Repeat Failure

Times of Malta reported the government is dragging its feet with the publication of GRECO’s assessment of the implementation of recommendations to fix corruption made to us in 2019. The government can’t be expected to be enthusiastic about the report. We all have eyes to see. We know what the recommendations are, and we know they haven’t been implemented. We know what any assessment of the non-implementation of the recommendations would have to say.

In my last article of last year on The Sunday Times I wrote how the government must expect a telling off when the 2024 rule of law report by the European Commission comes out. That report will review recommendations the Commission made in 2023 and will find that none of them have been implemented.

It should surprise no one that this government is not serious about fighting corruption. The so-called reforms they introduced since the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia were designed to fail in bringing about any meaningful change. Now they can’t be arsed to make any more changes. Now they position themselves to fight the fight against corruption.

Consider the way Robert Abela spoke about Joseph Muscat last Sunday. He was full of praise for his “friend” thanking him like St Paul would credit Jesus.

Do not separate that political realignment from the government’s determination to ignore the pressure of the international community to improve our institutions’ ability to catch corrupt politicians, prosecute them, and punish them.

Robert Abela is clear. If anyone touches his “friend” Joseph Muscat, they’ll have the prime minister and the Labour Party to lock horns with.

Don’t for a minute think that last Sunday was just any Sunday for the prime minister to choose to publicly endorse Muscat. It was a very important Sunday in which to do so. Robert Abela will have known that Joseph Muscat was waiting for a decision from a court in a case he started to get a magistrate he doesn’t like removed from the investigation into the hospitals scandal. He asked the court to order Repubblika to share with him the paperwork Repubblika prepared in 2019 when they get the courts to start investigating the mess at VGH.

Joseph Muscat was probably worried the magistrate would reject his request. Robert Abela stepped in to help. He’s done it before. When as part of the same inquiry the magistrate ordered the police to search his home and his offices, Joseph Muscat protested loudly. Robert Abela was his echo.

When the courts condemned unnamed government officials for colluding with VGH in defrauding the Maltese public in the privatisation of three public hospitals, Robert Abela said in Parliament that judges were puppets of Repubblika – he called it “civil society” then as if it’s one and the same thing. Abela said the Opposition plays home in court which is a way of saying that in the prime minister’s opinion judges are not what they should be: impartial and apolitical.

Joseph Muscat undermined Malta’s institutions to allow himself and his gang to get away with their crimes. Robert Abela is undermining Malta’s institutions to ensure that Joseph Muscat’s escape remains uninterrupted. Abela is taking pages out of the books written by the heaving threats to democracies everywhere – first among them Donald Trump in America – encroaching on judicial independence and using bullying discourse and crowd-pleasing rhetoric to neutralise anyone who might prove inconvenient to him and his friends.

Does it surprise you they’re unwilling to change anything that might return to institutions the power they should have to corrupt rotten politicians in check? Surely not when you know they’re the rotten politicians.

The so-far unpublished GRECO report and the yet to be written EU Commission rule of law report and several other reports due to be drawn up will record the failure of the Maltese government to fight corruption.

But there’s a greater failure here which we must record. Our failure. Campaigners, protesters, reporters, and truth seekers: we have failed to force the Maltese authorities to fix the problems that allowed Joseph Muscat’s regime to take shape. We have not reversed any of the rot that allowed Daphne Caruana Galizia to be killed.

We have not found the way to ensure truth and justice.

It should be no consolation that we tried. There’s no such thing as a heroic failure, of losing battles despite being right.

I’m not giving in to despair, but it helps no one to be drunk in mindless optimism either. All we have thought of doing and all we have done has been insufficient. It means we must think of some other way of bringing about change.

MANUEL QAL, Season 1 Episode 1

Written by Manuel Delia
Video Production: Michael Kaden / NEWZ.mt