History has an uncanny way of repeating itself. Or, rather, things tend to happen on, or close to the commemoration of some major event, enabling history to emphasise a point.
What it seems to be telling us now is that corruption can kill. It did so in 1982 and, again, in 2017, as events of the past few days have reminded us.
Just three days after activists marked 1,000 days since journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia’s murder last Sunday, Lino Cauchi’s widow and son filed a judicial letter calling on the state to compensate them as victims of a “barbaric political murder”.
Cauchi, an accountant, disappeared soon after leaving his office in early 1982 and was found dead in a well at Buskett three years later.
His mysterious death remains one of the skeletons in a cupboard somewhere in the corridors of power.
Many might not be aware that, like Caruana Galizia’s case, Cauchi’s murder was also sparked by the general climate of corruption and disregard of rule of law of the political powers who ruled at the time.
Court evidence on a number of corruption cases in the 1980s had revealed that the accountant was privy to corrupt dealings by a number of businessmen, including the right-hand man of a former cabinet minister, now deceased.
To what extent was Cauchi’s murder investigated – it seems a proper investigation only started after a change in government in 1987 – is not known, so one cannot say what really lay behind his disappearance and death.
However, it is widely believed – and not for flimsy reasons – that it may have been linked to his knowledge of the corruption that had become a way of life.
Caruana Galizia too had information on widespread corruption.
It is evident the powers that be had no interest in unearthing the truth about Cauchi. The police did not appear to want to lift a finger.
They failed to set in motion a magisterial inquiry and when his body was found they did not even bother to interview or speak over the phone to the owner of the private land where the gruesome discovery was made.
Justice and the rule of law was dumped in the well that had been Cauchi’s grave for many months.
Considering what has been emerging from court recently, one is justified to fear that the corrupt elements – now wearing new clothes and bearing different names and titles – deemed it convenient to discard the rule of law again, perhaps at the Marsa Menqa along with the incriminating phone SIM cards linked to Caruana Galizia’s murder.
Against this background, the words of Chief Justice Emeritus Silvio Camilleri should haunt us: “The rule of law is... not some abstract concept in order that lawyers may have something to talk about, but every citizen will have to suffer the consequences when the rule of law fails.”
He warned that, unless all did their duty, instead of rule of law we will have the rule of delinquents. Instead of delinquents, the assassinated blogger would have probably preferred the term ‘crooks’, which she warned were now everywhere. And how right she was.
In the Maltese legal system, the power to enforce the laws is vested in the police, the attorney general and the courts. They have failed us miserably.
Cauchi’s widow and son are right in demanding justice.
We should all be demanding justice and resolving to make sure corruption is never again responsible for murder.