We are not featuring the 30-year-old events of Black Monday today to open old wounds. We are doing it to refresh people’s memories and perhaps acquaint some younger minds with this incident for the first time. We are doing it because it is close to home; our home. We are doing it to show how people can triumph in adversity and to pay tribute to them.
Violence was commonplace in the 1970s. But it reached a peak on October 15, 1979. Strickland House in Valletta, where the offices of The Times and The Sunday Times are based, was gutted. The then opposition leader’s home in Birkirkara was ransacked. His wife was beaten and his children, who ran to a neighbour’s home via the roof, were terrorised. This was not just a coordinated attack on people and buildings. It was a challenge to democracy.
From that point of view the incident was a dismal failure. Although it was not the event that marked the end of political violence – only a change of government in 1987 managed that – Black Monday was the day when a significant enough number of Maltese decided that it would have to stop. It took longer than expected, it took unnecessary bloodshed and it took more than one untimely death. But the people got there.
The journey since has been onwards and upwards. It has not been without troughs or periods of disappointment and uncertainty, but it has consistently moved in the right direction. Against the odds, Malta became a member of the European Union and just four years later adopted the euro.
Were it not for these two happenings, Malta is likely to have been thrust into the financial abyss once the Lehman Brothers collapse just over a year ago caused the rest of the world’s economic dominoes to tumble. One need look no further than Iceland for evidence of that.
But although EU membership and the adoption of the single currency provided the foundations for Malta to survive, it is this government that has been applying bricks and mortar to ensure it stays healthy.
It did this, primarily, by investing heavily to secure people’s jobs where they have been vulnerable and by reaffirming its commitment to projects like the entrance to Valletta. There are, of course, things it has not done adequately enough, at times downright badly, and there is little doubting that morale in the country is a little low because of the economic situation which for some months has been biting.
At this juncture, however, people have to make a choice. They can either mope around, moan and ensure we are victims of the world recession, or they can roll their sleeves up, screw up courage and climb out.
The disgruntled Nationalist backbenchers have to choose too. At the moment the choice some of them have made is to further their personal agendas and bask in the limelight. This is doing nothing but causing unnecessary uncertainty which is harming the national interest, particularly because the Labour Party has turbulence of its own to deal with.
What the country needs right now are team players who are prepared to discard their own grievances and serve the nation; people who will pull together and stick with a leader through thick (they did not moan when Lawrence Gonzi won them the election) and thin. If Black Monday served to teach us one lesson, that was it. And the results are there for all to see.