There are two loose ends to be tied up concerning two of my December articles on ‘Regurgitating the election’ (December 6) and ‘Women’s rights’ (December 13).
“As we look around us, make no mistake. Malta is still a functioning country as it was before the killing. As it has been for the last half century since independence – imperfect, but a vibrant democracy. There are still courts of law and government can still lose cases. The civil service functions.”
“Freedom of expression is alive and well. There remains a lively independent press, as well as, sadly, party-controlled newspapers and television. Children go to schools in towns and villages, with shining faces and smart uniforms. Everywhere you will find the welcome and the helpfulness of people. The country is one of the most prosperous for hundreds of miles around.”
When I wrote these two paragraphs a month ago, describing the Malta I experience daily – and the majority of people recognise – it elicited a response from somebody who signed himself “Eddie Aquilina”. The reason for the inverted commas is that I know Aquilina, a publisher who (mostly) produces glossy coffee-table picture books – of which I possess many – with excellent photographs of Malta, but is incapable of expressing himself in the prose he allegedly used in his article of December 13. At a guess, I must assume he found somebody else to write it for him. No harm in that. That’s how he makes his living.
“Eddie Aquilina” described my two innocuous paragraphs above as, inter alia, a “totalitarian image”… [reminding him] of “the Hitler Youth”… “political commissars in the civil service”… “revolutionary committees”… [evoking] “the Fascist notion that criticising government is motivated by tribalism”… [allegations] of “fifth columnists and traitors within”… “goose-stepping black uniforms”.
It ended with this charge against the government: “It is a display of disproportionate military might and of a silencing propaganda machine that [Scicluna] seems incapable of seeing because he has become its microphone.”
What big words. The hyperbole of somebody who I strongly suspect does not write his own articles is something to behold. It can only be described as irrational. It is certainly paranoid verging on the demented.
The object of my article that instigated this overheated response was to inject a sense of proportion and balance to the hysteria (of which Aquilina’s article was a good example) that has gripped parts of Malta for the last three months.
More importantly, it was to draw attention to the need for disaffected Nationalists opposing the new PN leadership to concentrate on rallying to their beleaguered new leader of the Opposition to help give him credibility, rather than undermining him, in his key role of holding the government to account. It is a subject to which I shall return next week.
The object of my article was to inject a sense of proportion and balance to the hysteria that has gripped parts of Malta for the last three months
My article about women’s rights drew a predictably mixed response.
In what passes for Maltese wit, Mark Sammut of Żebbuġ read the article “with amusement and bemusement”. Like former Cabinet minister Tonio Fenech (who, at least, had the grace in his piece that appeared on December 22 to spare us any invocation of Our Lady of Sorrows as he did at the height of the divorce referendum), Sammut reads and writes English but finds it difficult to comprehend what is written. Their minds are made up; don’t confuse them with the facts.
Readers may recall from the 1960s the series of books for children aged four to seven years about Janet and John. For Sammut’s and Fenech’s benefit, therefore, I set out what I have written on this vexed issue in Janet and John language.
Janet asked John why Alternattiva Demokratika and the Youth Parliament were worried about abortion. John replied that it was already a reality in Malta. Malta should stop pretending there was no problem. The Council of Europe commissioner for human rights had said “Malta has one of the most restrictive regimes in Europe”. The commissioner added: “Abortion is a human right… It affects a whole range of women’s rights.”
But Janet was still worried. “Surely,” she said “what the European Court of Human Rights has said is different?” John agreed. The court has said that in every EU country where national legislation allows abortion, it is a violation to stop the effective exercise of that right. Ireland and Malta are the only EU countries not to have such laws.
Ireland is holding a referendum this year to ease the ban on abortion. A Citizen’s Assembly has recommended that terminations should be allowed in strictly defined circumstances. Eighty-nine per cent were in favour of allowing abortion on grounds of rape or foetal abnormality and 72 per cent on grounds of “socio-economic reasons”. Current opinion polls support a change in the law.
Janet said: “what about Malta? Surely, the view that abortion is always wrong should prevail?” “Ah, Malta,” sighed John. “You’re right that many people feel abortion is utterly wrong always. They do so on moral and religious grounds. But passing a law to allow it, in strictly defined medical and legal circumstances, would not oblige women to have one. It will be an individual choice, guided by conscience as it is elsewhere in Europe.”
John continued: “In Malta, those women who want an abortion simply go to Italy or England and obtain one. I do not think there is any need to pass a similar law here. These Maltese women already exercise freedom of choice. There seems no call for it.”
Janet was genuinely bemused: “But why do Maltese women not have the same rights as other women in Europe?” John bowed his head and shook it sadly: “Because, despite recent educational and social advances, this remains a male-dominated society. There is a long tradition of gender discrimination in Malta. I believe it is for you and other women to decide whether this is right.”
Last words. It appears, however, from a recent report that the Prime Minister has said the government had “neither the political mandate to open a debate on access to abortion nor the support of public opinion on this matter”. Although he has kicked the ball into the long grass, I doubt that Janet and John would agree.