Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/817563
24 maltatoday, SUNDAY, 30 APRIL 2017 Opinion M y article today (written on Friday afternoon) may lack the polish I normally try to give my articles. I'm not in the mood to edit, and I detect from what I've seen online that most people prefer crude, unvarnished writing anyway. Fair enough, different people, different tastes. Now: I will not deny that my online behaviour of late has been a little... as Vinnie Jones would put it... 'emotional'. A word of explanation may be in order. In fact I feel I owe it to readers. I could get f lowery on this, but I'll try not to. When I started writing articles 20 years ago, I didn't have much of a clear idea of where I wanted to go with it. It was never a childhood ambition of mine to become a journalist or a columnist or whatever. In a sense, the position concretised around me. All the same, I found myself in this position where I could put stuff out there... now what do I do with it? I don't want to come across like I have been motivated by some higher purpose. I've written a lot of rubbish and I've made a lot of (sometimes very serious) mistakes. My mistakes may even have contributed to the problem. But I looked around me at the time and I said: if there's one thing I'd like to try and end in this country, it is our national culture of political tribalism. I had my good reasons. As a 12-year-old boy, somebody tried to bite my ear off on a bus because I spoke English and was from Sliema. Ok, I'm tal-pepe. Sorry. Can't really do much about it, you know. Next time I'll try and arrange to be born somewhere else. And I'll try improving my Maltese in future, promise. No need to bite my ear off, is there? Bear in mind I was too young to think about the deep-seated political acrimony behind this. But to this day I still stand by my naive childish view of the time that... I mean, guys, come on. It shouldn't be this way. A child shouldn't grow up feeling that half the country hates him because of something he has no control over. Another childhood trauma was Karin Grech. I was around eight at the time. Out of respect for family, etc, I won't relive the details. But a little girl was blown up in her home. That's not a thing an eight-year-old boy should really hear details about on the news. Actually, it's just not a thing that should ever happen. Ever. Then there was Raymond Caruana. I was a little older, so could handle the trauma better. But still. The two big mental images that framed my childhood were: a dead child's remains being scooped up from the kitchen f loor, and a dead man lying face upwards in a pool of blood. Should that be the backdrop to a generation? Yet I got this horrible impression that crimes like those were being assessed differently by the two political perspectives. Acknowledging the full horror of one party's crime, also meant maybe giving an electoral advantage to the other party I was profoundly shocked by that impression. I still am. And I have seen it repeated ever since. Labourites were in denial over Raymond Caruana, too. Heck, they're in denial about corruption right now. No scandal, no matter how earth shattering or enormous, has ever jolted the country out of its state of internecine violence. Both sides always entrench themselves in this absurd idea that their own lives somehow matter more than the others'. That their 'truth' is more 'true' than the others' 'truth'. All this is avoidable. But you have to make an effort to avoid it. What we saw this week, however, was the very opposite: a concerted effort to take us right back there. Whether it happens literally, with bombs, teargas, machine guns, etc... I honestly don't know. Given the extent to which political hatred has now deepened in this country, it's just another of those things I can't exclude. I think it likelier that the hatred will just continue to simmer internally as a low-level apartheid... and to be frank that might be even worse. Now: people have been talking about this as a scandal; but inevitably, because they only ever view things from their own perspective. That the Labour Party is enmeshed in a corruption network involving several high-ranking members of government: oh, of that there seems to be no doubt. I threw the 'seems to be' because it's important. Our collective opinions, at this stage, do not matter. Those charges have to be proved in court. But that something stinks to high heaven, I think we can all see, and quite clearly. But something stinks on the other side, too. I have thought long and hard about this. Corruption is bad. But there are good ways and bad ways of exposing it and bringing it to justice. Doing it the wrong way may actually be worse than the corruption. The way this has been done – at every level, every stage – has been atrocious. You can consult my Facebook timeline because I recorded all the absurdities as they happened. We saw a re-enactment of Arthur Miller's The Crucible: an entire country swept into mass hysteria by unproven allegations. I have run out of adjectives to describe how utterly bizarre and dangerous that is. But the bottom line is: those charges cannot be allowed to become Malta's umpteenth unsolved political crime. We couldn't solve Karen Grech because of politics. We couldn't solve Raymond Caruana because of politics. We couldn't solve Zeppi l-Hafi because of politics. How often are we going to allow politics to get in the way of justice? This has to reach closure, because if it doesn't... Well, let's look at some scenarios. It is difficult, because there is too much we still don't know. But there's The real scandal is our failure to heal the divide YOU ASKED US TO ELIMINATE RESTRICTIONS ON ONLINE SUBSCRIPTIONS WE DELIVERED Putting you at the heart of Europe Our digital single market strategy ensures that by 2018, you can enjoy your favourite online content, anywhere in the EU, as if you were at home. Raphael Vassallo