Acquittal and the song of angry people

“Do you hear the people sing? 

Singing the song of angry men? 

It is the music of the people 

Who will not be slaves again!”* 

Yorgen Fenech’s acquittal hurts. After seven whole years in which the authorities assured us that all people connected to Daphne Caruana Galizia’s murder were either in prison or in Fenech’s case, awaiting trial, we’ve ended up in a situation where the murder remains unresolved. 

People of goodwill will respect the jury’s verdict because they want to believe in a judicial system that is untainted by corruption. But people of goodwill also know that something feels wrong; that the puzzle of Daphne’s murder feels incomplete. 

What we know for a fact is that on 16 October 2017 Daphne Caruana Galizia was brutally murdered because someone, somewhere put out a contract on her life. 

The people who executed that contract are in prison. But the person or persons who put out that contract on Daphne’s life are today roaming about free. And that angers all those who believe in justice, common decency and fairness. 

People of goodwill are justified to feel angry. They are justified to demand sobriety and righteousness from this country’s institutions. Because throughout Fenech’s trial we heard so many things that sounded bad, incomplete and out of place. 

We heard police officers testify how they were instructed by their superiors to only collect the devices Keith Schembri indicated during a search at the latter’s house. We heard experts admit Schembri’s ‘lost’ mobile phone was never cloned as part of the investigation. We heard Schembri testify that he was informed by an “important person” in 2020 that Yorgen Fenech’s lawyers wanted to meet him. We heard the judge ban reporting of Joseph Muscat’s name as the person Schembri was referring to.

We witnessed the judge ordering an investigation into a court employee, who asked Schembri for a favour when the latter was in court custody, but refraining from ordering an investigation into more serious claims that Fenech’s lawyers attempted to bribe a witness to testify favourably for their client. We knew, but could not report on court order, that prior to the trial, Fenech’s lawyers commissioned Vince Marmara to carry out a survey among potential jurors listed on the Government Gazette to assess their mood on the Caruana Galizia murder and Fenech’s case. The survey was stopped by the court in a closed doors session and jurors never got to know about it. Again, the behaviour of the defence lawyers was not put under scrutiny. 

We heard Fenech admit he paid Theuma thousands of euros to cover the Degiorgio brothers’ legal fees and yet on the witness stand the latter acted as if they did not know who Fenech was. The courts inexplicably prohibited any reference to Fenech’s multiple pardon requests in 2019. Someone who did nothing wrong would have never requested a presidential pardon. We heard how former Deputy Police Commissioner Silvio Valletta had told Fenech they “got his back”. We saw Valletta acting like a buffoon in a white Rolls Royce and being egged on by a mocking Fenech. 

For these and many more reasons, people of goodwill are angry at what appears to be a system rotten to the core. They are confused and unable to understand how Fenech could be acquitted practically unanimously on both charges—conspiracy to murder and association with others to commit a crime—when recordings of his own voice suggest otherwise. 

The mere fact that a site visit for a murder trial took place at Castille—the Office of the Prime Minister—was also shocking and repulsive. Equally shocking was a reference to a 2015 aborted plan to murder Daphne that purportedly involved then Economy Minister Chris Cardona and his lawyer friend David Gatt. These are not normal things. 

Hope is the last thing to die but the first that gets a battering and in days like these people of goodwill are tempted to lose hope. 

But people of goodwill also know that giving up is not an option. Giving up will mean that the rule of law is substituted by the rule of the jungle, where the strongest, the most powerful, the richest and the evil will prevail. And when that happens it is the weakest, the most vulnerable, the righteous and the good who will suffer; who will be enslaved by the yoke of tyranny. 

And now is not the time to give in to tyranny. Now is not the time to give up in the face of oppression by those who believe the country has been bequeathed to them in perpetuity. Now is the time to stand up; to sing the song of angry men and women. 

People of goodwill expect politicians, people in authority and public servants to shoulder responsibility, be accountable for their actions and discharge their duties honestly, transparently and fairly. 

The Fenech verdict may have temporarily closed Yorgen Fenech’s chapter—the prosecution is appealing and seeking a retrial—but it has left the country’s book wide open. This is a moment of reckoning that cannot be allowed to pass by as if nothing has happened. 

And no, this is not the time for prudence and caution as Robert Abela’s government wants it to be. Prudence as understood by the prime minister is just an attempt to silence us all. People of goodwill have been prudent for far too long expecting the system of governance in this country to work well. Now is not the time to shut up. It is the time to demand the right to live in a normal country where the law applies equally to all. 

People of goodwill are hoping in a better tomorrow because today has been tainted by the blood of a woman, a mother, a wife, a daughter, a sister, who was brutally erased from the face of the earth and denied justice 10 years later.  

“When the beating of your heart 

Echoes the beating of the drums 

There is a life about to start 

When tomorrow comes!”* 

*Borrowed from Les Miserables