The monument commemorating the execution of Dun Mikiel Xerri and his fellow conspirators is probably the best we can do in the circumstances. Xerri was a priest and the slaughter of one of the Lord’s anointed served to underscore the infamy of the unbelieving enemy.
Still the monument is probably inappropriate: The Xerri conspiracy was a complete fiasco: the men landed by the besiegers at Marsamxett were let down by the conspirators within Valletta who were expected to open the gate to let them in. Nothing happened. Day dawned and the men on the quay were found out. Apparently they were unable to swim and nobody rowed out to rescue them. Brilliant. If the conspirators inside Valletta had not been caught and killed by the French, they may have been shot by the insurgents for cowardice in the face of the enemy.
The very many thousands of Maltese who died of wounds, disease and starvation to evict the French are not commemorated anywhere. They deserve better than a monument to a shameful cock-up. So do the survivors who “fought like lions” and managed their own affairs for a number of years of unimaginable uncertainty. Would it not be fitting to honour the Sindaci who mortgaged their properties in order to obtain supplies of food for their starving countrymen?
Those exploits were undertaken in reaction to the forces of the French Revolution and led to the consignment of Malta to the British who had not lost a man in the process. Still they were great sacrifices and the end result was the best available for Malta at the time. We have been more than niggardly in their regard.
We have been offensively forgetful towards our ancestors of four hundred years earlier who stood under arms for more than a year between 1427 and 1428 in rebellion against the King of Aragon. At the end of that adventure they gained for us our Magna Charta Libertatis which grants every Maltese and every Gozitan (explicitly so mentioned) and their descendants for all time the right to take up arms against their sovereign if ever their land was given away without their consent. It should be regarded at the bedrock of our liberties, the first sprouting of constitutional monarchy in Malta, subsequently often betrayed but a major historical achievement nonetheless. The English Magna Charta grants rights to King John’s Barons not to his people but it is still regarded as something akin to a holy relic. Our lies largely forgotten.
We do commemorate the 1919 Sette Giugno, a bread riot brought on by the ineptitude of burocrats in London rationing the supply of corn in the post-WWI British Empire. Some of the people killed and commemorated on the outsize monument were not even rioters. One was hit by a stray bullet while riding in a karozzin and another watched the proceedings from a balcony far away when the soldiers fired over the crowd. Nobody has ever taken credit for leading the rioters or organizing the riots. Their political significance has been a post facto overlay, first to blame the British for a botched crowd control exercise and much later to idolise the irate proletariat. Both are heavily strained and neither can escape the fact that at least two casualties hold as much political significance as the latest traffic accident. June 7th is one of our five National Days nevertheless.
Perhaps far worse than these are the memorials to non-events: the inauguration of a playground or the paving of a street or promenade. Some of these go far beyond a modest if unnecessary marble slab and end up as a monument to next to nothing at all, a Dadaesque insult to the various significant events and worthy citizens who are not remembered anywhere.
The debate about which our National Day should be continues to resurface intermittently. I prefer to stay out of it except to ask that if ever we do choose one it should have some substance to it. The raising of monuments and the eternal commemoration of non-events and events inflated far beyond their true significance has a long-lasting corrosive effect, preventing us from securing a common ground. Better no monument than a false monument.
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