A week ago thousands gathered in Valletta to call for truth and justice. Few of us had high hopes. Many had made the same call the year before and many times since, and in all that time there had been no change. There was very little reason to think this would be different.
For the thousands who showed up, this was not the end of a campaign. It was the beginning of one.
Though there may well be many reasons to lose hope along the way.
The 16th of October is now the anniversary of a grave injury to our democratic life. It follows the anniversary of the day in 1979, 15th of October, when media freedom was attacked by the forces of tyranny. Journalists working for the publication you are reading now ran for their lives as their press was set alight. On that same night, 39 years ago, the home of the man who stood up to that tyranny was ransacked and his family chased over rooftops.
Many people who watched those events in horror were old enough to have lived through the Second World War. They thought they had given more than their fair share of fighting for freedom and democracy. And yet many of us are now seeing the battles of our youth forgotten and the errors we overcame repeated.
As we organise the present campaign we cannot avoid remarking on the support of generations who lived through the period before and after Black Monday in 1979. Certainly that generation is more represented than people who are too young to recall the campaign for EU membership.
That campaign, which lasted an incredible 15 years, was also a battle for freedom and rights. Our generation thought we had sealed our nation’s fate as an EU Member State with guarantees of freedom, rights and justice. And yet we are also the generation to witness the assassination of a journalist investigating political corruption. It happened in our time.
Why fight, if victory can be reversed? The battle of a generation is doomed to repeat itself. If the choice whether to fight for freedom depends on certain victory, all that can be guaranteed is defeat. What makes a battle worthwhile is that it subscribes to decency and dignity, faith in what is right and hope for justice.
Protestors asked themselves what justice had been secured in 12 months spent waist-deep in the trenches. From a distance, everything looks immutable. Justice has not been served either to the murdered journalist or to the country. The cheaters, the thieves and the crooks remain on top. And some who marched in protest a year ago thinking that now, surely, victory was assured, have since abandoned the fight or switched sides.
We face an alliance between politics and crime, funded from the exploitation of their victims and supported by those who exchanged their conscience for a share of the spoils.
So many reasons to give up.
We choose not to cover the stench of rot with the perfume of lucre. We choose to retain our dignity rather than sell out
The BBC’s John Sweeney gave a lecture the previous week and told the story of a protest memorial – flowers, candles, photos and messages laid bang in the middle of Moscow, a stone’s throw from the Kremlin – demanding justice for murdered politician Boris Nemtsov. Sweeney said the government removed the memorial 192 times. And activists put it back 193 times.
After 192 removals the government gave up and left the protest memorial undisturbed.
But the lesson from that episode is not the final victory. It is the simple fact that at no point did the activists have reason to feel they were nearer to the final victory. They went to place it again and again because despite the government having much of what they did not – power, biddable employees, controlled media, popular support – they had the one thing the government did not: a moral victory.
We the protesters in Valletta last week made a choice. Win or lose, successful or not, alone or in the company of others: we would fight for right and remain true to ourselves.
We choose not to cover the stench of rot with the perfume of lucre. We choose to retain our dignity rather than sell out.
The hope that energises the campaign for truth and justice is not the promise of final victory. Hope comes from the fact that disobeying an illegitimate order, protesting, reminding what others would rather be forgotten, placing flowers and candles in protest and memory, knowing they would be removed again and again, demanding the resignation of corrupt officials in power, speaking out despite harassment and retribution – this is speaking truth to power and being true to oneself.
Those thousands in Valletta, in claiming their right to justice, served justice unto themselves. They did more than walk a mile. They refused to wait for their rights to be granted but made some attempt to grasp hold of them.
Final victory is not the promise that keeps us standing. But truthfulness to ourselves is. A clean conscience: the weapon that steels us to confront all hypocrisies.
No doubt we are afraid. We are disappointed. We are angry and we make mistakes. But there’s no courage without fear. There’s no need for hope if we don’t feel disheartened.
In this light, a lot looks different on the first anniversary of the day Daphne Caruana Galizia’s life was taken. We will continue to make sure that our claim for truth and justice is not forgotten. Had we stayed home, a battle greater than the fight for democracy would have been lost – our dignity, our self-respect, our will not to live as the walking dead.
In the reality of our time it would be deceitful to seek to rally people for a final push to victory. There is no real prospect of that. But we must push nonetheless, fuelled by our own pride and our self-respect.
Only in this way can we try to unburden ourselves of the sense of collective guilt that weighs us down. We promise to still be standing next month, next year, and every year after.
The political mafia will find us victorious in our losses, strengthened by our own fears, armed but with our voices and the will to ensure that for as long as we remain upstanding, truth and justice will prevail.
This is a Times of Malta print opinion piece