History rewritten: Malta ignores Gallipoli Campaign centenary despite heavy involvement in 1915

World leaders and families of those who died are streaming into Gallipoli to commemorate the centenary of the disastrous campaign which led to the deaths of so many.

Malta played a crucial role in that campaign as the base where many of the injured were brought to be tended in hospitals and medical camps. Some 150,000 wounded soldiers were brought here and those who died were buried in military cemeteries. As a side note, that should put our current ‘migrant crisis’ into perspective.

Several Maltese officers and men died at Gallipoli, and beyond that, the 2,000-strong civilian labour force there included 800 Maltese labourers. But is the centenary being marked in Malta as part of Maltese history? No, it is not. Instead we are reporting the international wire stories on the commemoration in Gallipoli as though it has nothing to do with us.

And we are talking, instead, of marking the 450th anniversary of ‘the Great Siege’, while the 100th anniversary of the Gallipoli Campaign passes by unnoticed.

Is Malta, given its role in the Gallipoli Campaign, represented among those world leaders there in Gallipoli right now? Apparently not.

You’d be hard pushed to find a member of the government, or of the Opposition for that matter, who knows anything about the Gallipoli Campaign or Malta’s role in it. Because unlike ‘the Great Siege’, it wasn’t part of their secondary school syllabus.

The catastrophic failures of education in this country never cease to astound me. And you can’t blame the schools entirely. Most of us learn little or nothing at school. It’s up to us to find out afterwards.

But here’s the thing – because we are surrounded by people who don’t know anything much either, we are never challenged and never feel inadequate or ill-informed. We protect ourselves by never moving out of our comfort zone and finding out how ignorant we really are.

And so the centenary of the Gallipoli Campaign goes by unremarked on in the very country that was, in 1915, known as ‘the nurse of the Mediterranean’.

If you ask a Maltese politician what he thinks ‘the nurse of the Mediterranean’ is, he’ll probably tell you that it’s Paul Pace.

And so we haven’t even spared one member of government for Gallipoli this week – because they don’t even know they should be there or why.