Murder on the Malta Express

by Carlo Bonini

  The Caruana Galizias were not about to waste their time watching others wipe crocodile tears at their mother’s funeral, their last chance to pay their respects. Joseph Muscat publicly acknowledged that he would not be attending the funeral as he had got the message. And the Speaker of the House of Representatives – the former police officer who had treated her so badly in custody – did not attend but sent a wreath.

  The leader of the opposition, Adrian Delia, had also been held to account by Daphne for his connections to the sex trade in London’s Soho and his mounting debts. He also stayed away. All the former living leaders of the Nationalist Party (PN) attended. The TV station owned by the PN, Net Television, omitted to mention their presence in its report so as not to make the incumbent look too bad by comparison.

  With most civic leaders staying away from the funeral, the community at the Mosta church was led by two improvised replacements. The leading figure was Antonio Tajani, President of the European Parliament, who flew to Malta for the funeral after paying tribute to Daphne at the parliament in Strasbourg a few days earlier.

  Before he was a politician, Antonio Tajani had been a journalist in Italy. He had personal experience of the killing of journalists, magistrates, and state officials at the hands of organised crime. He knew intuitively that Malta needed to cut through the fog and rhetoric and ask itself some very clear questions: Who killed Daphne? Who paid them? Why? They are questions the local authorities still shy away from.

  The other leader was Malta’s Archbishop Charles J. Scicluna, a close confidant of popes and a senior lawyer of the Church in his own right. He did not mince words. From the pulpit, the archbishop’s voice rang a clear warning. The killing of a journalist was the killing of democracy. Journalists must be protected. They must not be made to feel afraid. Their duty to discover and reveal the truth should not be compromised by the fear of personal consequences.

  Without using the word, Archbishop Scicluna declared Daphne Caruana Galizia a martyr for democracy.

  Daphne’s son Matthew took to the altar to read her favourite passage from the Book of Ecclesiastes: ‘a time to tear and a time to mend, a time to be silent and a time to speak, a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace …’

  As Matthew returned to his seat, he saw the wreath bearing a ribbon with the words ‘The Speaker’ in Maltese. This was the man who had kept his mother as a young girl in a cell overnight. Matthew pounced on the wreath and tore the ribbon to shreds.

  Like his mother before him, Matthew was consumed with a righteous anger.

  MALTA THE BRAVE

  Daphne Caruana Galizia did not study journalism. She only went to university after her sons were old enough to go to nursery and she chose to study archaeology which she loved and found very rewarding. She also minored in anthropology, and both sciences would give her an unorthodox but incisive perception into the realities of her country.

  After all, looking under the surface is what archaeology is about. Knowledge comes in layers and it is hidden in places the uninitiated would think unlikely. In her journalism Daphne would often cite the sceptic’s aphorism that ‘absence of evidence is not evidence of absence’. That principle is as useful in good journalism as it is in archaeology. On the other hand, the anthropologist finds meaning in the behaviour and organisation of a community, interprets the patterns of deference, the cleavages of hostility, and the profound, though often buried, links of solidarity that define a group of people.

  Malta is a treasure trove for archaeologists and anthropologists alike.

  The archipelago’s history is enviably long and fascinatingly intricate. People have lived in its caves for 9,000 years, probably first coming here on boats or improvised rafts from Sicily, the only other land from which Malta is sometimes visible.

  The link to its much larger neighbour, only 60 miles distant, is deeper than most people in Malta are wont to admit.

  For thousands of years, the history of the two islands was inseparable and indistinguishable. Before recorded history, however, was the Temple Culture of the large megaliths, sophisticated complexes of temples dotted throughout the Maltese islands, dwarfing the pyramids in age and much else in the Western world.

  But the cultures that built those temples left nothing but stones. Historical memory in the rising and falling spheres of Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans, and Byzantines placed Malta as a provincial but dignified heir to Western Mediterranean antiquity.

