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• CENSU Tabone THE MAN AND HIS CENTURY Published by %ltese Studies P.O.Box 22, Valletta VLT, Malta 2000 Henry Frendo 268058 © Henry Frendo 2000 [email protected] . All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author. ISBN: 99932-0-094-8 (hard-back) ISBN: 99932-0-095-6 (paper-back) Published by ~ltese Studies P.O.Box 22, Valletta VLT, Malta 2000 Set in Times New Roman by Standard Publications Ltd., St Julian's, Malta http://www.independent.com.mt Printed at Interprint Ltd., Marsa, Malta TABLE OF CONTENTS Many Faces: A FULL LIFE 9 2 First Sight: A CHILDHOOD IN GOZO 17 3 The Jesuit Formation: A BORDER AT ST ALOYSIUS 34 4 Long Trousers: STUDENT LIFE IN THE 1930s 43 5 Doctor-Soldier: A SURGEON CAPTAIN IN WARTIME 61 6 Post-Graduate Training: THE EYE DOCTOR 76 7 Marsalforn Sweetheart: LIFE WITH MARIA 87 8 Curing Trachoma: IN GOZO AND IN ASIA 94 9 A First Strike: LEADING THE DOCTORS AGAINST MINTOFF 112 10 Constituency Care: 1962 AND ALL THAT 126 11 The Party Man: ORGANISING A SECRETARIA T 144 12 Minister Tabone: JOBS, STRIKES AND SINS 164 13 In Opposition: RESISTING MINTOFF, REPLACING BORG OLIVIER 195 14 Second Thoughts: FOREIGN POLICY AND THE STALLED E.U. APPLICATION 249 15 President-Ambassador: A FATHER TO THE NATION 273 16 Two Lives: WHAT FUTURE? 297 17 The Sources: A BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 310 18 A General Index: NAMES AND SUBJECTS 313 'Irridu naslu biex meta nghidu "ahna", ebda persuna ma thossha eskluza minn taht il-kappa ta' dik il-kelma.' Censu Tabone, Diskors fl-Okkaijoni tal-Ftuh tas-Seba' Parlament, 4 April 1992 1 Many faces A FULL LIFE CENSU Tabone is a household name in Malta. And for good reason, too. Today, most people remember him as 'il-President'. But for many years one of the country's leading eye doctors, he was 'Tabone tal-ghajnejn'. In the 1950s, when the first clashes between Mr Dom Mintoff's first administration and the Maltese doctors began, as a union leader he became 'Tabone tat-tobba'. Tabone and Mintoff would sit on opposite sides of the House for the best part of half-a-century - the two eldest, outstanding politicians of the 20th century who have made it into the new millenium. Ironically Tabone, like Mintoff, had a father from Gozo and a mother from Cospicua. Censu's father Kolinu hailed from Rabat (Victoria), whereas Mintoff's father Wenzu was from the small village of Ghasri. Their mothers, Lisa and Cetta, were both 'Bormliii'. An intriguing potion. Contrary to popular belief, Dr Tabone, unlike Mr Mintoff, has not been a politician for most of his life. When he first sought election to office in 1962, he was nearly fifty years old. He did not become an MP and thereafter a Minister, until four years later, in the fifth - and last - Borg Olivier administration. Mintoff, who is three years younger, was only 19 years old when he became the Malta Labour Party's general secretary after a stint as an official of the Cospicua Labour Party club. Soon after IQ CENSU TABONE his return from England in 1944, when he became the party's deputy leader, he was 28. Whereas Tabone left active politics in 1989 when he became Head of State for a five year term, Mintoff fought on until in 1998 he brought down the one-seat majority Labour administration led by Dr Alfred Sant by voting against the proposed Cottonera development project. Except for his foray to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar followed by a spell in Britain during the Second World War, and although he certainly kept his architect's practice going, Mintoff was a politician through and through, spending his entire life in advocacy, agitation and militancy. Censu 'the politician' would be, and had already been, other things besides that. He was first an army doctor. That was at a propitious moment when the Second World War broke out and, in 1940, just as the bombs started falling down on the Maltese Islands in what was probably the most demanding and devastating time within living memory. In the following decade, Censu's calling was a still more challenging one, taking him as a pioneering surgeon not just to his beloved Island of Gozo but to the far corners of the earth in the fight against a widespread blinding disease: trachoma. In the meantime, 'Censu' was a pupil at St Aloysius College in the 1920s; an undergraduate at the University of Malta and its Medical School in the 1930s; then a post-graduate student seeking and obtaining specialization as an ophthalmologist in the United Kingdom; he became a husband, a father and a family man like his own parents with several mouths to feed. As a