To mark the sixth anniversary of Daphne Caruana Galizia's assassination, we are reproducing some of the articles she wrote for The Sunday Times of Malta.
This article appeared in the January 31, 1993 edition.
A hangover from the past
This Sunday you almost got an empty page, with nothing more than two or three advertisements and a statement saying: “Daphne Caruana Galizia is not writing this week, in protest against her inability to comment on the most momentous event in recent Maltese history, the Lawrence Pullicino trial.”
Fortunately for you, I was persuaded otherwise, mainly by myself, a firm believer in the fact that if silence speaks volumes, then words speak twice as much.
We have, unfolding before our disbelieving eyes in daily instalments, a story that has shocked a nation in private. But it has rocked no institution to its foundations, caused no public hue and cry. This is because the frontrunner in any fight for public awareness, for some form of national conscience – the press – is apparently powerless in the face of ingrained legal practice.
I say “apparently” because it is not quite clear where the power not to allow published and broadcast comment about matters emanating from a trial by jury, when that jury is ongoing, derives from. I am not saying I favour trial by the media in the sense of giving judgment on who is guilty or not guilty under the law.
But it seems to be a hangover from Anglo-Saxon rule, that even now, in what are reportedly democratic years with a functional free press, and at a time when even the Anglo-Saxons who left us this legacy are jettisoning it. I cannot use a single adjective to describe my reaction to what I have seen or heard in open court without the fear of a pungent outcry of sub judice, claiming that I am prejudicing the proceedings.
The result is that I and many others have no option but to keep our mouths shut and our keyboards strangled.
The sub judice pundits will say that comment is banned to safeguard the members of the jury against undue influence by uninformed, subliterate and highly opinionated persons of my sort. Yet jurors are supposed to be locked away more or less incommunicado for the duration of the trial.
Because of the faint prospect of their malleability, is the entire country to be banned from speaking its mind on what is said in open court without pronouncing judgment and with due diligence?
The situation is unreal.
I hate every line I have written so far, because I have exercised a good deal of self-restraint and self-censorship, both anathema to me. Here I sit, deleting a word here and a word there, blue-pencilling myself, wondering how far I can go. Would that I could write what I feel and think, thoughts and feelings which almost certainly coincide with those of a sizable chunk of my fellow citizens!
Gosh, isn’t the government a nice boy?
In-Nazzjon Tagħna, which is becoming increasingly and exhaustingly smug as the years tick by towards the end of this elected decade, has chosen to rally its forces behind the Fort Chambray development company and the government’s decision to go for the project.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise, of course. In-Nazzjon Tagħna, like the government, is owned by the Nationalist Party. Whatever the government does, out rush the Independence Print newspapers, shrieking and applauding like carnival floats.
We may be talking forts here, but there is no way the Nationalist Party is going to allow any breach in its bastion. The day may dawn – though I shall probably never see it when – those newspapers can find it within themselves to occasionally criticise one or two decisions made by a Nationalist government.
If newspapers had tongues, those of In-Nazzjon Tagħna and Il-Mument would be worn out after six long years of hard labour.
In-Nazzjon Tagħna last Wednesday chose to announce, with its usual overtones of self-satisfaction, that the government has just returned 115 tumoli of land around Fort Chambray, which land it chose to expropriate from farmers in 1989.
The land had been expropriated under the Ordinance which allows such expropriation of private land for public use. It has been returned, after more than three years, because “it is no longer required for public use as laid down in the Ordinance”.
In-Nazzjon Tagħna saw this as wondrous proof of the government’s good intentions in not allowing development outside the fort, and as a dismissal of the “rumours” which would have had us believe that Ix-Xatt l-Ahmar and its surrounds were going under the Antimen sledgehammer.
But the newspaper failed to ask why the land was expropriated in the first place. Are we to understand that 115 tumoli of land were whipped away from the owners on a capricious whim, just for fun? Or was there the intention to hand this sizable area over to the Fort Chambray developers, for the all-inclusive price of Lm10,000 a year?
Perhaps the government has been frightened into returning the land after realising that not even the most credulous blue-shirt would classify a private development company as “skopijiet pubbliċi”.
