Shots in the dark

I can't remember the film’s name – it might have been ‘The Twilight Zone’, or something similar – but I distinctly remember a scene in which a man drives through a tunnel, only to emerge at the other end to find he has actually travelled backwards through time.

Well, more or less the exact same thing happened to me this week. Last Wednesday, to be precise. The tunnel was the one passing underneath Tigne to connect Qui Si Sana with The Ferries, in the town of Sliema, which I once called home. It was roughly 10.30pm, and I was driving along the seafront in the direction of Gzira.

I’m pretty convinced the year was 2014 when I drove into that tunnel. Upon emerging, however, I was suddenly altogether less certain. For one thing I found myself in a traffic jam – which I’ll grant you is not exactly unusual in this day and age, though it rarely happens quite so late in the evening. But what really distorted the space-time continuum was the sight, a short distance ahead, of flashing red and blue lights, in which the silhouetted figures of helmeted policemen could be seen waving torches about and poking their heads into car windows.

A traffic accident, I thought at first. Or a roadblock...

Roadblock! My goodness, that transported me right back to the 1980s in one, utterly disconcerting moment. Remember? The days when armed policemen (and sometimes the AFM, complete with machine guns and camouflaged faces) would set up little ‘Check Point Charlies’ at strategic locations across the island… shining flash-lamps into drivers’ faces; waving occasional cars through, but stopping others at random and conducting roadside searches for (presumably) drugs… every weekend, without fail… and the most they’d ever come up with to show for their efforts would be a couple of youngsters hauled to court for smoking a joint in the back of a Ford Escort…?

It all seems so long ago. Yet there I was last Wednesday, undeniably caught up in a roadblock of the kind I hadn’t experienced in at least two decades. And even after being waved through, there was more police presence for the rest of the 1 km trip than I’d seen on the road in years. So driving through that tunnel really was the nearest I’ve ever experienced to time travel, on more levels than just one. And I did not like the experience one tiny bit.

I thought we’d left all that unpleasantness behind us once and for all. I thought we’d progressed a tiny bit from the Papa Doc-style police state I remember from my childhood. But not only was that roadblock in itself a direct reminder that such times can never really be consigned to the dustbin of history; it was the cause of the roadblock (which I worked out the following morning) that clearly took us back 30 years at least.

By now you’ll all have worked it out for yourselves, too. Hours earlier (and just a little further down the road) a minor hit-and-run incident, involving the government vehicle assigned to Home Affairs Minister Manuel Mallia, resulted in what can only be described as the attempted murder of a motorist by a policeman.

OK, a drunk motorist who threatened the policeman with a beer bottle.

But still. Three shots fired directly at a vehicle… for the grave crime of accidentally breaking the minister’s side mirror, and not stopping to apologise… Honestly, it would be considered excessive even for the aforementioned Papa Doc-style Caribbean banana republic.

And that was before the Department of Information lied to us about the incident, only to instantly get caught with its pants on fire. It was before the Home Affairs Minister addressed the media to defend the policeman in question (his personal driver), and even try to portray him as a misunderstood ‘hero’… because he had once arrested someone over a spot of illegal hunting.

And here is where the sensation of time travel becomes unmistakable. After all, the actions of a single policeman, no matter how dangerous or disproportionate, can always be argued away as an isolated incident. But an orchestrated cover-up by the government’s communications arm? That’s something else entirely.

And I’m beginning to suspect the government hasn’t yet fully awoken to just how seriously this incident may have damaged its standing among that pivotal segment of the electorate – including myself – that is willing, all these years later, to turn a page and finally move beyond the long dark chapter of the 1980s.

Those old enough to remember that decade will know what I mean. We have, after all, been here before: it is the same general approach to things that had characterised the 1986 TVM coverage of the ill-fated EgyptAir hijack, in which over 60 people were killed in the most catastrophically botched rescue operation in aviation history.

