The few people who went online earlier this week to see the meeting of Parliament’s Privileges Committee could have been forgiven for thinking this was a scene straight from North Korea, or Ceausescu’s Romania or even Ukraine’s trial of Yulia Timoshenko if not outright a scene from Kafka.
As we all know, the Prime Minister had claimed a Breach of Privilege by the Leader of the Opposition on the John Dalli issue.
So the scene inside the Committee Room of the House of Representatives, (in what used to be the Grand Master’s bedroom, complete with a holy picture stuck on the ceiling to focus thoughts before and after sleeping) had the Prime Minister as accuser, facing the Leader of the Opposition sitting opposite him.
The few viewers, 129 towards the end of the session, saw ugly exchanges across the table, which not even the chairmanship of Mr Speaker could stem.
Dr Muscat clearly was out to get his pound of flesh. He even managed to make it clear that today, the Breach of Privilege does not entail the possibility of sending the culprit to jail, as it used to be before this possibility was removed. Although he may have intended it to sound like he was being gracious, he surely did not sound like that.
The scene made viewers remember the show trials of North Korea, and Ceausescu’s Romania, the eagerness with which the Ukrainian government pursued Yulia Timoshenko until the locked her in jail and even shades of Kafka’s books.
It is generally unheard of in what we consider to be functioning democracies for the head of government to pursue the leader of the Opposition even when this is done by using the tools of parliamentary justice.
The prime minister may well reply that it was his right to defend himself from what he claims were unjust charges raised by the leader of the Opposition. But between reacting to the charge and denying it flatly there and then and claiming his privileges had been breached there lies a huge gap, an enormity. Not all the tools available to a common mortal are available to a head of government.
Dr Muscat may have forgotten that today the committee meetings of the House of Representatives are streamed directly and automatically. People thus did not just hear the words but they also saw the facial expressions. And the way Dr Muscat kept looking at Dr Busuttil was chilling, to say the least.
Then again, and this is to enter into the merits of the case, Dr Muscat’s testimony did not do him any good. He admitted he had sacked John Rizzo as Commissioner of Police and he admitted too he had appointed the present Commissioner.
The way things are going between Government and Opposition, bridges are being broken, dialogue is drying up and Dr Muscat himself said last Sunday the government will not discuss with the Opposition as regards the citizenship issue, but will discuss solely with the Commission.
Whatever the faults from either side, it is not right that the government declares all dialogue with the Opposition as being suspended and that the two leaders face each other across a table in a parliamentary ‘trial’ as they did this week.