Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/972198
maltatoday SUNDAY 22 APRIL 2018 24 S o it seems I 'shocked' quite a few people by pointing out – in my last article, published last Wednesday – how 'six months' is a tad too short to expect such a convoluted murder investigation to reach closure. Ah, well. I suppose it's partly my fault for occasionally forgetting that this column is also read by an entire generation brought up on TV shows like 'CSI'... where every crime is always solved with laser precision, to everyone's satisfaction, and beyond any reasonable doubt... at the simple click of a mouse. But as some of those same people so often like to point out... I don't belong to that generation myself. No, indeed. Middle-aged fogeys like me are the product of 1970s Malta – a very different country, I can assure you – and this might help explain why... erm... yes, actually; I do see the relevance in comparisons to past political crimes. I see it very clearly indeed. To the 'point-and-click' generation, those murders I alluded to last Wednesday – Karin Grech and Raymond Caruana specifically, but there were others – may seem like shadowy occurrences from a distant, murky and completely forgotten past. To me, however, they represent the key to actually understanding what is happening today. Those two crimes shaped my entire childhood and adolescence: to this day, I still remember that feeling of profound shock and disquietude when I realised that so many Nationalists (the 'good guys', as I was brought up to believe) simply couldn't bring themselves to appreciate the full horror of Karin Grech's murder... because she was from 'the other side'. It's a harsh lesson to have to learn at roughly seven years of age: but I understood back then what some people are only just beginning to wrap their heads around 40 years later... that 'this is not a normal country'. Even with no real knowledge of the political context, I could perceive that it is hardly 'normal' to try to justify – or minimise – the murder of a 15-year-old girl on the basis of logic like: 'it might strengthen Labour's hand'. Even today, I feel a touch of the same sickly queasiness at the mere memory of those arguments. The same sensation was greatly reinforced some 10 years later, when Raymond Caruana's murder elicited the exact same reaction from people of completely different social and political backgrounds. It may shock some of my readers even further to know that – today, more than 30 years later – there are still tens of thousands of people in this country who are firmly convinced that Raymond Caruana was actually killed by agents-provocateurs from within the PN itself. With my own ears I have heard that argument put forward – time and again – and it doesn't 'shock', so much as sadden me. Not necessarily because it is 'beyond belief ': I don't happen to believe it myself, but I am not naive enough to discount similar possibilities in comparable scenarios. No, what saddens me is that this conspiracy theory is not even rooted in any reasonable suspicion, arising from anomalies within the event itself. It is merely dictated by a logic that should be terribly familiar to all those 'shocked' readers of mine: 'It suits my political cause to believe it... therefore, it is true.' But then, there are some things that shock even battle-hardened fatalists like me. One of them is that the 'logic' I alluded to above – flawed and frightening though it may be – was nonetheless based on political differences that were, in themselves, very real. The Nationalists generally absolved themselves of guilt for Karin Grech's murder, not necessarily because they were nasty, evil people... but because they were motivated by a very urgent (and trust me, it felt very urgent at the time), overriding political goal. It is no coincidence that The Times building was torched two years later (another traumatic 1970s experience) and the law- courts, Archbishop's Curia, etc., ransacked and pillaged over the next few years. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, 'Nationalist' and 'Labour' meant two totally different – and, more to the point, utterly irreconcilable – things. Sadly, and with utterly tragic consequences for innocent people at the time... they were not differences that could be bridged by dialogue. I need hardly add that Labour felt the same way at the time... which explains why so many shrugged off the fact that people were getting gunned down just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. There was a feeling of 'force majeur' that compelled people on both sides to think the unthinkable – and defend the utterly indefensible – in the name of a higher objective. Today? The sensation feels uncannily similar... only without any 'higher objective' to justify the continued distortions of reality. The stark truth of the matter is that there hasn't been any discernible ideological difference between the two parties since – at the very latest – 2004: which is when the last major plank of this country's 'irreconcilable differences' came tumbling down at long last. To put that into some form of context: people fighting the political wars of the 1970s and 1980s knew perfectly well what they were fighting for. What is today's 'shocked' generation fighting for, exactly? What, in fact, do they even want? The answer you normally get when you ask is 'justice'... yet, applied to Daphne Caruana Galizia's murder, the same people who demand 'justice' are perfectly content to cling to almost any hypothesis (sometimes, to one or more conflicting ones at the same time) simply because it conforms to their own suspicions. One second Shocked, are we? Too bad... Raphael Vassallo Opinion The same people who demand 'justice' are perfectly content to cling to almost any hypothesis simply because it conforms to their own suspicions