I see from yesterday’s news reports that we are back to the days when victims of crime are treated by the police as perpetrators while the culprits suddenly become the victims and get away with it.
I and tens of thousands of others had to live with that sort of thing on a routine basis – you never reported a crime to the police or asked them for help if you were assaulted, because they’d arrest you instead – and I don’t think any of us want to see it happen again. None of us, that is, except for the dregs of society and the people from the pits, who tend to be the perpetrators and so work that situation to their advantage. They like it, because it suits them.
The newspapers described scenes yesterday at the bus terminus in Valletta that were straight out of a Third World country. When I say that one of the worst characteristics of Malta is that Maltese people are in the main extremely uncivilised, ill-mannered and uncourteous, with no idea how to behave – many Maltese are actually savages – I get jumped upon. But face it – where else in the supposedly developed world do you see people behaving like that? You just don’t. People are courteous to each other as a matter of course. They are civilised. They know what the codes of behaviour are. They say please and thank you and keep their voices down in public. They show consideration for others in their immediate surroundings. Behaving well is a matter of pride. In Malta, behaving badly, loudly and aggressively is a matter of honour, and most people wear grim facial expressions and have hostile body language. It’s awful. When you return to the island after being away, it’s the first thing you notice: how rough people are, how angry-all-the-time.
The most frightening thing – yes, it is indeed frightening, because ignorance and savagery could be excused on the grounds that people knew no better 30 years ago, but it can’t be excused on similar grounds now, which means that savagery is actually a lifestyle choice – is that when people have good manners and behave well, they are seen either as a pushover or as somebody with pretensions, or, at the dangerous end of the scale, as a threat. “What does he want and what is he trying to do to me?”
Transport Minister Joe Mizzi’s Tal-Linja card project started with disaster yesterday. We could have predicted that from the fact that the night before he turned up to Parliament wearing the sort of clothes men generally wear when their wives have given them an ultimatum on fixing the kitchen sink and then painting the bathroom ceiling. And he was as frazzled as a headless chicken. Masses of people were stuck for hours at the terminus yesterday at launch, unable to use their Tal-Linja cards, some of them just giving up and buying ordinary tickets so they could get away. Daboma Jack, a Hungarian citizen on holiday in Malta, tried to speed up matters and cut down on the rising tension by getting the chaotic mass of mainly Maltese people to form an orderly line (how embarrassing is that already), and ended up pounced on by the police and arrested.
Mr Jack was simply showing leadership there. It is impossible for somebody with a strong leadership drive to stand around in chaos, see what the solution might be, and not do anything about it. But as he asked people to form a line, and many obliged (should they have had to be asked?), one Maltese woman of the sort usually seen in the front row at coffee mornings for Silvio Parnis went up to him and spat in his face, shouting “Go back to your country!” Then she slapped him. She only did it because she thought she had the approval of the crowd, that they would agree with her, share her sentiments and back her up. That is not necessarily the case, but Maltese people are also cowards and don’t stick their neck out for people who are bullied or attacked in public. So the crowd stood by and watched her do this and Mr Jack called out to the police for help. They rushed over all right. They knocked him down to the ground and pinned him to the tarmac. Press footage shows two policemen in black action gear rather than the standard uniform, lying on top of the poor man with only his feet visible. Of course it goes without saying that Dobama Jack is black and that he had been mistaken for an African refugee. This does not in any way justify the actions of either the awful woman – another Maltese coward who scuttled away when she saw the police approach and arrest her victim – or of the police. On the contrary, it highlights the fact that accusations of racism among the police and the public are grounded in reality.
The Police Minister has ordered the Commissioner of Police to hold an inquiry. That’s as it should be, and the officers who did it should be held accountable. It is unlikely that this will happen, because as we have seen to our disgust, police corruption is worse than police racism. The Police Minister himself illustrates that fact: he did not spring to action and order an inquiry into the behaviour of former acting Commissioner of Police Ray Zammit and his two corrupt police inspector sons despite the shocking details of their corruption revealed in the press.
www.daphnecaruanagalizia.com