The king of Valletta

For the forthcoming five days the undoubted king of Valletta will be King Carnival and his merry reign.

Otherwise, however, there are many claimants for the title. One of these, an appointed person, V18 chairman Jason Micallef, might be said to have ambitions in this sense.

Some time ago he held a press conference and imperiously demanded that the oil rigs on the other side of the Grand Harbour, be removed. They are still there. Now he has weighed in on the impromptu memorial for Daphne Caruana Galizia that mourners have set up at the foot of the Great Siege monument in front of the Law Courts.

Earlier he had criticised the beaming of messages by activists on the Castile façade. Reacting on Facebook, Mr Micallef said that “democracy is being abused”. Public monuments are “under attack” via “illegal behaviour of a few dozen.. who think they can humiliate the people”. He said that lack of action on the government’s part is a sign of weakness.

Then he objected to a call for the Valletta local council to recognise the makeshift memorial dedicated to assassinated journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia.

The Civil Society Network has appealed to the Valletta local council to recognise the makeshift memorial, after a Labour local councillor presented a motion to have it removed.

A brief check on Daphne Caruana Galizia’s blog shows innumerable times when the blogger wrote about and chastised Mr Micallef. That and its context adequately explains his opposition.

But Mr Micallef is no king of Valletta and his opinion, although qualified by the title he has, is but one of the many opinions that people air.

What happened in Valletta is not an isolated case. People set up an impromptu memorial on the Place de la Republique monument in Paris to honour the victims of the terrorist attacks there.

Some trolls have put up posts showing that after a time this impromptu memorial was removed.

But they overlooked the fact that a memorial was set up outside the Bataclan night club where most of the dead fell. This memorial was inaugurated by then President Hollande.

There is another impromptu memorial honouring Daphne Caruana Galizia and this is in Bidnija on the spot where the bomb went off. As footage shot yesterday showed, most of the spot has now been overgrown with vegetation so that only a Maltese flag is visible.

But the people of Malta, without anybody planning this, chose to honour and commemorate Daphne in the heart of Valletta, in front of the same Law Courts where she went so often to combat libel charges.

The same people have continued to bring flowers and candles and to ensure that Daphne’s memory is not obliterated.

It is true that one lone woman tried to sweep away the flowers and Daphne’s portrait but she ended up being interrogated by the police and grieving hands restored the shrine.

Like the assassination of Malta’s most famous and controversial blogger, the memory and the shrine have become a focus for controversy.

There must be a solution to this controversy but it is not in the short term.

Certainly any action such as that urged upon by a Valletta local council member, will only be counterproductive.

Nor will outbursts such as that by the V18 chairman help solve the problem. The V18 celebrations, just like Carnival in these coming days, must share the space with the shrine.

Maybe at some future point there will be some agreement on setting up a monument and then removing this impromptu shrine, but that is a long way afar. At a time when Daphne’s name has echoed in so many assemblies especially European Union institutions and on so many television stations, removing the shrine will only exacerbate feelings.

On the contrary, her defence of the rule of law, which led to her brutal death, has turned her into a first rate icon for all the free peoples of Europe.