  The defining era for both Sicily and Malta was the Arab expansion of the 9th century. If the Arabs had not totally repopulated a desert island when they came to Malta from Sicily, they would not have found much when they got there.

  The language spoken by the Maltese, il-Malti, is based on a cousin of Arabic as spoken a thousand years ago, but it is written in Roman script. Arabic speakers can sometimes work out the gist when they hear Maltese spoken. It is a Semitic language built on the dialect brought here in the 9th century and evolving in its isolation from Arabic from the 13th century onwards. There is no remnant in the Maltese language of any other language spoken on the island before the arrival of the Arabs.

  The agricultural landscape was formed in that era; the names of towns and villages in use today are reminiscent of the Arabic lexicon with town names such as Sliema (peaceful), Ħaż-Żebbuġ (olive village), iż-Żejtun (the olive-pressing village), and l-Imdina (the city), a daily reminder that the deepest concepts of the Maltese vocabulary are rooted in Arabic.

  The very few Maltese who are Muslim are recent immigrants rather than native descendants. But the Islam that founded the mediaeval Arab expansions was Christianised here when the Normans landed in Sicily, and by extension, Malta in the 12th century. Lent in Malta is known as Randan, a corruption of the term for the month of Muslim fasting, Ramadan. And the Maltese word for God is Alla, a crisper, stunted pronunciation of the more languid Arabic Allah.

  Sicily and Malta were both returned to Christianity from the 13th century onwards when the Normans settled definitively on the islands. They were subsequently taken by the Angevins (French) and Aragonese (Spanish). Throughout these times Malta was something of a backwater fiefdom gifted by European kings to a succession of largely absentee landlords.

  That changed when the first heir of the unified kingdom of Spain found a strategic use for this small foothold in his enormous portfolio of territories. King Charles V of Spain was the heir of Ferdinand of Castille and Isabella of Aragon who joined forces in battle, as well as in marriage, to oust the last Muslim emir from Spain.

  But the rivalry between Christianity, militarily led from Spain, and Islam, from the Sublime Porte in what was then called Constantinople (now Istanbul), was nowhere near over.

  A small front of that battle was the island of Rhodes, just off the coast of what is now Turkey. For over 200 years, it had been the base of the Knights of St John of Jerusalem. They used their base to continue, as best they could, their crusading mission, harassing the Ottoman navy as glorified corsairs, all in the name of the one true Holy Catholic Church.

  The Knights of St John were founded during the brief rule of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem in the 11th century, originally to man the pilgrims’ hospital of St John, but soon to take up arms in the ‘holy’ war against Muslims. They retained the moniker ‘knights hospitallers’, keeping their medical and religious missions alongside their military vocation. They existed in parallel to the Knights Templar founded at around the same period but headquartered in the ruins of the Temple of Solomon after which they were named.

  After the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem was abolished and the Christian armies were cast out from the cities of Palestine, the two Orders wandered around Europe and the Mediterranean. The Knights Templar would meet their end in a massacre in 1312. The Knights of St John would outlive them, cocking a snook at the sultan’s navy.

  In 1522, they were thrown out of Rhodes after a siege ordered by Suleiman the Magnificent. After seven years of homelessness, Ch
arles V of Spain handed Malta to the Knights of St John in the hope it would be of some use in his struggle with the sultan’s might. The yearly rent in exchange: one Maltese falcon.

  The year 1530 is the point where the political history of Malta is detached from that of Sicily. The archipelago becomes a distinct political entity with a decidedly international outlook. Though technically a theocracy governed by monks, Malta’s government by the Knights was run by an international, polyglot oligarchy of aristocratic European second sons.

  Its rulers came from Italy, France, Spain, Germany, and Portugal, each vying to compensate for the peripherality of their castle in the European scheme of things with opulent expenditure in architecture, decoration, costume, and culture.

