When an emergency becomes a memory

Public life has a poor sense of time. It knows how to respond to a crisis and how to commemorate an anniversary. It is less adept at recognising when an experience that has consumed a country is moving from emergency to history.

The trial of Yorgen Fenech brings Malta close to such a moment. Not because its outcome can or should be anticipated. Nor will the verdict, whatever it may be, complete the criminal justice processes arising from the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia.

The trial serves as a marker of time. It obliges us to look back over nearly nine years and to understand not only what happened to Malta but also what happened to us.

The first response was not constitutional theory. It was shock.

A woman had been killed in a car bomb near her home.

A journalist had been murdered because of what she knew, what she wrote, and what she might yet have uncovered. Her family suffered a loss that was theirs before it acquired any public meaning. But something tore in the rest of us too.

There was grief, even among those who had never met Daphne. There was raw anger at the obscenity of the crime. And there was fear, because murder had made a political argument: that those who accumulated enough money, influence and violence could build the country they wanted and silence anyone who exposed it.

The revelations that followed deepened the wound. The assassination had not struck a healthy state like lightning from a clear sky. It had occurred in a country whose safeguards had been weakened, whose regulators had looked away, and whose government had confused its survival with the national interest.

People were entitled to be angry. We were angry.

The question was what to do with that anger.

Anger can consume itself in hatred, violence or despair. Or it can be harnessed as civic energy. People chose to use their voices, their feet and the democratic means available to them.

They gathered, protested and stood in silence at vigils. They wrote, investigated, litigated and appealed abroad when institutions at home would not listen.

That first phase was a refusal. We refused to accept that our children would have to live in the country Daphne’s killers had built for themselves.

We refused the proposition that fear was now a condition of citizenship. We refused to allow official delay to become public forgetting.

None of this brought Daphne back. None of it eased her family’s grief. But it prevented murder from achieving all that it had intended.

Then the emergency dragged on. Weeks became months and months became years. Indignation alone could not sustain what needed to be done.

The emotional force of the first response had to be tempered with discipline, knowledge and endurance.

Protest became more than an expression of outrage. Journalists continued investigations that the murder had been intended to halt. Lawyers used the courts, which moved painfully slowly. Activists documented institutional failures and addressed international bodies.

People maintained a protest memorial because public officials appeared determined to erase it. Organisations acquired the capacity to persist after the crowd had gone home.

This was repetitive and thankless work: standing in the same place every month, filing another application, writing another report, replacing flowers removed the night before, and restating facts that should have needed to be said only once.

Repetition was not a failure of imagination. It was an answer to the state’s strategy of attrition. The expectation was that grief would exhaust itself, outrage would become unfashionable, and people would return to private life. Persistence defeated that expectation.

Something changed in the process. People who had understood the constitution as a document controlled by politicians and interpreted by judges realised they had a place in it too.

I do not mean a formal place. Civil society did not gain the power to enact laws, levy taxes or direct the police. Nor should it. What emerged was a constitutional habit: refusing to assume that the state will correct itself without pressure from the society it is meant to serve.

People were entitled to be angry- Manuel Delia

After the assassination, institutional failure became unacceptable to a significant number of people. Their cumulative actions showed that a country’s constitutional life is not confined to official buildings.

A constitution also endures in the conduct it inspires: in the insistence that facts be recorded, that power explain itself, and that institutional failure not be mistaken for the natural order of things.

The achievement should not be romanticised. The reforms demanded since October 2017 remain largely unfulfilled. Executive power remains excessive.

Secrecy remains instinctive. Public bodies still conflate loyalty to the government with service to the state.

But movements are not judged solely by whether governments concede their programmes. They also alter what citizens believe themselves capable of doing. A generation learnt that citizenship endures after the ballot is folded and deposited in its box. People without office may impose no decision, but they can still prevent power from enjoying silence.

The next phase must preserve that capacity without pretending the emergency can or should continue indefinitely.

Preserving history does not mean embalming every practice created during that period.

No vigil, slogan, campaign or organisation should be required to endure forever to prove that it mattered. A method may complete its work without the principle it expressed becoming obsolete.

Democratic maturity requires the ability to distinguish perseverance from ritual dependence. There is courage in continuing when power expects you to stop. There can also be courage in recognising that memory must eventually be carried by more than the repeated performance of grief.

The years ahead should therefore be a time for collecting testimony, preserving archives and arguing about what ought to be remembered. Not merely who was killed, who was accused or who held office, but what citizens learnt about the fragility of their state and their responsibility when its safeguards failed.

The youngest voters in this year’s election were only eight when Daphne was killed. Most will have been shielded from the news and could scarcely have grasped its meaning. Yet they have already helped choose a government. Unless this experience is preserved and transmitted, its meaning will diminish to a murder, several trials and a change of prime minister, with the civic response reduced to background scenery.

The deepest legacy of these years is neither anger nor protest. It is what citizens made of them. Grief became solidarity. Indignation became action. Action, sustained long enough, became democratic capacity.

The verdict in the present trial will answer the question entrusted to the court. History will ask another: when the state failed, what did its citizens become?

We should preserve enough of the truth to enable the next generation to answer.