After the shock came anger. The anger at first was obvious, almost banal. It was aimed at the faceless people who did it. Then days passed.

First there was the spectacle of a vindictive, barely competent magistrate dragging the victim’s family to court within hours of losing their loved one and wasting a night of precious evidence preservation only to accept, as was inevitable, that she was the last person on earth suitable to run an inquiry into the killing of her harshest critic.

Then there was that pathetic excuse of a police force with scene-of-the-crime experts cavorting on site looking like they were celebrating an event and, after four days in hiding, the emergence of a police commissioner who would not pass a job interview for a supermarket security guard.

Then came the Prime Minister, all solemn and dark, pitifully declaring how harshly he had been criticised by the deceased – for, of course, on the day a mother, a wife and a lone voice for free speech and truth to power is blown to pieces in the worst atrocity ever committed on our soil, this megalomaniac Prime Minister must try to retain the limelight and usurp victim status.

Then came the leader of the Opposition, all hellfire and brimstone, trying to say all the right things but unable to live down the fact that just weeks before her death, he had disparaged his harshest critic (“biċċa blogger”) in an attempt to strip her of the basic democratic protections due to a free press. We watched his colleagues cringing in embarrassment, trying to live up to their boss’s expectations that the people around him would keep a straight face while he pontificated, even as he was undercut by a history he wrote himself, and which he has now been quick to try and shed, given the haste with which he withdrew the now unnecessary libel suits.

Then came the silent vigils of thin and sparse crowds made up almost exclusively of that fringe element of Maltese society, the smaller Malta of English-as-a-first-language literati from a lower-upper-middle-class established before the heady days of a quick buy-to-let economy. There was the excruciating spectacle of 12,000 university students, collectively staying away from the silent vigil that should have been the civil moment of their young lives. For why would anyone want to live in a country where the punishment for speaking up is death? Should we read acquiescence in their absence?

Then came the orchestrated campaign of trying to pin Daphne Caruana Galizia’s assassination on the PN. The campaign started with the classic innuendoes and non sequiturs with which Joseph Muscat is such a dead shot, and driven forward by the less subtle implications of ‘it’s them who done it’ of government ministers and spokesmen. They exploited the obvious vulnerability of Adrian Delia, almost certainly briefed the Italian press with fuzzy stories of links between the murder and Adrian Delia’s stagehands, and mobilised the trolls to restart the demonisation campaigns that first made Monday’s tragedy possible.

I fear that this country does not feel hurt enough by the mafia to stand up to it and push it away

Then the caveats started kicking in from the most stunning of sources. “She didn’t deserve to end up like that,’ the line goes, ‘but it’s not like she wasn’t asking for it.” The mafia equivalent of the but-her-skirt-was-too-short defence.

A ‘mafia state’, as Matthew Caruana Galizia dubbed the country that killed his mother in his incredibly clear-headed and cogent grief, is not possible without the general and popular complicity of omertà. This is the broad acceptance of the people that there’s a law for made men and a law for the rest of us, and never shall we complain. That is the mortar that keeps this evil edifice in place.

And that omertà manifested itself so transparently, as this nation turned its cold shoulder on a woman who died at the end of 30 years’ poorly paid and mostly freely given public service, keeping the powerful in check and revealing the fundamental underlying truth that our country was being taken away from us by drug lords and corrupt dictators. That omertà kicked in, when the general theme of discussion was not anger at the commission of a crime but victim shaming.

That is when my anger changed into fear.

I fear Daphne Caruana Galizia’s death shall not be our strage di Capaci, though it looked like it so much and should really have the same effect.

I fear that this country does not feel hurt enough by the mafia to stand up to it and push it away. That our people are not ready to withdraw their placid complicity in the taking over of banks, institutions, citizenship and other elements of their country’s pride and dignity.

I fear that our people are still too happy rolling in the scraps of fat carved out and thrown at us by the mafiosi laundering their money here.

And that even if more people were to die, we would rather find reasons to justify their picking off than accept being woken up from the dream of l-aqwa żmien.

But a dream ends on awakening, and sleep cannot be forced. Even as we shrug off the assassination of a journalist, the rest of the world has seen our mask of a paradise island drop and glimpsed the rot beneath.

They will now move to protect their interests, to avoid the flow of blood-money washed in Malta, in the process blocking the legitimate businesses from which we earn our keep. They will move to scrutinise the holder of every Maltese passport in case any one of us is a fugitive or undercover caporegime who paid a cool million for a European passport. They will move to block gambling in their jurisdictions if it is handled by businesses based here in case the takings are notes laundered from slave trade and drugs.

And then finally, when on top of rebuilding our institutions we will have to rebuild our reputation and our economy as well, we shall have to wake up to the horror of what we did to ourselves when we allowed a woman who gave her life to sounding the warning be consumed in a ball of fire.

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