  The Knights’ resources were depleted after the loss of Rhodes. Their mission was in doubt as crusading faded from the priority list of many Catholic monarchs. Protestant monarchs ignored the issue completely. The Knights’ toehold on Malta and their own very survival became precarious.

  The Ottomans understood this and pressed their advantage when they launched their siege of the island in 1565.

  This date is at the heart of a romanticised Maltese identity. The local population was dragooned into supporting the Knights of St John, besieged in the pocket-sized fortresses around the harbour. The siege started when almost 200 vessels sailed from Constantinople, the biggest invasion fleet since antiquity. A key position was St Elmo’s Fort which guarded the entrance to Grand Harbour. The Turks finally captured St Elmo, but at the cost of 6,000 men. The Ottoman commander cut off the heads of the surviving knights and had their bodies floated across the bay on mock crucifixes. By way of an answer, the leader of the knights, Jean de Valette beheaded all his Turkish prisoners and fired the heads as human cannonballs at the Turks. De Valette was a 70-year old war veteran, a one-time galley-slave, who would today be described as a religious fanatic. Battle was cruel and merciless.

  After the fall of St Elmo, the Christian powers started to fear an Ottoman victory. Queen Elizabeth I of England summed up the panic: ‘If the Turks should prevail against the Isle of Malta, it is uncertain what further peril might follow to the rest of Christendom.’

  The Turks now ringed the Knights’ citadel with more than 60 siege guns and began one of the most sustained artillery bombardments of the time. One of the defenders reckoned that 130,000 cannonballs were fired during the siege. In August 1565, the Turks breached the town’s walls but fell back in alarm when they thought a Christian relief army had landed on the island from Sicily. They were wrong. The Knights’ cavalry leader, Captain Vincenzo Anastagi had attacked the unprotected Turkish field hospital, putting everyone to the sword. The panic in the Turkish camp bought precious time. The Christian relief force turned up in September and the Turks fled with their tails between their legs.

  The Siege of Malta was a turning point in European history, the moment when the might of the Ottoman Empire, fielding forces numbering around 40,000, was broken by 6,000 defending soldiers. It was a perfect storm of stubborn resistance, the hubristic attitude of the invaders, and a weak supply chain which forced the Ottomans to abandon their siege before the onset of winter.

  Valette followed up his military victory by founding a city from scratch. Malta’s capital city, named after its founder, is a masterpiece of the late Baroque. The palaces of political power and influence used today by the government were built by European aristocrats who fancied themselves princes and would eventually take to placing on their escutcheons the closed crown of a sovereign.

  The 1789 French Revolution struck at the heart of the Knights of St John. When revolutionary France nationalised property owned by religious Orders, the Knights’ revenue from France, a third of their income, was lost. As the revolutionary wars expanded the Republic’s control on ever more European territory, the fate of the Knights was sealed.

  Napoleon Bonaparte himself stopped in Malta on his way to near glory in Egypt and annexed Malta to the Directorate in 1798, giving the islands an early draft of his secular law-making.

  He left a garrison that would soon be besieged from the sea by the Royal Navy and from the land by a Maltese rebellion as unsympathetic to their new French masters as they had been to their old masters. Perhaps more.

  There were a few intellectual revolutionary sympathisers among the Maltese. They were branded ‘Ġakbini’, originally a corruption of the political affiliation Jacobin, but eventually acquiring the meaning of ‘traitor’ or ‘backstabber’, as all sympathisers with the French cause came to be labelled.

  It is said history is written by the victors. There was hardly any time for the Francophiles to write it up. The French were locked up inside the walled towns within three months of Napoleon’s departure and just over a year later they surrendered to Horatio Nelson’s fleet.

  When the British landed in Malta in 1800 they did not know what to do with it. Perhaps because they did not seem too keen, a group of local leaders wrote to King George III asking him to accept the sovereignty of Malta as a conditional gift from a sovereign people adult enough to make their choices.

  The British were not altogether impressed and, in the 1802 Amiens settlement with Bonaparte, they promised to hand the islands back to the Knights of St John.