politician, Censu would attain the highest offices, the most prestigious overseas one probably being that of Chairman of the Committee of Ministers, one which Mintoff had filled, quite differently, a decade before him, in Strasbourg. His last appointment was also his highest, as Malta's Head of State, one which Mintoff may well have coveted, in his case unsuccessfully. There were various other positions, mainly party ones, in the run-up to these. Yet Censu is reputed always to have remained close to the grass-roots, generally approachable and affable, staunchly guarding his own principles and opinions but moving up and down the social scales with an innate simplicity and ease, from the convent to the band club to the festa in the Sacro Cuor parish enclave Many Faces: A FULL LIFE 11 and similarly elsewhere, so that many today might still regard him, as 'the people's President'; and certainly there, in the Sliema-St Julian's area, which became his 'heartland' of a lifetime. In a front-page tribute after a year in office as President, The Democrat had actually called him that. In the history of the Nationalist Party, in 1987 Censu Tabone became the first Foreign Minister not to hold office simultaneously as the Prime Minister (Dr Fenech Adami). When the Nationalists returned to office after a full sixteen years in Opposition - in what was frequently an unpalatable neocolonial context of internecine, even bloody rivalry and conflict Censu was the only one in the new Cabinet team to have previously served as a Minister and been exposed to a stint of Cabinet government. He was thus a living symbol of continuity with the Borg Olivier era, one which however he would also see actively being brought to an end during the internal, generally 'hushed' but very tense leadership struggles of the 1970s. More importantly, in the historic year 1989, as the Berlin Wall fell down and Communism and the Cold War with it, Censu became the first 'Nationalist' President of Malta. Here, as elsewhere in Europe, that marked a difficult and a delicate turning-point in contemporary history. Malta and her people slowly but surely yearned and indeed sought to leave behind them the al1l1i di piombo associated with the worst aspects of Mintoffism: the roaming armed thugs from campus to curia, from club to printing press, the unwarranted police shootings and tear gas; the overly protectionist bans on imported chocolate and toothpaste, colour television sets and computers, in favour of such fanciful old-time recipes as guJepp or a kappar industry; the ban on making use of the words 'Malta' and 'nation' and their derivatives without prior government authorisation, causing newspapers, shops and even books to change name or title ... Pugnacity and adversity also served however, in angst and catharsis, as a nation-building exercise: this saw a winning of internal rights and freedoms through a more home-grown political experimentation, communal solidarity, social democratisation, as well as a raised, if sometimes highly controversial, self-awareness regionally and internationally, with an adduced 'republican' slant. 12 CENSU TABONE As the Nationalist Party's Secretary General, then its first Deputy Leader, as a constituency MP for the Sliema and St Julian's area during 23 long years, as a Minister in different portfolios and as a parliamentarian in government and in opposition in Malta and overseas, Censu was one of those who most valiantly fought against abuse and excess - even as, by virtue of age and a shared generational resonance, he seemed to strike a chord in Mintoff's responses, or so he felt. Having a devout Christian social conscience, he would have applauded socially beneficial reforms, of which there then was a bonanza of sorts. Surprisingly perhaps, at times he or others in his circle would have been closer to Mintoff's party on certain 'nationalist' issues, such as, for example - during the seminal and historic Independence debates of the early 1960s behind closed doors at party headquarters - whether or not the Maltese national flag ought to retain the George Cross. Or indeed as to how far Malta's joining of the European Community should be pursued as a political goal and platform without due reassurance and persuasion (certainly not without Censu being duly reassured and persuaded first). Censu was the first President of Malta to be officially boycotted by the Opposition (then led by Or Km'menu Mifsud Bonnici). He was also the first one ever to be asked as his constitutional term was coming to an end in 1994 - to stay on, by that same Malta Labour Party in Opposition, albeit now under a different leadership.