The Prime Minister said the other day that the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia was an “exceptional circumstance”. I disagree. While there certainly was nothing normal or average about Caruana Galizia’s life, the manner of her leaving it was not particularly special. I also think that it suits certain people to have us believe that the assassination was a one-off.
If it sounds mad to say that a car bomb is standard fare, it’s because I’m not saying it. Statistically, the chances of dying by one are extremely remote. Nor is it normal to send people off in pieces. In that sense, the assassination was a rare, vicious, and highly disturbing event. Not rare or vicious enough for the national television channel to budge from its usual schedule of inane dramas and Friday evening busload of adverts, but still.
The explosion that killed Caruana Galizia was described as a particularly massive one. Forensic scientist Anthony Abela Medici spoke of a crater in the road surface that was about 1.5 to 2m across and half a metre deep. He told journalists that it was likely that half a kilogram of military-grade Semtex had been used.
Thing is, Abela Medici must have been talking about some other happening altogether. There was no crater whatsoever in the road surface at Bidnija. Instead, there was a largish burn mark and a small hole the size of a football that was tarmacked over two days after the assassination. While still a possibility, the Semtex connection is at the time of writing pure speculation.
The photos and footage from Bidnija are consistent with those of the other car bombings of the last couple of years. In Buġibba, for example, the bomb that killed John Camilleri blew the roof right off and destroyed the passenger compartment of a very sturdy offroader. In Ħamrun, an explosion that would have vaporised Keith Galea tore a van to ribbons. And so on. The only difference is that what was left of Caruana Galizia’s car turned into a fireball and was completely gutted.
As car bombs – more to the point, as car bombs in Malta today – go, there was nothing extraordinary about what happened two weeks ago. Rather, it was the latest in a consistent and fairly uniform series.
Which makes things much worse, because it points us in the direction of a circle of high-powered crime that yields high dividends and has a lot to lose, is networked enough to carry out contract killings at the drop of a hat, and can draw on a tissue of fear and silence which has given us several car bombings in two years and not a single conviction. Drug trafficking and fuel smuggling are the two most promising candidates, but there may be others. Question is, why should anyone wish to go on about military-grade explosives, vast craters, and exceptional circumstances, when the truth is very likely more prosaic? I think there are two reasons.
The one-off ‘exceptional circumstance’ argument suits certain people who are unhappy with the idea of a resident, sustained presence of high-powered crime
The first is sensationalism and people’s innate liking for a good story. There was a fair bit of that in the international coverage, truth be told. The Semtex guesswork was lapped up with gusto by, among others, The Times (of London) and The Telegraph. Words like the IRA, Lockerbie, the Mob, and Libya were dropped like names at a Portomaso party.
For his part, Abela Medici probably found himself out of (he’s retired) and still wanting to be part of it. I’m very sure there was nothing deceitful or intentionally misleading about his non-existent craters. I imagine he will have been under pressure to tell us something new, something that would make the news. Even he must have been surprised at the hot air radius of the Semtex blast.
There’s a second reason why the exceptionalist version seems to have caught on. Put simply, it’s a convenient untruth. It makes it possible for people to blame the Green Men from Mars, on a one-off assignment in Malta for evil purposes known to them alone.
“This is not my Malta,” they said. Except it is. There are Maltese people doing terrible things in Malta to other Maltese, to protect the kind of interests we see squatting in the middle of a valley or moored at the Blue Lagoon. That there may be foreign hitmen involved is rather like the pineapple on a slice of Maxims pizza: all Pacific and alien, but extremely Maltese anyway. Partly the sleight is a part of an insular mindset that assumes that all that is truly evil must come from outside the country. It’s a legacy that’s probably as old as the string of Ottoman sails that appeared on the horizon one morning in May 1565.
Less poetically, the one-off ‘exceptional circumstance’ argument suits certain people who are unhappy with the idea of a resident, sustained presence of high-powered crime. That’s probably because such a presence tells of the impotence of the state where the really big fish are concerned. Little wonder the Prime Minister is among those certain people.
The protesters are wrong to demand the appointment of a new police commissioner by a two-thirds parliamentary majority. Their insistence that the public can only trust officers if they are appointed jointly by both parties betrays the very bipartisan mould they claim to reject. It also effectively lets the Prime Minister off the hook. Wittingly or not, what they’re saying is that we shouldn’t even expect the Prime Minister to act as the top executive and take the right decisions. The two-thirds majority would shunt away that problem for him very comfortably indeed.
It is the Prime Minister’s responsibility to fire the man under whose watch high-powered crime clearly has a field day. It’s also his prerogative, because he was elected in a fair and democratic way, to decide on who is best-placed to lance the boil. Should he not bother, or choose the wrong person, we can expect many more exceptional circumstances.
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