I distinctly remember the scene back then. You didn’t even need a TV to know something seriously bad had just happened. Thick black smoke could be observed rising from the Luqa airfield across the entire country. Foreign news reports were already trying to conduct body-counts, and come to terms with the sheer scale of the disaster. Yet our national television station, Xandir Malta, proudly announced that the same operation was “an overwhelming success”… and that all the hostages had been rescued: alive and unhurt.

Even back then, when ‘truth’ was around the very last thing we expected from Xandir Malta, I remember being amazed at the sheer baldness of the lie. Did they really think they would get away with a colossal fib of such eminently verifiable proportions? Did they assume we would never notice that around 60 of the people who were supposedly ‘rescued’ that day would have to be sent home in body-bags?

Well, after driving through that tunnel, the same question must be asked again today… albeit on a much smaller scale. What the hell was the DOI even thinking, when it reported that ‘warning shots were fired into the air’? There were two bullet holes clearly visible in the back of the car, for crying out loud. Did they assume we wouldn’t notice? Or did they think that public opinion is as easily manageable today as it was more than 30 years ago?

I don’t know the answer to either question. What I do know, however, is that this attempt to minimise the incident – based, as it so clearly was, on the underlying assumption that the ‘official version’ would be believed simply because it is official – is actually far more serious than the shooting itself. Individual policemen do silly things in every country; and this year alone we have seen infinitely worse in places like Ferguson, USA. But it is the knee-jerk reaction to try and distort the truth that strikes a deeply ominous note. And for the Labour government, it also represents exactly the sort of worst-case scenario it should really be trying to avoid at all costs.

Not only does this sort of thing automatically undo practically all Joseph Muscat’s earlier efforts (successful, as attested by the March 2013 election result) to shed that party’s previous image as the scariest thing since Hannibal Lecter… but it also hands the otherwise virtually non-existent Nationalist Opposition a surprise trump card under the table, just when it seemed to be on the brink of expiring in a puff of bluish smoke.

And what a trump card, too: the ability to suddenly turn to the electorate and say: “See? This is precisely what we tried warning you about 18 months ago… but you wouldn’t listen, would you? Tsk, tsk, tut, tut” Etc. etc.

OK, perhaps the diehard Labourite will be unmoved or unaffected. No doubt there will be references to the dozens of times former Nationalist governments had likewise tried to deceive us, often as not through equally dubious DOI press releases. But then again, the Labour government doesn’t need to fear losing Labour votes.

It is all those former Nationalists who voted Labour in March 2013 they should be worrying about. i.e., precisely that segment of the electorate that Labour cannot possibly afford to lose, if it intends to actually remain in power beyond the next three and a half years. And trust me – because on this issue I know more than any number of Labour voters – to those people, to those former Nationalists, the fear of a return to ‘Old Labour’ is an immensely powerful argument, no matter how disillusioned they may have been with the PN.

So make no mistake. Those shots in the dark last Wednesday represent a potential turning point in young Dr Muscat’s career. Much now hinges on how the Prime Minister actually handles this turn of events. And so far, the signs are not terribly encouraging (though, to be fair, they could be far worse).

It is not particularly reassuring, for instance, that the policeman in question has not yet been arrested… despite having very clearly tried to shoot someone. Personally, I was unaware that the laws of the land were different for those citizens who also happen to be police officers. If I produced a gun in the midst of a road rage incident and fired two shots into a car, I’d sort of expect to be arrested. Why should it be any different for a policeman?

Call of duty, you say? Self-defence? Both are possibilities, but they would have to be proven in a court of law. And that is simply not possible, when the suspect in what looks like an attempted murder isn’t even arrested, still less tried…

Moreover: why has nobody assumed responsibility for the false report released by the DOI? We have been told that the ‘mistake’ was down to misinformation given to the DOI in the first place. But who gave out that misinformation? Was any effort made to verify it? And – most important of all – would it have even been corrected at all, were it not for photographic evidence that blatantly contradicted the official version of events?

These are the sort of questions Joseph Muscat may wish to publicly answer – and quickly, too – if he intends to retain the sort of national trust level that propelled him to his historic electoral victory of March 2013. And the clock starts ticking… now.