  But Britain was not finished with Napoleon and soon Malta would be the pretext for another war. They professed interest in the island and, being a sea-going nation that wanted to rule the waves, the idea of a safe harbour in the middle of the Mediterranean grew on them.

  Malta formally became a British colony under the Treaty of Paris of 1814.

  ‘Colony’ is perhaps a misleading term. Malta had no metals in the ground, did not grow much food, and was hardly a powerhouse of human resources, slave or free. The small, poor, isolated population was not an obvious market for goods manufactured in the English workshop either.

  The value of Malta was its physical location, a harbour that guards the facing doors of the East and West Mediterranean. Britain considered the possession of Malta, firstly to deny it to the French, then the Russians, aggressively seeking warm water harbours to extend their influence on the world.

  The island would become a strategic pivot in the resistance against Russian expansion and would be used as an outreach station to support the British campaign to support the Ottomans (ironic, given Malta’s history) in the Crimean War (1853-56) against Russia.

  With the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 and the shortening of the seaway to the Raj, Malta’s strategic value increased manifold. The Maltese harbour became a coaling and repair station concentrating the entire value of the economy away from subsistence farming to the servicing of British military and maritime demands.

  Times of war in the British period were, for Malta, times of economic boom. While the men repaired and supplied ships going to war, women tended to the wounded brought back from Crimea or Gallipoli in the First World War. The island became known as ‘the nurse of the Mediterranean’.

  In peacetime, however, the British had little interest beyond keeping up their ‘fortress colony’ that inconveniently housed a native population that kept getting in the way. An economy dedicated to war withers when the sword is turned into the ploughshare.

  As these extreme boom-and-bust cycles rocked the island, its closest neighbour was fighting a heady war for its own identity. Italy, until the mid-19th century ‘merely a geographical expression’, was fighting a civil war of liberation inspired by Mazzini’s romantic notions of nation and liberty but driven by Cavour’s cold and calculated Realpolitik of a legacy kingdom and realised through the military genius of Garibaldi who, unusually, had no personal political ambitions.

  Thanks to these three, a country of disjointed histories, mutually unrecognisable dialects, alien cultures, disparate economies, inconsistent norms and customs, and conflicting interests gradually took shape as a political entity founded in 1861. But the forging of Italy took a long time. The young leaders of the Risorgimento had to fle
e the displeasure of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies between 1820 and 1860. They took up house in Malta, sheltered by the British pleased to host the rebels challenging French influence on the peninsula.

  But rebels cannot be relied on. Their conversations in Malta would recall the shared history of thousands of years between Malta and Sicily. Italian was the informal lingua franca of the Knights of St John, Italian the natural language of trade and business in Malta.

  Local community leaders would argue that a nation was forming around Malta and the British occupation was hindering the completion of that project much as the Austrians held back Milan and the French blocked the liberation of Rome.

  Malta became ‘terra irridenta’, an unredeemed province of the new Italian kingdom waiting for political circumstances to allow it to come home.

  The notion was popular with lawyers, intellectuals, and a professional middle class for whom Italian – language, law, culture, political sympathy – was their Sunday best, the formal front of the native, humdrum life of islanders governed by a barely interested, alien race of colonisers.

  But it was still a controversial idea among the local population. For the farmers and the poor, Italy was just as unconnected to their everyday lives as England. Perhaps more. Some of them were earning salaries as port workers, ship chandlers, even civil servants with the small but dignified colonial administration.

  The Catholic Church too was not keen on allowing Malta to join a kingdom that realised its own existence by stripping the pope of his temporal powers and making him ‘a prisoner in the Vatican’.

  And the British had treated the Church kindly enough.

  One big motivation for the Maltese rebellion against the French was that the Republic’s army felt entitled to use property requisitioned from the church to finance the war in Egypt. The local counter-revolutionaries were partly led by clergymen distinctly unimpressed by this strategy.