Guido de Marco’s lingering presence

Last Thursday’s commemoration of Guido de Marco four years after his death saw AZAD’s main hall in Valletta packed to capacity with people from all walks of life.

It was a sobering occasion graced by evocative and revelatory addresses, mainly by EU Commissioner Tonio Borg and Judge Giovanni Bonello, both of whom knew de Marco well and, to a greater or lesser extent, had worked with him.

The Academy’s president, David Griscti, opened the soiree; Guido de Marco’s son Mario concluded it.

De Marco the father was an affable and determined personality who had a brilliant critical mind, not only as a criminal lawyer. I remember him telling me that he was probably ‘the only friend Mintoff had left’.

We had various meetings in his study at Sant’Anton when he was writing his introduction to my book The Origins of Maltese Statehood (1999). Memories were exchanged. One was when Guido was at home in San Pawl tat-Targa and he heard somebody shouting outside. It was Mintoff. ‘Gwid, gibtlek l-gheneb!’ Apparently on his pseudo-farm at L-Gharix, Mintoff also had a goat. In a very recent interview for a book, which I had with Eddie Fenech Adami, it transpired that the milk being served to him with the coffee at L-Gharix was from Mintoff’s goat: ‘minn taghna dan, minn taghna.’

De Marco, as noted at the AZAD symposium, is also remembered for his oratory, even for his engaging way in conducting lectures. One reassuring metaphor in disheartening times, which I myself particularly recall, was that Mintoff was a clay giant, his shadow bigger than himself (‘Dan ggant tat-tafal, dellu itwal minnu’). Actually the only other orator who matched his verve was probably Mintoff.

And no less was he remembered for his humane touch. He would not only shake your hand but press it – hard. One speaker whose father knew Guido recalled how he was once at Ghar id-Dud and the Head of State was passing by. On seeing him, Guido stopped the car, crossed the street, and went to greet him personally. This approach worked wonders. When he was President of the UN General Assembly at the time of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, against all protocol Guido went down from the podium to greet Emir Al Sabah, Kuwait’s temporarily displaced ruler. Kuwait never forgot that gesture.

Other recollections were of a less personal nature. As a criminal lawyer, for instance, his successful defence of, among others, the Cachia Zammit brothers just after the change in government in 1971, and of Pietru Pawl Busuttil, who was falsely accused by the police of murdering Nardu Debono, stood out.

Gudio had a sense of history, as shown in his well-known quip from Nerik Mizzi: that politics was neither a vocation nor a profession but a mission. Known for his propensity to keep people waiting, his sense of time was less acute. Not so his sense of humour. Once he died, he used to say, people would describe him correctly as ‘the late Guido de Marco’.

The means test to enter University he called ‘a mean test’ so together with Ugo Mifsud Bonnici he saw to it that students would no longer have to pay to go to University. After waiting for years to assume ministerial office he and others of his ilk assumed that their time had arrived in 1971, but their party lost the election. And in any case, so Borg Olivier told me at the Auberge d’Aragon on the eve of that election, he was not planning to change his Cabinet.

Another iconic memory is that of the man with his bandaged head after a Maltese policeman had struck him with a truncheon on his brow during one of the perilous marches down Kingsway to commemorate Independence Day, on 21st September, 1975. With Borg Olivier hugging him. In other words, he was seen as a symbol of resistance, of courage and perseverance. No wonder that, as the party’s secretary-general, his rallying cry at the end of meetings would be: ‘il-liberta’ l-ewwel u qabel kollox’. That was also in response to Mintoff’s concluding slogan ‘Malta l-ewwel u qabel kollox’. The individual against the state.

Guido was, as Vanni  Bonello put it, ‘not a human rights lawyer’ but a ‘human rights person’. On Judge Bonello’s advice, the first piece of legislation enacted by the newly-returned PN administration in 1987 was the inclusion of the European Convention of Human Rights as part and parcel of the Maltese corpus juris.

The text of Guido’s speech in sitting 13 on 3 August, 1987 (the European Convention [Amendment] Bill) was reproduced verbatim and distributed to all and sundry on Thursday. This was befitting as Judge Bonello’s evaluation of how the concept and implementation of human rights law had changed over the years, a unique lesson for all those  interested in human rights. Briefly, the right to petition symbolised a move from state to individual rights, as could be seen from various sentences cited by Bonello.

Among other revelations, we had Bonello’s testimony that after pre-election staff changes at St Vincent de Paul home for the elderly in 1976 practically 100% of the votes of the poor inmates had favoured the party in power. When Bonello and de Marco sought constitutionally to challenge this, half way through the case two of the three judges were arbitrarily changed. The two new ones were the father and the brother of the government’s defence lawyers. Although Judge Bonello did not mention names, it is known from court proceedings that the judges in question were Mizzi and Refalo. On seeing this, Bonello and de Marco reckoned that it was a hopeless case and they just withdrew it. All I recalled from that incident was a published photograph showing the windscreen of Guido’s car smashed by an axe, as he arrived to visit.

Once AZAD or the PN find some financial equilibrium from the mess inherited by the current leadership, they could invest in an audio system. Such precious and pertinent eyewitness testimonies of past times should be recorded, categorised and archived, if only for the benefit of posterity.

Prof. Henry Frendo is a historian and author