It was a scene straight out of the panic-stricken Labour government years of the 1980s. It brought back memories so many of us would prefer to forget, but tell ourselves not to do so. Soldiers beating on riot shields, bearing down on unarmed, peaceful protestors seated on the ground. Six armed men in uniform, beating and kicking in the head and the spleen a lone and defenceless man, who is lying on the ground trying to protect his face and skull with his hands, as best he can. A gang of other men in uniform, urging on their colleagues and shouting at them to “let them have it”, to “give it to them”, to “knock their heads in” and to “kick their faces”. The only difference this time round was that they qualified those heads and faces as “black”. There was another difference, too. The journalists who watched it all did not have their cameras snatched and smashed. They captured the whole thing on film.

Norman Lowell and his band of neo-Nazis must have been thrilled. If they get their hands on the footage, they will probably play it over and over again, as a form of Nazi porn, for thrills. Now, at least, we have an indication of who at least some of those 1,700 individuals who voted for brute fascism might have been. They are in the army, guarding the people they would like to see shot at sea, while voting for Norman Lowell with one hand and giving aid to the people of the Indian Ocean with the other.

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Twenty-three of the people from the refugee camps have been hospitalized. Eleven of them have been kept for observation and further treatment. At least two of them were seen by reporters to have been taken into casualty in wheelchairs. Another two had to be carried in on stretchers, one of them unconscious. Another had his neck supported by a medical collar. Yet another was shouting in pain as he was helped out of the ambulance. I am writing this piece 36 hours after the soldiers attacked those unarmed protestors, and so far, members of the Jesuit Refugee Service have not been allowed to see or speak to them. After much negotiation, lawyers have been allowed in instead, this being a country that sets much store by them. Had the Jesuits not taken a firm stance on this one, these human beings would have been denied a right that we consider fundamental: access to a lawyer when being kept in confinement by the forces of authority. And this, too, reminds us of the years of decline in the 1980s. People then taken arbitrarily into custody, and questioned at all hours of the night in the notorious police headquarters in Floriana, were denied access to a lawyer, too. I know this from direct experience, because I was one of them – just as I was among those charged, on at least four occasions, including one when I was heavily pregnant, by weapon-wielding soldiers and policemen, their faces, where visible, contorted with rage and hatred and with spittle foaming at the sides of their mouths.

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Though disgusted, I am not shocked. I saw similar scenes in the summer of 1991, when a ship carrying boys and young men from Albania put in to St Paul’s Bay. Through binoculars I watched, horrified, as soldiers in a dinghy used their oars to beat hard on the heads of the boys who jumped off the ship and tried to swim ashore. One of them had to be hospitalised with a head injury. You will always find these revolting elements in the army, usually in the lower ranks, where they give a bad name to the rest. Soldiering attracts those who like order and discipline, but it is also a magnet for those with a violent streak coupled with a Rambo complex. If they don’t take it out on the vulnerable at home – like their wives or their children – they’ll do so on others when they get the chance. You can tell, simply by watching the relish with which they pounce violently on others when given the chance, that this is the sort of thing about which they have fantasies.

It’s our own Abu Ghraib. All those who tut-tutted about the “Americans” torturing and behaving with violence towards Iraqi prisoners should now either stop up their mouths or say the same about our own men. At least those low-ranking US soldiers knew they were doing something wrong; ours actually thought they were doing something clever, something that would win them the support and admiration of the whole of Malta. They charged the asylum seekers and beat them savagely in full view of news reporters, television cameras, and photographers. They must have expected a round of applause, and perhaps a medal next Republic Day.