This government already has enough to contend with where Fort Chambray is concerned. Its decision to hand the fort over to a sort-of-foreign company for Lm10,000 a year has provoked reactions ranging from discontented rumbling to cynical laughter, and not on the Opposition benches.
The big bosses at the Malta Development Corporation are tearing their hair out, those who have any hair left, that is. After all, they pay Lm60,000 a year for the privilege of renting a little bit of space above the Fino furniture showroom in Mrieħel. For six times less they could have had a whole fort, with a disused lunatic asylum thrown in.
Vell-yews
As the product of one who now lives in another, I am all for the family, whatever that means. I take it to mean a group of reasonable people living together in relative harmony, and possibly related to each other by blood or marriage.
I am not going to tread the path down which the bigots have already stampeded and condemn single parents. I know many people who are bringing up children on their own. because their partner died. ran off or never was. They are good and decent. and it is likely that their children will be good and decent too. It is not necessarily the number of parents that matters, but the quality.
Speaking at a Mass organised recently by the Cana Movement, the Archbishop warned that countries with a high rate of marriage breakdown face social and economic upheaval. “Countries in which there are many broken families and couples living together outside marriage are facing high social and economic problems,” he said.
He elaborated on this theme by saying that these countries are learning that a strong economy moves hand in hand with strong families.
It is a common misconception that a broken marriage produces a broken child who grows into a broken adult. Yet we all know separated people who give the lie to this piece of mythology.
Their children – perhaps because a sole parent strives so hard to be a good parent – are often more well-mannered, pleasant and articulate than the ghastly brats generated by so-called model families, with their whiny voices, asking-for-a-slap faces and ignorance of everything but chocolate and Sega Master System. It is not his parents’ marriage or the lack of it that forms or destroys a child, but his parents’ behaviour.
If those parents are decent and civilised human beings who take the time and trouble to bring their children up as such, then we should fear no great fissures in society.
The real danger to our social fabric comes from those parents who teach their sulky-faced children to distinguish between a Ferrari and a Lamborghini before they can distinguish between good and evil, who ride their children like horses in the educational rat race, who are morally weak, intellectually debilitated, narrow-minded and ill-mannered, and who will produce another generation of morally weak, intellectually debilitated, narrow-minded and ill-mannered adults.
The sad fact is, most of those parents are married to each other.
Does the strength of the family have a bearing on the economy of a country? Only insofar as we need peace to prosper, and peace is heavily dependent on the happiness of our domestic life.
Somalia’s economic tragedy has not been brought about by a Somalian penchant for concubinage and incest. The most heartrending images to emerge from that country’s strife are of stick-thin mothers and fathers cradling dead and dying children, and in the face of such insuperable devotion, nobody questions the existence of a marriage certificate.
Nor is the theory applicable in the countries of Northern Europe, where economies burgeon while the traditional family unit weakens.
A family for the sake of a family is no guarantor of peace, prosperity or stability. If it doesn’t work, it is a recipe for hell. Far better a happy concubinage with happy children than a miserable marriage with damaged children who will go on to inflict their unhappiness on their own children.
And it is my fairly accurate assumption that children are hurt more by the verbal abuse and cheap, nasty behaviour which surrounds the break-up of their parents’ marriage than they are by the break-up itself.
It is acrimony – within, outside or on the edges of marriage – that kills. And it is lack of moral fibre – in the true, not the religious, sense of the word – that leads to a disintegration of society. Meanwhile, economies thrive or falter, oblivious.
A gold star for trying hard
AZAD does its best to be taken seriously, though it is hampered by its Nationalist Party connections. Many times it succeeds. At others. the self-described “centre for political studies” just seems as idealistic as the average first-year university student who wants to change the world.
AZAD has organised a conference on professional ethics in Maltese life, held over this weekend. It could have been subtitled ‘wishful thinking’, but never mind.
The sharks in the shark-quarium that is Malta will never go to a conference like this, and those who do go do not particularly need to know.
The first session was on ethics in business, the last on ethics in politics. Was that me laughing, or was it you?
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