Freedom at a high price

This is my article published in the Times of Malta on Monday 5th December 2011, the 25th Anniversary of Raymond Caruana's murder:

My generation has grown up in the age of the internet, free market, media pluralism and a multitude of education and work opportunities. Free to air our views, discuss issues civilly and protest without fear of intimidation, it is sometimes difficult for us to appreciate what these liberties have cost us. It is only after witnessing the fight for liberation experienced in our neighbouring Arab countries that we might realise how fortunate we are to live in a free country, where respect to the democratic process is paramount. But it was not always so and, like every country in the world, our freedom too came at a high price.

Let’s go back to December 5, 1986 at 11.15 p.m.
A group of men are enjoying a last round of drinks at the Nationalist Party club in the usually tranquil village of Gudja following a party celebrating the opening of their new club. Among them, a 26-year-old youngster. Suddenly, a stream of bullets showers the club’s façade.
The bullets were from a gun that, four days earlier, had already been used in a similar attack on another club in Tarxien during a former minister’s carcade.
The gun was later used in a revolting frame-up of a completely innocent human being. A gun, which, on December 5, however, did more than that. It spilled blood and claimed a human life.

It was a time when people were prevented from the freedoms that we take for granted today. Opening a radio station, holding a mass meeting, inviting foreign speakers and holding industrial action were all things that were either forbidden by law or violently punished.

Many University faculties, deemed unnecessary, were closed down and the subjects taught underground while students were besieged by the army for delivering a speech on democracy during their graduation ceremony.

A printing press was burned down, judges were juggled as the Executive deemed fit and the Constitutional Court spent years suspended.

The police force itself, the supposed safeguard of law and order, attacked people holding peaceful meetings and demonstrations, was involved in the murder and cover-up of a man held for questioning and the frame-up and attempted murder of an innocent man in order to try to bury the truth forever.

It is not my intention to enter into the historical details of these events; whole books have been written. Nor do I wish to dismiss any political party because of its past. I believe it has changed since then.
But on the 25th anniversary of this political murder and the surrounding unrestrained violence, I would like to commemorate what our nation went through, in the hope that we learn history’s lessons.

I hope our present politicians and opinion writers realise what horrible actions can hate incitement lead emotional-blind supporters to and, thus, the enormous responsibility they hold. I am still amazed, for example, at how the Press Ethics Commission and the Institute of Maltese Journalists stayed unashamedly silent when an article in a Maltese newspaper called for the “liquidation and elimination” of one of their fellow journalists who was described as an “abject rodent”.

I would like our political discussions, speeches and media to be more focused on policy-making and intelligent proposals, rather than personal attacks and emotional rhetoric, in which we all – myself included – sometimes get carried away.

I would like to see the day when all the country, and not just half of it, is able to pay homage and respect to someone whose life was innocently taken away in our common fight for democracy. This seems rather difficult when even some of today’s politicians still call the years described above as being “golden”.

At the Gudja PN office, a Maltese flag tainted with the dried blood of one of our brothers is still kept in remembrance, a constant reminder that politics should be the battlefield of ideas and not the battlefield of brothers, an arena for the clash of policies and not the clash of fellow humans.

And, like all the countries in the world, we too owe a huge debt to the persons who payed with their life for our freedom, a debt that can never be sufficiently redeemed, a debt that should never be forgotten.

The Czechs owe it to Jan Palach. The Tunisians owe it to Mohamed Bouazizi. The Libyans owe it to many rebel fighters.

We owe it to Raymond Caruana.