The Prime Minister threw away an excellent public relations opportunity when he didn’t meet representatives of one of the world’s most influential wildlife conservation organisations. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, which has organised a massive campaign against what is happening in Malta, collecting a petition with more than 150,000 signatures, asked for a meeting and didn’t get one.
An attempt was made to fob them off with the Environment Minister (birds = environment). They read the message for what it was: sorry, but you and your stupid English petition are not high priority, even though your campaign has been all over the largest-circulation London broadsheets. The Prime Minister and his advisors have turned into a public relations disaster of the first order a situation that was brimming with positive potential in the way of photo opportunities and feel-good headlines.
We would much rather hear that he met these people than hear that he met the shooters. But such fine distinctions seem to pass over their heads. Besides, when the Prime Minister and his deputy seem to have so much time to spare for the Gift-of-Lifers, they might have had the good sense to find a little window in their diary for a vastly more important organisation with greater clout and more sensible objectives.
The people at the Prime Minister’s office may think of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds in terms of the Animal Liberation Front or PETA, or dismiss them privately as tal-ghasafar. If that’s the case, they had better become au fait with what’s going on in the world around them, and read a few newspapers and journals other than those published in Malta. Had they done so, they would have known what’s being written about us. And if they got out more, instead of cocooning cosily in their ivory tower, they would know that the majority of Maltese people agree.
Despite their many merits, our national newspapers do not put global current affairs and trends in context, because it’s not their job to do that. Anybody who has a halfway pretence to being well-informed needs to read every week at least two Sunday newspapers published in London. This is just the minimum. For the Prime Minister’s advisers – the Prime Minister doesn’t have that kind of time to read, and it’s their duty to brief him – the order is taller still. If you’ve ever wondered why some of the people who represent Malta sound like ta’ wara l-muntanji, this is the reason why. They know nothing of the modern world. They travel relentlessly in their political jobs, but all they see is the inside of hotels and conference rooms, and the only people they speak to are the other members of their delegation.
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On average, many Maltese people have a tendency to become cocooned in their own little farmyard called Malta. They are completely disconnected from goings-on elsewhere. They might have pretty thorough information about the big news – the goings-on in Iraq, for example – but daily life and the big picture are not made up of the number one items on the news bulletin. It’s absolutely crucial for significant politicians (and even insignificant ones, because that’s how they will get noticed) to keep up with the way trends in thinking and behaviour are developing in the western world of which we like to imagine we form part.
There are fashions, by which I do not mean only clothes and handbags, and there are general directional trends. One such directional trend since the early 1990s has been a definite shift, among the better-educated and better-off (and therefore the most influential) people in Europe’s leading economies towards heightened awareness of the destruction of nature, and of nature’s creatures. This awareness extends even to concern for threatened communities in far-flung places.
The shift is clearly discernible: environmental awareness has moved from the realm of the “crazies” in their baggy trousers and their calico shirts to the mainstream. First we thought it was just a fashion, like boot-leg jeans. Now we know it’s here to stay, and that there’s no going back. People are not going to revert to indifference to the environment, or indifference towards endangered birds.
Birds are no longer for creeps and nerds, for people without a sex life and for those who like to spend damp winter mornings with a pair of binoculars. The name “birdwatcher” used to be synonymous with “trainspotter”, and was a by-word for anorak-wearing pimpled youths who never went to parties, and for strange men with abundant facial hair, ugly spectacles and woolly hats. No more. To be bird-protection-conscious has been hip for years. Birds are cool. They’re happening, they’re now, and they’re wicked – or whatever the word of the moment might happen to be.
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Birds didn’t count in Malta up to fairly recently because, until then, people were quite primitive and concerned with survival above all else. There was little or no finesse in anything. If you think I’m talking rubbish, just cast your mind back to how you yourself used to live 10, 15 or 20 years ago. That’s right: shudder. Now that we are vastly more comfortable, despite what the doomsayers might have us believe, our thoughts can turn to higher things. And they have. With our own survival sorted out, we can bother about the survival of birds.
