If we bury the last three years under a carpet of wishful thinking, we’re asking for worse trouble next time. We would be missing the opportunity of doing what this country needs: not merely changing the person of the prime minister, say, but limiting the powers of any prime minister that will follow.
‘Returning to normality’ has been the devout wish of many commenters and lobbyists disturbed with finding themselves last year unable to disagree with the need of daily protests in the streets of Valletta.
The default attitude of hoteliers, economic operators, politicians and the innocent bystanders for whom nothing outside their doorstep ever matters is that protests are disruptive and undesirable. They often don’t realise that protesters too have better things to do than defy rain and cold and fill the squares with their hoarse voices.
By the turn of the last month of 2019, it became very difficult to argue that daily protests were not justified. No one could credibly suggest that we were protesting against a ‘normal’ situation. A prime minister implicated in the cover-up of a murder which itself was perpetrated to cover up corruption which the prime minister had covered up is not an indication of normality. Quite the opposite.
That prime minister is no longer prime minister.
The widespread temptation now, even among protesters exhausted by the days and nights of campaigning, is to rest and bask in the relative improvement of no longer being governed by a prime minister implicated in the cover up of a homicide. There’s a shared, almost desperate urge to think things are ‘normal’ again.
We’ve done this before. 1987. Malta emerged from a decade of violence, corruption, brutality, institutional failure, international isolation and, I suppose you could say, abnormality. One Joseph Muscat some years ago described Malta’s government in the years that ended in May 1987 as the most morally corrupt in our history. Any other historian will have to update that assessment now.
On May 10, 1987, the feeling of a fresh page turning at the sight of a new prime minister climbing the steps of Castille was euphoric. There was enthusiasm for modernisation, economic transformation and openness to the civilised world. We revelled in the newly discovered respect we started to enjoy in our region. Things felt... normal.
At the time, it felt uncomfortable to look away from the newly discovered environment of tranquillity and dig up the dark and ugly recent past. With the possible exception of the trial of former police chief Lawrence Pullicino, who would be convicted of a murder committed in his own office at police headquarters, there was no looking back.
If we had used 1988 to confront the demons of that decade, some of the evil that hit us in the last three years could have been prevented
We failed to examine how Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici felt empowered to suggest he would consider ‘suspending democracy’ in the interests of what he called the proletariat. We failed to examine how Dom Mintoff could openly threaten the weaponization of the working classes to enforce his revolution through violence.
We did not examine how government ministers could rely on vigilantes to impose political will through physical violence. How physical intimidation could force people to stay inside their homes on voting day. How ministers openly administered development permits through a parallel system of bribes. How they regulated trading permits through personal cuts and ‘silent’ shareholding.
How the state’s monopoly on violence could be outsourced to benefit one political party over another. How public TV could outrightly ban the name of the leader of opposition and how the defiant expression of political opinion on TV could force someone into exile. We did not examine illegal arrests, the systematic disruption of public gatherings and police-mandated frame-ups. We did not examine how private education and private health care were persecuted as crimes.
How the protection of fundamental rights was frozen and how recourse to a high court with jurisdiction on complaints on the flouting of constitutional limits of the government’s powers was abolished.
These were things that happened in 1986 that the country did not want to think about in 1988. The opportunity to confront these demons not merely to punish the perpetrators of crimes or to attribute political responsibility to those who abused their powers but, perhaps more importantly from our point of view standing as we do in 2020, to find out the underlying context that allowed those atrocities and outrages to occur.
Robert Abela is not Joseph Muscat. 2020 is not 2019. And we are encouraged, particularly by those with plenty to hide including the embarrassment of having belonged to the corrupt regime we saw out over Christmas, “to look ahead and not dwell in the past”, to “return to normality”, to “give the new guy a chance”.
The fact of the matter is if we had used 1988 to confront the demons of that decade, some of the evil that hit us in the last three years could have been prevented.
We owe it to the generation of 2040 (that is at school today) to confront the demons that have plagued us and to strive to address the causes of the ‘abnormality’ we have experienced.
It is not enough for Joseph Muscat, Keith Schembri, Konrad Mizzi, Chris Cardona and Neville Gafà to be suddenly, and from their point of view unexpectedly, unemployed.
They need to be investigated for the suspected crimes they may have been involved in by a police force that is independent of them. I have seen written correspondence by people speaking for the new Abela government parroting the sophistry that ‘magisterial inquiries’ are ongoing.
That crap must stop. Only the police can investigate crime and only the attorney general can prosecute it. And they must do it. Now. It would be painful no doubt not just for the subjects of these investigations but to an entire country that would need to come to terms with the error of electing criminals to power and supporting them for so long.
But if Abela keeps his promise to the Labour Party delegates that elected him that there would be “continuity”, that he would treat protests as “a provocation”, that the country “is not faced with a disaster”, he may hope to achieve tranquillity but he would be denying the country the chance to come to terms with what has really happened.
Firing Lawrence Cutajar is an obvious thing to do for the government. It has been obvious for years now. But will the government separate from itself the power of appointing his successors? Will the executive branch (the prime minister and his ministers) re-distribute some of its powers to the other branches (the judiciary and parliament)? Will institutions be equipped to act on abuse of power and to punish criminals dressed as politicians?
Will we act now to prevent our country being used again in the future by criminals who would stop at nothing, including murdering a journalist, to profit on the back of an entire community?
And I would be falling for the trap of illusory normality if I were to accept that this is about re-opening a closed chapter. If Joseph Muscat and his gang are not properly investigated, how do we know the mafia infiltration they allowed has been reversed? How do we know they are not still working to guarantee impunity to the perpetrators? How do we know they are not still frustrating the proper investigation and prosecution of the assassins of Daphne Caruana Galizia? All of them.
How do we know they’re not plotting their next kill? The fact is we do not know. And that, my fellow country men and women, is not normal.