Black Ribbon Day.

Although we share a common cultural heritage with the sister states of the European Union, the  collective memories of our experience in the recent historical past, in Malta as in most of the West, are quite different from those of the East of Europe. We have to keep this in mind when trying to understand better some of the political positions  taken by  the ‘new’democracies of Eastern Europe.

The 23^rd August is the seventy ninth anniversary  of the infamous Molotov –Ribbentrop Pact of 1939. It was supposedly a simple non-aggression pact, in which the parties promised neutrality, should there arise hostilities with other parties. In reality it was Stalin’s  Soviet Union giving the Carte Blanche to Hitler’s Nazi Germany for invading Poland. A secret protocol in the Pact provided for the partitioning of Poland, after the invasion, along the lines of certain rivers. The Pact also assigned spheres of influence, with Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Slovenia and Bessarabia being recognised as of special interest for Soviet Russia.  

So on the 1^st  September which followed, German air and ground forces attacked Poland from the west, and later in the same month, Russian troops overrun their part of Poland from the east. In 1941 Hitler broke the Pact and invaded Russia and the following three years saw all these buffer countries being occupied alternately by the two powers. What the populations suffered under Nazi occupation and then Soviet re-occupation, with the pogroms, concentration camps and gulags, with the reprisals against collaborators, as well as against Jews, supposedly dangerous dissidents, Catholic priests and Lutheran pastors, has left a seared collective memory in what are now called the ‘new’ democracies in the former Communist dominated countries .

Witnesses and survivors have left us works of  eloquent human testimony and literary importance. Primo Levi’s Se questo e’ un uomo [If this is a man] and Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Odin den' Ivana Denisovicha [ One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich] are ample proof of the disregard for basic human dignity that followed after the breakdown of democratic and ‘rule of law’  guarantees in Fascist/Nazi and Communist dictatorships.

We in Malta, as in Britain, suffered extensive and repeated bombing from the air, hunger and deprivation, during the Second World War.  Providentially, and through our courage and steadfastness, and with the blessed concurrence of the wide moat of the surrounding  blue sea, we were spared invasion and counter-invasion. What the experience has wrought  on the collective memory of our sister republics in the East, needed and still needs great  investment in psychological reconstruction of attitudes.

The memory of what happened in the two World Wars should not be forgotten. Today’s generation and future generations   should not be  exposed to the  lure of strong man politics, and the seeming simplicity of populist solutions, through this amnesia.

These considerations prompted the establishment of the European Day of Remembrance for  the  victims of Stalinism and Nazism on the 23^rd August, known as the Black Ribbon Day. It was originally proposed in the Prague Declaration of 2008 which bore the signature, among others, of Vaclav Havel. It was decided upon by the Council of Ministers responsible for Justice and Home Affairs of the European Union on the 10^th June 2011. I was one of the Ministers who “reaffirmed the importance of raising awareness of the crimes committed by totalitarian regimes, and of promoting a shared memory of these crimes across the Union and underlining the significant role this can play in preventing the rehabilitation or rebirth of totalitarian ideologies.”

  

That is why Black Ribbon Days are important.  That is why the holocaust should not be forgotten, minimised, or  seen as an accidental aberration.  Hitlers and Stalins can recur. In some parts of the world smaller sized despots or ambitious demagogues can still be a threat.

During the June 2011 Council Meeting  I had broached the possibility of criminalising certain actions aimed at subverting democracy and the rule of law, and strengthening through the Criminal Codes the democratic consensus. Subverting democracy is a great treason. Other Ministers were of the opinion that the matter needed further debate and juridical elaboration. I still think that some demagogic loose language and occasional posturing, are threatening the democratic consensus.

From the opposition benches, one is not exempt from urging memory, reflection, and strenuous, but vigilant, contrast to the enemies of democracy and the rule of law.