This is a country where domestic violence against women is abhorrently high; where the secret silence about the violence is one of the highest in Europe; this is a country where some men and women vote in Parliament against a Bill for harsher penalties against perpetrators of domestic violence.
This is a country where, if you’re sitting at a boardroom table, a man thinks it is perfectly fine to call you “Pupa”. This is a country where misogyny is rife. This is a country where men, in Parliament, in boardrooms and in all possible positions of influence and power dictate the agenda of the country. Sometimes it feels like it’s just one huge Old Boys’ Network.
Where does this leave us? Unfortunately it leaves us with a society which is happy to close an eye on many things, because its priority is not the community but man and his mates, and they stick together come what may.
A typical case in point of this was the Prime Minister’s speech last Sunday when he roared that there should be repercussions for those who could be lying to tarnish the country’s reputation. My reaction to that was hurrah, press the clapping emoticon, and the fireworks one too. And then came Muscat’s plan of action: The best reply the country can give to The Daphne Project – an international consortium of 45 journalists from all over the world investigating corruption festering in the top echelons of the Maltese government – is… wait for it… not a prompt investigation, not on the spot resignations, but… a mass meeting on May 1. Uh. If that is not Kim Jong-un, I don’t know what is.
What the Prime Minister keeps forgetting is that even if he had to rally a crowd of a million on Tuesday, he is still MY Prime Minister, and he is still up there to represent ME. And if I happen to be very angry and disgusted at the way he is protecting his chief of staff and top minister, who are clearly involved in money laundering – then it is his duty to do something about it and not shut me up. His job is not to rally people waving flags with his face on them and shouting in one, North Korean voice, “we are proud of you”, but it is to listen to dissent and act on it, even if it is just one solitary voice.
History is full of examples of when people take to the streets to show that all is not well
The reality is that the government that drowns protest is betraying its fundamental commitments to the constitutional governance. This is exactly how democracies die. And this is what is happening.
What can we do about it? As it happens democracy doesn’t just come alive every four years at the ballot box and a real democracy is participatory; we as the citizens are responsible for getting off the couch and doing our part.
History teaches us that there comes a time when we cannot wait ad infinitum for the process of criminal investigations which will never happen. In one of his letters from jail, Martin Luther King said that spontaneous organisation by citizens is powerful not because it replaces political process, “but because it dramatises the issue that can no longer be ignored”.
History is full of examples of when people take to the streets to show that all is not well with their state, and very often it is the women – absent from the Parliament, the boardrooms, the positions of power – who take lead.
Take France in 1789 and the Women’s march on Versailles on October 5. Supplies of grain were running low, the price of bread surged, the people on the street were starving, but those running the country were gorging in their excesses. A number of Parisian women could no longer bear to look at their rattle boned children: they gathered in the square and they marched on Versailles, where King Louis XVI held court.
As they marched other women joined, and then other men, until they were in thousands. They stormed Versailles, made their demands to the King and that was the actual start of the French Revolution.
Or what about the Icelandic women’s strike in 1975? Women, then underpaid and underrepresented in government, decided to organise the ‘Woman’s Day Off’ strike to demand equality. On October 24 of that year, 25,000 women gathered on the streets of Reykjavik (out of a population of 220,000) and 90 per cent of the female population did not go to work, cook, clean or take care of children. They rocked the system and set the ball rolling for one of the most equal societies in the world.
Then there was the Singing Revolution, from 1987 to 1991, which brought about the independence of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. These three countries, then under Soviet domination, protested by singing patriotic hymns. On August 23, 1989, two million people took each other’s hand to form a symbolic border facing the USSR – a 560km-long human chain which started in Vilnius, through Riga and finished in Tallinn. Even writing this gives me goose bumps.
Why am I saying all this? I’m saying this to remind us all that the power belongs to the people and to encourage you all to join today’s march for justice and truth in Valletta at 4pm, organised by a group of women and young people. Bring your pots and pans, and whistles and banners and homemade cardboard placards. Together we can force the government to respond.
To quote one of my favourite poets, Rupi Kaur:
“The kindest words my father said to me: women like you drown oceans.”
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Twitter: @krischetcuti