Six months after the slaying of Daphne Caruana Galizia, the reputational damage to Malta has grown, not diminished. This is partly because the government neglected to put a lid on the volatility of the event by immediate political catharsis – there have been no resignations – and it didn’t even examine the wider issues surrounding the event so that institutional reforms could be taken and wider measures adopted.
Instead the government battened down the hatches, taking comfort that support for Labour held up in the polls, and treated the assassination as merely a police investigation and public relations blip.
The only wider measure announced, aside from dusting off the media Bill that was in the works anyway, were plans to overhaul the Constitution, presumably to make it more democratically robust.
Rewriting the Constitution may be overdue, but constitutional amendments are an overarching exercise far removed from the institutional failures, culture of impunity and perverting effect of the sale-of-passports and dodgy inflows of money that led to the assassination in the first place. This is where a public inquiry would be useful.
Instead of holding a public inquiry and drawing lessons, instead of national unity forming around such a seminal event, six months on we have descended into hideous partisan warfare. Some Labour politicians and government operatives such as Glenn Bedingfield and Jason Micallef have inflamed the partisan-minded by snide remarks about Daphne’s last words and gratuitous hostility to her memorial in Valletta. The surreptitious night-time vandalising of the organic, community memorial itself intensified the partisan entrenchment, and fed the idea that elements within Labour seek to banish Daphne from public consciousness.
The vilification of Daphne’s memory and memorial, and the slurs against activists keeping up the struggle for immediate and wider justice or reform, by elements within Labour or people who identify with Labour, only serves to solidify the impression that Daphne must have been right if attempts to disparage her have to continue even after her death.
Our only way out is to hold a wide-ranging public inquiry
And the Prime Minister, instead of reining in these outbursts by those in his herd, has nourished the sense of injuriousness and siege by implicitly characterising international disquiet as in part PN-instigated and in part enviousness for our roaring economy. This has been combined with talk of Labour’s vast majority, and elements within Labour are reacting with tribal instinctiveness and plotting a show of strength on May 1.
This outpouring of tribal, political pique is misplaced. Daphne was not assassinated for the excesses or style of her journalism – the fiery, prejudicial personal attacks that she often deployed through her pen – Daphne was eliminated because of what she knew or what she was on to. And irrespective of the person, even if we don’t want to honour the person, we cannot lose sight of the event and the wider context of impunity within which the assassination happened.
The culture of impunity is not limited to political unaccountability and cronyism, that’s only part of it. More widely and insidiously, it is institutional inefficiency and inertia. Our law-and-order institutions are creaky and rusty. Incompetence within the police often goes unaddressed; people are dismayed by reports about the partiality or randomness in what and whom the police investigate ; there is no recourse over police blunders or wrong decisions – we are in urgent need of something like the UK’s Independent Police Complaints Commission. And the courts often procrastinate about form and technicalities, getting caught up in endless delays, allowing the crooked and the wealthy to evade or frustrate justice by legal manoeuvrings.
The media is also thwarted in its essential role by some politicians and government entities who resort to intimidatory or obfuscatory tactics, or outright evasion when asked legitimate questions by journalists. This is all perilous for our shaky democracy and rule of law. The brazen assassination of Daphne who, for all her failings at least in part shone a light into the dark recesses of our society, has drawn the world’s attention.
Let’s not forget that what happens in Malta now matters to the EU, especially since we are now peddling European citizenship more easily and inexpensively than any other European country, and luring European companies to domicile their profits in Malta to avoid higher taxes in the countries where they operate. And as the West tightens sanctions against Russia’s thuggish international buccaneering we can seem like spoilers from within by selling European citizenship to Russians so that they could circumvent the gauntlet of sanctions. Persistent reports of dirty inflows of money into the EU via Malta add to our woes.
Staid, respected newspapers are characterising Malta as a “parasite” within the EU, of Malta and Joseph Muscat having become Europe’s problem. These are serious, alarming charges.
The battering to our reputation has been such that a Greek court made the decision to block the extradition of Daphne’s source Maria Efimova on the grounds of safety. That a court in a fellow Schengen EU nation feels that another EU nation cannot guarantee the safety of an accused is something that signifies a rupture in trust and solidarity.
It doesn’t help that the magisterial or police investigations spun out of Daphne’s reportage and the assassination itself have stalled. The world is watching, and not only are we being found wanting, we are facing reputational ruination.
Our only way out – aside from long overdue political accountability and catalysing the various investigations that appear to have stalled – is to hold a wide-ranging public inquiry into the wider culture of impunity, institutional failures and economic policies that have led us here, and then design ameliorative reforms in a spirit of national unity.