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The Prime Minister, who is ultimately responsible for the army, has ordered an inquiry, which is now headed by Judge Franco Depasquale. I think the Prime Minister should have summoned the brigadier for a very stiff talking-to. Lower ranks take their orders from those above them, who in turn take orders from those above them. The army is one of the few organisations where acting on one’s initiative is simply not permitted. Orders are followed, and if there are no orders, then there is no action. Somebody must have given the order to charge the protestors and to attack them. That same person will have failed to give the order to cease and desist when it became apparent that people were seriously injured. Who is that person? Obviously, he is the officer who was in charge. He is responsible, and no inquiry need go further than questioning him and finding out why he gave the order to charge in the first place, and why he then failed to give the order to stop the violent attack. It is inconceivable that soldiers in riot gear should be present at the scene of a protest without an officer in charge, who we should take his presence for granted, as we should also take for granted the fact that he gave one order and then failed to give another. Soldiers in riot gear do not charge and attack without an order to do so. If they did, then that is a scandal of an entirely different order, and should lead us to ask what is happening in the army. If – and this is yet another scandalous prospect – there was no officer in charge of the men, then it is the Brigadier who should be severely questioned.

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Look at the fuss we make because British soldiers charged Maltese rioters in Valletta nine decades ago. We set up monuments and still mark the day as one of the now contentious national holidays. Yet when Maltese soldiers charge people who are not rioting, but sitting on the ground, we try to gloss the whole thing over. Typical: two weights, and two measures.

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In the anti-democratic days of Mintoff and KMB, the army and the police were the main weapons the government used for the oppression of the people. Finding out who gave an order to charge, beat up, attack, shoot or otherwise molest unarmed protestors was taken for granted as impossible. Today, things are supposed to be different. Let’s hope that this inquiry will not only be quick, clear and transparent, but also published without any equivocation or attempts at sharing of the blame. The army, again, is one of the few organisations where blame cannot be shared or passed on, because it is structured in such a way as to give a clear chain of command, with everyone bar the Brigadier acting to superior orders – and even the brigadier, ultimately, is answerable to the Prime Minister.

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Some people are saying that it serves them right, that those “black bastards” deserved it. That, too, recalls the past. When reports of protesting families who were shot at by police, brutalized by soldiers, or assaulted by thugs, made the news in those not-easily-forgotten days, many people who voted Labour reacted by saying “Haqqhom”. Others tried to play down the reports by saying they were exaggerated, or that the bullets in bodies had been faked. They regarded those who demonstrated against the excesses of the then Labour government in the same way as many now regard the people in the refugee camps: as sub-human, deserving of punishment or retribution with maximum violence, to “teach them a lesson”.

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All we need now is a statement from Norman Lowell’s Nazi party, congratulating the soldiers for their efforts, and lamenting the fact that not a single nigger was killed by a brave Maltese.

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I wonder how many of the soldiers, and those who support their brutality, gave money or other donations for the victims of the Indian Ocean tsunami – probably many of them. They like their pitiable creatures to be on the other side of the world, not right under their noses. How much easier it is to give money than to feel compassion.

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“They attacked us,” one soldier was overheard saying to some friends in the casualty department at the hospital. One wonders what with: a T-shirt, perhaps? A piece of over-boiled pasta? A pair of donated shorts? His friend replied: “Serves them right. We never asked them to come here.” No, we didn’t. They didn’t want to come here either. They would much rather be in any other part of Europe whatsoever, and they have said so. If they are released from the camps, this is the last place they will stay. Why are we so surprised? Even our younger generation is all set to leave in droves, having recognised this as a dead-end country for those with plans and ambitions. And make no mistake, the people in those camps have plenty of plans and ambition; if they hadn’t, they wouldn’t have taken such a high risk in getting into those tiny, ramshackle boats to escape.

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We call ourselves Christian, so Christian that we are the only country in the world – bar the Philippines – not to have divorce legislation. And then we are immune to suffering on our doorstep. We even hate those who are suffering because they cause us inconvenience and threaten our cosy life. We like suffering to be as far away from us as possible – the Indian Ocean, for example – so that we can watch it on television, shed a couple of tears, and make ourselves feel good by competing to raise as much money as possible. We love those headlines in which we tell ourselves that we are the most generous people in the world (“Look how much money we raised per capita!”). Yet as Alfred Sant once famously said, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. And the real proof of our generosity is in our attitudes towards those who have been washed up on our shores.

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Yes, if Paul of Tarsus were to be shipwrecked here today, he would end up confined in Hal Far, guarded by soldiers taunting him as a squinty-eyed Semite who should go back where he came from.