It was wartime leader Winston Churchill who once commented that “The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.”
Malta should be looking back 80 years tomorrow, April 15. It was not a pleasant sight. The island was under wartime siege. Much of its capital city and its surrounding towns were in ruins.
The people lived in dark, dank and squalid shelters burrowed deep underground or under the bastions. Food supplies were critically low and the population was being starved, fast.
The island was the most heavily bombed place on earth and the defending forces were running out of ammunition. More than 500 civilians and servicemen had been killed in just one month.
This was the Malta which, on April 15, 1942, was awarded the George Cross by Britain’s King George VI. “To honour her brave people,” he wrote, “I award the George Cross to the Island Fortress of Malta to bear witness to a heroism and devotion that will long be famous in history.”
Malta had no representative government at the time and the medal was eventually received on behalf of the people by the Chief Justice, Sir George Borg.
The George Cross has, almost since that time, featured on the national flag as well as the masthead of this newspaper. And with good reason, as it recalls the sacrifices, hardship and loyalty of the people.
This newspaper too had played a key part in the battle, never missing an issue even though its offices were hit just a week before the award of the medal.
Some have argued since that the George Cross is the symbol of a coloniser, which is true. It has also been claimed that the Maltese were fighting another people’s war. False.
The Maltese people, in its vast majority, supported the war despite losing so many of their own, along with the destruction of their homes and buildings they held dear. Suffice to mention the brave Maltese, then British subjects, working or studying in Italy when the conflict broke out. They had a choice: either a relatively easy life if they renounced their loyalty to Britain or imprisonment if they didn’t. All but one chose the latter.
For this was a fight against fascism, a struggle for the preservation of basic human values, a conflict which Malta would not have survived, had it stood alone.
The Maltese people do well to continue to honour their forefathers for the choices they made, their fortitude and their sacrifice.
Hundreds gave up their present so that this country could have a future.
But the dark events of 80 years ago are also a timely reminder that freedom and security can never be taken for granted. The pictures of the shattered streets of Mariupol in Ukraine are so strikingly similar to the pictures of the bombed streets of Valletta or Senglea 80 years ago.
So too are the harrowing stories of people buried for days under the debris of bombed buildings, having lost their homes and all their possessions other than the clothes they were wearing.
Malta needs to continue to champion the cause of peace but, as former president Guido de Marco used to say, it should not be the “peace of the cemetery” but peace with freedom, reinforced by the norms of national sovereignty, respect for basic human rights and rule of law that is publicly promulgated, equally enforced and independently adjudicated.
It was what our ancestors fought and died for 80 years ago. It is what the Ukrainians are fighting for now. We cannot be mere spectators.