A major anniversary of a national milestone, such as Independence or EU membership, often presents an occasion to reflect on how far the country has come. The first anniversary of the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia last week brought home, more clearly than ever, how far the country has left to go.
Where, exactly, are we going as a nation? We once naively assumed that, having joined the EU, there was no going back, that we were heading inexorably towards the fulfilment of the European ideals of democracy, freedom of expression, human rights.
Many in Malta have been duped into thinking that we’ve already made it; that progress is defined purely by the level of prosperity that the country has achieved. And the powers that be want to keep them thinking that way.
Hence the Labour slogan l-aqwa żmien, the best of times, which equates exclusively to economic well-being. On this basis, it seems, Labour wants us to become “the best in Europe”. Only, a nation’s development is not measured by affluence alone.
Economic stability and prosperity lay the essential foundation stone for other gains, such as higher levels of education, health and social welfare, as this government is rightly fond of pointing out. But progress towards joining Western civilisation’s top league, as it were, entails far more than wealth generation. True progress is measured by the values we embrace and put into practice.
Values like freedom, justice, solidarity, truth, service, respect, accountability, rationality. Values that, as was evident from the circumstances surrounding the anniversary of Caruana Galizia’s murder, are all too often honoured in the breach rather than in the observance.
Let’s take those values one by one. Freedom can only be partial at most when an investigative journalist is eliminated for digging too deep to hold power – political and criminal – to account. And we can hardly have confidence in justice when the depraved people who plotted her murder are still at large despite the capture of her alleged killers several months ago.
Solidarity cannot be seen as a primary value in this country – ‘generous’ as we are towards other causes – when the mourning family are vilified and insulted by those who didn’t like Caruana Galizia’s writings. And the repeated desecration by government workers of a memorial motivated by genuine feelings of sadness and outrage shows appalling institutionalised contempt – so much for the value of respect.
As for truth, how can we ever be sure we will have it when the magistrate’s report on a story Caruana Galizia investigated ends up in the hands of the very man she made allegations about, the Prime Minister, who may publish it or not as he deems fit? When it comes to the desire to be of service to the country, this cannot be farther from our representatives’ minds when they blaspheme and threaten and cajole a fellow MP, making a mockery of Parliament, when he expresses his views on the same report.
The government laughs in the face of the value of accountability when it refuses to countenance an independent investigation into whether the State was responsible for failing to protect the journalist, or when it refuses to explain a minister’s association with those charged with the murder.
And rational thought is surely absent from the minds of a great many when they dilute the wrongness of Caruana Galizia’s killing by citing the divisive nature of some of her blog posts – as if that goes any way whatsoever towards excusing the deed.
Recent events have highlighted how far we still are from living in a moral society led by morally fit politicians. Yet, if we allow ourselves to lose sight of the values we want to live and be governed by, or cynically dismiss them as too idealistic, then we will fail to make progress towards fulfilling them.
The thousands of people in Valletta last Tuesday represented the survival of that hope, the yearning to live in a value-driven society and the aspiration that after economic stability, a new period of consolidation of the principles of good governance will one day dawn. That hope must never be allowed to die out, just like the candles for Daphne.
Only when we reverse the moral direction this country has taken and start to cleave to the high ideals of Western culture will we earn the right to say that “we live in the best of times”.
This is a Times of Malta print editorial