There’s more information, too, which helps. Without the media to let them know, many people in Malta were wholly unaware of the kind of birds that migrate over the islands, only to be shot. The image being used to illustrate this column is of one of them, the hoopoe. One season, a pair of them spent a couple of days resting in our garden during their long-haul flight between the continents. You can’t imagine how thrilled I was to see them in the context of a typical Maltese rural landscape, where all I usually see are sparrows and robins, or birds of prey right up there in the sky being shot at.
They were so much at odds with the background that it might as well have been a gorilla passing by the window. The hoopoe’s stark black and white stripes and its brilliantly exotic plume were like something plucked out of a Walt Disney film. Even the most sophisticated, blasé person would dissolve into childlike excitement at an unexpected sight like that, so I felt no embarrassment at all in jumping up and down like a four-year-old.
People don’t know what’s being shot unless they have it pointed out to them. They don’t know that hoopoes, and other birds equally or more fascinating, are not just in Malta from time to time, but being shot here – for fun and games. When you see a bird so beautiful, so exotic, so completely out of place in the Maltese landscape, it is like a gift. Seeing it is a special treat. The perfection of these creatures makes their destruction even more shocking. It is like seeing some lunatic rip a knife through a work of art on canvas. Yet that same day, when I left the house I found a posse of men with guns waiting outside the gate. They had seen the hoopoes too. How can you see something like that and only think of killing it, I asked one of them, whom I know. He didn’t have an answer. It’s completely mindless, you see. To these people, it’s like killing chickens.
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This is the mistake that bird-shooters make. When we call for an end to their so-called hobby, or at least for better policing and stiffer penalties for those caught killing protected species, they accuse us of being hypocritical. If we’re chicken-eaters, they say, we have no right to stop them killing other kinds of birds. They don’t seem to understand that this battle is not about the morality or otherwise of destroying life, but about destroying rare, beautiful or endangered species. It’s about the pointless destruction of something finite, something designed to give pleasure through observation. There is no end to chickens, but there is a foreseeable end to flamingos.
Wherever flamingos congregate, they become a main attraction. In Djerba there are large numbers of visitors to see the migratory pink flamingos that gather in a certain part of the marshy coast in November. Here, the lone flamingo that dares pass overhead ends up shot – in a conservation park.
We’re sick, and the sooner we face it, the better.
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As with the issue of divorce, the Prime Minister and his advisers are failing to hear the whistling on the wind. They are still stuck in a time when placating the voters on the issue of bird-shooting meant keeping the shooters happy. That was in the days when everyone else was indifferent. Who cared whether birds were shot, except for the tal-ghasafar groups on the fringes of political lobbying? I can’t understand how the government hasn’t noticed that public opinion has hardened since then, that now almost everyone has a strong view about the matter, and that the majority is dead set against bird-shooting.
So it’s no longer a case of a minority of die-hard shooters against a majority of indifferent others. It’s now the shooters’ minority against a majority who want an end to this nasty business. Can the shooting minority swing the vote in a general election? That’s unlikely. Look at the rubbish number of votes they got in the MEP election, when there was no government at risk. And compare that figure to the whopping number of votes polled by the candidate from Alternattiva Demokratika, the party that has made the fight for bird protection one of its key issues. People voted freely in that MEP election, because there was nothing at stake. You could see the lie of the political land, and where people’s hearts lay.
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A government that wants to keep Malta a paradise for bird-shooters, for anti-divorce Catholics of the mealy-mouthed by-the-book variety, and for foetus-fetishists, is a backward-looking one. In seeking to maintain Maltese society in a state of retardation, the government is going to create a massive schism where previously there was homogeneity of sorts. The Maltese who want to live secular modern lives in a Malta that is part of contemporary Europe will wrench themselves away from those who cling to a misguided nostalgia for a mythical island and a way of life that exists only in their imagination.
There never was a blissful past in Malta, just as there never was one anywhere else in Europe. The present is by far the more wonderful, comfortable, convenient, secure, safe and amusing. If we go with it, it can only get better. But we can’t do so as long as the bird-shooters, rosary-fingerers and foetus-frenzied are clinging to our coat-tails and dragging us down. The only way to shake them off is with a pair of scissors to cut them loose, and that, of course, is where the schism starts. The division of the future is not going to be the old one between Labour and Nationalist, but the new one between the liberals who want to inhabit the contemporary world and the illiberal who want to remain denizens of a non-existent past. You mark my words. It’s happening already.
