Everyone will always remember when they heard or read that Daphne Caruana Galizia was killed. The bomb that shred her body to bits – as much Semtex as that used to kill 260 people over Lockerbie – tore through our collective psyche too, whatever we thought of Daphne and her writings.
When it happened, we were shocked, dumb, incredulous. But in some ways we had seen it coming.
The ground had been laid in a relentless, years-long campaign by Labour to dehumanise Daphne and turn her into ‘an enemy of the people’. Just like Ibsen’s Dr. Stockmann, she spoke the inconvenient truth to a Mafia State, as The Guardian is calling our system of government.
Like all inconvenient women for millennia, misogynistic Labour depicted her as a witch; is-saħħara tal-Bidnija. They got it right very early on, the place where she was bombed out of existence. On Labour TV, they would show the worst footage and photos they had of her.
They would link her to the Nationalist Party as a blogger Nazzjonalista so that Labour supporters would immediately raise the wall of prejudice, rather than judge the incontrovertible facts she revealed.
It wasn’t only Labour. Supposedly independent journalists would not refer to her by name at all, but in disparaging terms only worthy of the persecution they now purport to condemn. When her fact-laden stories broke, these supposedly independent journalists would attack her, rather than run with her story and better her. What a sad media environment we have in Malta.
Then, when her biggest story broke – the Panama secret companies with all their owners in Castille, the Pilatus Bank saga and the secret bank accounts, the Dubai and Azeri 7-digit transfers – it had to get worse.
In the Azerbaijan of the Mediterranean, you attack the messenger, not the bribery and money-laundering Daphne revealed, confirmed by the State’s own anti-money laundering unit. The FIAU in a Mafia State is there to be dismantled, as happened recently.
Labour would say Panama was all a lie by some businessman who didn’t get some government contract. Measuring with their spans, we would term that in Maltese. They would say Daphne was harming the country abroad. She was ‘negative’, the blogger Nazzjonalista, you see.
They wanted us to be ‘positive’ about their corruption. They worked for their money, you know. Konrad Mizzi had a brilliant career in a parallel universe. They’ll order an ‘audit’ by an ‘international’ firm of great repute. Daphne was envious of Mizzi and Keith Schembri’s millions.
The Prime Minister himself would insult her publicly by getting his spokesman, Kurt Farrugia, to tweet abuse at her. That’s how you then get a policeman who rejoices on Facebook at her death, calling her ‘cow dung’.
When even Labour supporters started admitting Castile is corrupt but they would still vote Labour “għax qdewna”, Labour started hitting where it thought it would hurt. Libels flew. They froze Daphne’s bank accounts and made her pay €47,000 as an ‘extreme measure against an extreme person’; that’s the way Labour itself described the garnishee orders against the journalist.
She’s dead because our corrupt institutions turned on her, rather than on the corrupt politicians she unmasked
In Azerbaijan of the Med, you’re ‘moderate’ if you’re corrupt, and ‘extreme’ if you fight corruption – a new meaning for ‘the movement of the moderates’. The fact that David Thake crowdfunded €67,000 in a day wasn’t in Labour’s plans, of course.
Then it was the ‘discussion programmes’ on Labour TV, not just the news. Rather than discussing the simple facts of the Prime Minister’s closest associates opening secret companies in a secretive jurisdiction on the very morrow of their oath of office and what the secrecy really showed, they would invite a queue of all those she exposed to lament her ‘grudges’ and ‘jealousy’. #galiziabarra they would hashtag. Daphne was ‘evil’, they would say. ‘Evil’ like the bomb that pulverised her in a field in Bidnija.
The scene in Bidnija on that fateful October 16 is what happens when the full powers of the State (there is no difference between Labour as a party and the machinery of the State) are wielded not to bring corrupt politicians to account, not to build independent institutions which act without fear or favour, but to treat appointments as trophies and spoils of victory for the incompetent and the corrupt.
That’s why we’ve had five police commissioners in four years and an Attorney General fast asleep on his FIAU reports.
Daphne wasn’t killed on October 16; they started killing her long before when they assassinated her character and tore down any shred of independence in our institutions. Then it all became much easier for the killer to plant the bomb that was the final act.
The same people who tore at her in Labour’s campaign are now judges. Police-politicians supposedly investigating her murder can now have access to her contacts, her sources, the information she had, her documents. How’s that for ‘protection of journalistic sources’?
Journalists have lodged an application in court about this, but protection of sources is a luxury for those living in free and open societies, not for a persecuted and bombed journalist.
Daphne held our governing class to account like no one else ever did. She had the keen sense of propriety so tragically missing in Malta. She knew how the rot spreads, and spreads fast. Many people thought she was mean when she wrote about seemingly trifling matters, but that was precisely her point: when standards drop, there is no floor.
The amoral U ejja, mhux xorta?’ mentality will give you bad signs on the roads and bribery in Castille, bogan behaviour in the streets and perjury in court, fenkata commissioners and money-laundering in high office, appointments at the trough and a million dollars at Pilatus, persecution of a journalist by the State and half a kilo of Semtex in Bidnija.
As Andrew Borg Cardona told the BBC, Daphne was a shy and unassuming person until she hit the keyboard to deliver the truth. That’s how I always knew her till the very end: correct and reserved, yet firm and demanding of high standards. She’s dead because our corrupt institutions turned on her, rather than on the corrupt politicians she unmasked.
Adieu, Daphne. You will always be our Queen of truth.