Just 60 years ago

I was a 19-year-old student witnessing the ceremony at the ‘Xgħara tal-Furjana’ (now called the Independence Arena) symbolising Malta’s birth as an independent and free nation after so many centuries of foreign domination.

The atmosphere was electric, ignoring the fact that a bunch of protestors led by Dom Mintoff were prevented from upsetting the proceedings. Ironically, it was that independence which eventually gave Mintoff the legitimate power to assert Malta’s rights when confronting NATO and Britain years later.

The people had decided to take the ‘leap in the dark’ and start removing the shackles of British colonialism.

The future was impossible to predict. Malta relied on the faith that it can do it. We believed that being on our own would lead to more decisions taken in the interest of the nation and that the economy will change from that of an island depending on British military expenditure to one depending on its own resources. We believed Malta would become a popular tourist destination and Maltese workers will start trying their hand at industries that were alien to many at the time.

Yet, it was not an easy trek for Maltese prime minister George Borg Olivier to arrive at that zenith. He used the majority made up by the PN and the MLP to ascertain that there was a genuine call for independence and then used the majority made up of the PN and the other small parties to ascertain what the new constitution should be.

It was a great day: the Maltese were on their own. From then on, the future of Malta depended on the Maltese voter and not on some decision taken in London. This is a point that those who were against independence were not capable of grasping. The British took decisions in Malta in their own interest. Sometimes the Maltese benefitted from these decisions but that was an incidental corollary as the decisions were not taken in the interests of Malta.

The doomsayers predicted that the value of the Maltese pound will end up some 50% of the Sterling. By the time, we switched to the euro, the Maltese pound was worth two pounds Sterling! They predicted that the Maltese passport would be valueless compared to the British one we had. Today we have had a government selling Maltese passports for millions - not that I agree with that. Anyway, we did not really have a right to a British passport but we just had the passport of a British colony, which the British themselves did not respect.

Eventually, time proved that the attitude of demeaning what Malta could achieve on her own, was self-defeating. Over the last 60 years we had different Maltese governments that took decisions in the interest of Malta and that made the difference, even when these decisions were the wrong ones.

So much water has passed under the bridge. Our different governments made many mistakes, but even so, their intentions were always taken in the interests of Malta – at least up to when the Joseph Muscat took over, only to be kicked out from his post by his own MPs. The problems of the Maltese can only be solved by the Maltese themselves: that is what independence also meant.

When we had a constitutional crisis because the party who got the majority of votes did not win the election, it was Dom Mintoff himself who saved the day. In truth Mintoff could not suffer a situation in which the party in government had garnered fewer votes than the party in Opposition.

Later, it was Alfred Sant who buried Labour’s penchant to use violence as a political tool.

Malta’s main politicians always realised when their own party’s stand had to be changed.

Independence eventually also reduced the influence of the Catholic Church. Not just by Archbishop Gonzi waking up on the 22 September 1964 to find out that he had fallen down some places in the official list of precedence.

Before independence, the British had the right to veto whoever was proposed as archbishop. The Vatican – observing protocol – assumed that this privilege was passed on to the Maltese government. Borg Olivier renounced this right leaving the Church to its own devices.

Slowly, the grasp of the Catholic Church on Maltese society started to lose its strength. It would take decades before the Maltese state became completely a lay state and the Church had no say in decisions taken by the Maltese government.

There was an unwritten tacit agreement between the British coloniser and the Maltese Church: the British could do whatever they wanted in Malta, so long as they did not interfere with the tradition that allowed the Church the temporal powers that it had over its flock. No wonder that Archbishop Gonzi was against Malta attaining independence!

This intriguing web took many years to unravel. The Catholic faith is respected – even constitutionally – as the religion of the majority of the people of Malta. But the power of the Church in civil matters – including marriage – has been practically extinguished. In the end, I believe this was to the benefit of the Church itself.

The waters that have passed under the bridge in the last 60 years were not always calm and serene. We had episodes because of which, some concluded that independence was the wrong step as we lost the guiding hand of Rule Brittania. But this cannot be further from the truth. The Maltese people are not above making mistakes, but they always held the interests of their native country as paramount.

When the Maltese people are called to vote – either in the general elections or in a referendum – they did so with a genuine spirit. People think that voters follow blindly their party leaders. This is hardly true. Malta is an EU member because many Labour voters did not follow their party either in the relative referendum or in the subsequent election.

The current administration obtains the majority of votes thanks to many would-be PN voters who did not like the shenanigans going on in the PN under and after the leadership of Lawrence Gonzi, who lost the election that saw Joseph Muscat becoming prime minister. But Joseph Muscat is no longer prime minister because the very Cabinet that he had appointed decided to tell him ‘stop’ when they felt he was openly defending corruption.

Independent Malta, warts and all, is a success story.

Happy Birthday Malta.