A true Mellieha story

Over the last weeks this newspaper accepted to publish some articles I submitted explaining the great dangers the Selmun fish factory poses to our natural environment and cultural heritage. I am grateful to it for having helped me explain to readers the repeated actions by today’s society that manage to destroy our environmental and cultural heritage. I am aware that it is frequently futile to defend the environment; it is a lost battle and has always been a lost battle. The Prime Minister has now expressed his opinion: it is acceptable to build the fish factory that trespasses on the natural environment... the garigues. The Prime Minister has, incredibly, relied on advice given to him that this industrial activity in a prime site threatening natural beauty should take place. The industrial activity will therefore be carried out on the Selmun garigues.

Many have shown great concern that the application of this factory in a natural site should have been even considered in the first place. But everything was in complete order on the entrepreneur’s side. It had been also carefully analysed and Okayed by experts. The great concern was that notwithstanding this assessment, the bottom line still signified disregard and irreverence of environmental and cultural indicators of our identity. The mechanisms of the country failed to defend the country’s environmental values. The entrepreneur was not at fault. Other countries have grown to respect their heritage. But not so Malta. Politicians with executive power in our country are still far off the standard sensitive mark in environmental awareness. No matter how much NGOs try to defend what few things we have, the politicians’ word is more important.

Perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps after all they are right and a fish factory on the garigues is more important than the garigues and natural surroundings themselves. For having expressed my opinion, I was served with a threatening judicial letter telling me to shut up. So I will let the future judge. There is little more one can do if the very Prime Minister of the country himself gives more importance to other issues than to environmentally sensitive ideals. I have pleaded with the Prime Minister, I have written to him about the matter, but his office did not even deign to acknowledge my letter!

Although NGOs have voiced their concern, I feel that other people who should have been stronger defenders of the Mellieħa environment have not shown any crusading spirit at all. Their militancy was weak – understandable for reasons I suspect but will not mention. This shows yet again the usual proverbial fight between powerful insensitive people and the voiceless environment. It was all so predictable. It has always been like that and will always be like that in Malta. Even our own flesh and blood couldn’t care less about our own environment and our own heritage. This is Malta.

I will now recount the story of Pietru Gauci, il-Pirrex, who died a heartbroken old man. They simply bulldozed their way through the produce in his fields. He had no voice and his fields were voiceless. The windmill was too powerful, too inconsiderate. Again: Malta.

Pietru Gauci, il-Pirrex

It was a windy day when we met at l-Imġiebaħ.

“Do you know that I used to be a farmer?” he asked suddenly. “I had so many fields…”

Then he moved away, slowly, carefully, muttering to himself, one hand against the rubble wall, the other resting on a crooked stick.

“First they took my fields at Għajn Żejtuna,” he muttered to himself. “Then they took all my trees, they pulled down all my walls, they took away my soil, they took away my work, I lost my job, my wife lost a son… we had no money because they took all my tools, then they sent me digging the new roads where my fields used to be… they taught me how to mix concrete… ”

“But did you not talk to the police…” I ventured. “Or to someone in authority…”

“I went to the parish priest,” he said, his lips suddenly quivering, “because the Church owned the land. I asked him to help me, but the priest said he could not. The Church had sold the land to some lawyers. I asked him to go to the bishop, but he said the bishop was busy and had nothing to do with the garigues and the fields any longer. Rich people from the city had bought the land. The peasants had no business interfering with the future of their land. I could not work as a farmer any longer. What is a farmer who has no land and no soil…?”

Construction trucks and bulldozers soon turned up one morning and started uprooting all his trees. They took his vines, his plum and carob trees, all he had. They grabbed his work, his own life. The big monsters went right through and destroyed the walls he repaired so carefully. Pietru was crying as he talked, his eyes suddenly wet, his lips trembling, his unshaven cheeks had little rivulets of emotion and anger flowing down them. What could he do?

“I had 14 mouths to feed. The boys were already very keen to work in the fields, they used to study hard, and they used to work hard. But then I had no fields, the people from the city came and they had papers and we had no papers, the priest said that our papers were useless, they were like fakes, he said! What could we do? But we had these papers since the times of the Knights, and even before, because the peasant existed before the Knights ever dreamt of coming to Malta, the peasants were the first people to live in our fields! Even the priest came later. The peasant was the true owner.”

When Pietru said this, the parish priest could not understand what he was talking about! Pietru said this also to the lawyers. They could not understand what he was talking about!

“My children do all they can to make me happy, but they will not succeed. They take care of me, they cook for me, and they will not leave me on my own. The boys take turns to sleep with me every night and during the day there is always someone with me. I am so proud of them. I always worked in the fields that my father and my grandfather and their ancestors had done before me. The fields and the garigues fed all my family and all my ancestors before they took it away from us. They took all my fields, they took all my land… what could I do...?”

These were strong words that this simple peasant was telling me. In a nutshell he was synthesizing the characteristic essential features of the family of human beings called peasants or villagers who form the backbone of the Maltese people. He was describing the greed of those Maltese lawyers, priests and entrepreneurs. He was expressing the voicelessness and helplessness of Mother Nature. Pietru l-Pirrex may have been an old insignificant, barely literate peasant who toiled at Selmun, but his ideas were crystal clear and his vision could not be more far reaching and paradoxically incomprehensible to people who were educated at universities and who therefore should have known better than to intrude on his life and cause him to suffer this great injustice. His words were simple and clear, but deeper, more significant than what most educated or powerful people today would ever grapple hard to understand.

To rub more painful salt into his wounds, they told him to stop moaning and fall on his knees to beg employment in their heartless system that had robbed him of his land and occupation. There was not a single person who listened to his plight. Not one single human being who tried to help Pietru. Not a single lawyer. Not a single politician. Not even the parish priest, any priest! But his children had to eat. He had to provide money for them to go to school, to buy daily bread and to buy the same fruits and vegetables he used to grow in his own fields.

Pietru had to endure the hardship of seeing his garigues being savaged and the ravaging of his revered and sacred fields. His family had lost the battle to defend Mother Nature, in his own time. And he could do nothing about it. He had to witness the soil being carried away, literally removed in truckloads to some other mysterious place and the rocks being excavated for foundations for villas and other buildings. He had to see the roads being constructed over country footpaths, and rubble walls being demolished to serve as filling material. He had to watch helplessly as the helpless lizards and snails and hedgehogs and snakes and vipers were savagely buried.

Pietru il-Pirrex, the Mġiebaħ peasant was aware that other people could never understand his anguish: they were never close to Mother Earth and did not respect her. You do not learn to respect Mother Earth by going to university, by becoming a lawyer, or a priest, or a bishop, or an entrepreneur, or a politician, or a prime minister. You respect Mother Earth because you are more sensitive to her beauty than you are to making money − because you respect life and Mother Nature more than you respect your friends.