freedom, in 1989. Has Poland gone the way of Libya and Iraq? No, it is a European Union member state. Did Spain devolve into anarchy when General Franco died after his 36-year dictatorship? No – it’s greatest problems are economic, and it is a European Union member state. It was only the former Yugoslavia that generated into civil war and religion-based genocide, and that wasn’t because it had come out of dictatorship, but because it had the ingredients for disaster right there – remarkably similar ones to Libya’s and Iraq’s.
As one flummoxed observer tweeted after Joe from Malta spoke: ‘Has Malta MP Debono Grech seriously just compared Ilham Aliyev to Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein to try to defend him?’
Debono Grech voted in favour of the Council of Europe report which demands the release of human rights activists, journalists and political prisoners in Azerbaijan, but he sounded tetchy all the same at the way Azerbaijan’s name kept creeping back into the human rights agenda when he wanted to talk about something else.
“I have been a member of this assembly for nine years and the subject has always been Azerbaijan,” he said to his colleagues. “Always Azerbaijan. Whatever happens, Azerbaijan. Most of the countries that were part of the Soviet Union are never mentioned, but we mention Azerbaijan. I am not saying that Azerbaijan is perfect. No country is perfect, not even those of western Europe.”
I blinked when I heard that, because I had no idea he really is that fossilised. Clearly, he stills thinks in terms of what Mintoff’s government in the 1970s and early 1980s, of which he formed part, used to call ‘L-Ewropa ta’ Cajjin u Abel’, the Europe of Cain and the Europe of Abel. The European Cain was Western Europe, free Europe, and the European Abel was that part behind the Iron Curtain, under the Communist fist. There are no prizes for guessing with which Joe Debono Grech and his extreme socialist colleagues identified, and I’m not talking about the people or sympathy for those who had no choice but to live under oppression, but alliances with oppressive governments.
The trouble with people like Joe Debono Grech is that people see them as representative of Malta and not as representative of himself or the Malta Labour Party. Those who don’t understand the weird peculiarities of the way things are done in Malta, with public posts treated as a dumping-ground or reward system for cronies, imagine that he was chosen because he was the best for the position, the most politically astute, the smartest and the most articulate. And what does that say about the rest?
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