The Sorrows of Malta (3) 'One Woman With a Blog'
What the world can learn from Daphne Caruana Galizia
Today marks exactly four years since the Maltese investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia was murdered in a car bomb outside her home in Bidnija. In her last blogpost, written the day before she died, she famously wrote the words that have come to constitute a kind of epitaph: ‘There are crooks everywhere. The situation is desperate.’
Since some of those ‘crooks’ have been brought to justice, or at least brought closer to it. One man has been sentenced to 15 years for his involvement in her murder. Two others have been charged but not tried. The men who made the Semtex bomb that killed her have also been arrested. Yorgen Fenech, the tycoon triend of so many of the politicians Caruana Galizia attacked, is now awaiting trial for commissioning her murder.
Fenech denies the charges, and has implicated former members of the former Labour government of Joseph Muscat in the killing. It remains to be seen these charges can be made to stick, and whether the Maltese judicial system is able and willing to investigate the web of corruption that allegedly connects Fenech’s 17 Black company to the shell companies in Panama that Caruana Galizia exposed.
Other politicians have also been charged with an array of offences pertaining to the stories that Caruana Galizia broke on her blog during her investigation into Maltese involvement in the Panama Papers. Some of these politicians were members of Joseph Muscat’s Labour administration, which fell from power in 2020. In July this year, a public inquiry into Caruana Galizia’s death found Muscat’s government politically responsible for her murder, and accused the Maltese authorities of presiding over a ‘culture of impunity’ and a ‘breakdown in the rule of law’ which left her isolated and vulnerable.
These are serious allegations, but political responsibility is not the same as criminal responsibility, and the coming months will show whether the Maltese state is willing to find out who actually ordered the killing and why, and it also remains to be seen whether Maltese civil society – and the outside world - is able to maintain sufficient pressure to ensure that it does.
Today Caruana Galizia’s picture can still be found opposite the Palace of Justice in the memorial that campaigners have created alongside the monument to Malta’s Great Siege. From time to time the government tries to clear away the flowers, photographs and placards, and each time her supporters put them back. This tug-of-war is an indication of the ambivalence on the islands towards Malta’s most famous investigative journalist.
Since her death Caruana Galizia has been honoured with numerous posthumous international awards, foundations and prizes. Only last month Ursula von der Leyen paid tribute to her during a visit to Valletta. But at the time of her death she was an isolated and vulnerable figure, in part because of the deliberate efforts of her powerful enemies to isolate her and make her vulnerable.
Less than two weeks before her death Caruana Galiza gave an interview for the Council of Europe, in which she described the threats and personalised hate campaigns directed at her, some of which were generated by her own government. Death threats, misogynistic abuse, harassment, trolling, a billboard campaign, the killing of one of her dogs, an arson attack on her home; letters filled with excrement – all of these forms of intimidation were part of what she compared to a ‘witch-hunt in 17th-century Salem’.
By that time Caruana Galizia had more than forty libel and criminal defamation suits pending against her, and her assets had been frozen on the orders of the Minister of the Econom, following allegations on Caruana Galizia’s blog that he had been spotted visiting a German brothel. It’s easy to see why so many powerful people loathed her and might have wanted her dead.
Caruana Galizia’s blog investigated tax evasion, bribery, kickbacks, money laundering, fake banks and so components of the Maltese business model, and she ridiculed and humiliated the politicians that she alleged to have been involved in such practices. She revealed their sexual peccadilloes, their greed, vulgarity and tawdriness. Politicians don’t like to be treated like this, and corrupt politicians like it even less.
Caruana Galizia had a sharp tongue, and her vitriol was often used by her enemies as a justification for their own attacks on her. She was often accused of snobbishness, and she was certainly critical of what she called the ‘primitivity’ and ‘amoral familism’ of her countrymen, who she regarded as complicit in the corruption of her country’s political class. In June 2017 she wrote:
The problem that has to be addressed is the widespread and ever-increasing amorality among a sizeable percentage of the Maltese population of Malta (not all of Malta’s population is Maltese; tens of thousands are not). It spans the entire socio-economic spectrum and has nothing at all to do with social class, privilege or the lack of it…Malta is in a dangerous place, and now we can no longer say that it is corrupt politicians who have brought us to this point, for it can no longer be denied that those corrupt politicians are a reflection of society.
Those of us who have watched the same dynamic unfold in the UK may well question Caruana Galizia’s suggestion that it stems from some uniquely Maltese cultural characteristics. But such observations may well have contributed to the indifference and in some quarters open celebration that greeted her murder, and the guarded tributes paid to her by journalists – some of whom had been on the receiving end of her sharp tongue.
But if Caruana Galizia criticised her country she also fiercely defended it, and wanted it to be better than it was, and the charge of snobbery does not define her – to say nothing of insults like ‘witch’ and ‘terrorist’ which her enemies threw at her.
Caruana Galizia was the sum of many contradictions. She was an admirer of Margaret Thatcher who denounced the racist treatment of refugees; an aesthete who edited a magazine on taste and flair, who was perfectly capable of resorting to tabloid gossip to humiliate the politicians and official she despised; a Maltese journalist who wrote her blog in English rather than Maltese; a Maltese patriot who criticised her own country and yet wanted it to be more European; a courageous journalist whose fearlessness makes most British journalists look like deferential court scribes by comparison.
But what comes over again and again in her work is her passionately democratic spirit, and the anger and despair with which she reacted to the degradation of Malta’s institutions at the hands of its politicians. Though she attacked these politicians for their individual vices, she persistently referred to functioning democratic institutions is the key to the elimination of the corruption she denounced, and also an essential guarantor of the collective good.
‘Put amoral men into near-absolute power untrammelled by the normal checks and balances of a functioning democracy, and it ends up unbalancing their minds,’ she wrote in a 2017 post on her bete noire Joseph Muscat.
It is both a tribute to her courage and also something of an indictment of her country that she was largely left alone to do this, and that she became such a crucial journalistic outlet for too many whistleblowers who were frightened to reveal their names. In doing so she presented her country with an image of itself that many Maltese didn’t want to see.
But the problems she denounced are not uniquely Maltese. Because even the most fearless investigative journalists can only have an impact if they live in a society willing to respond to what they have to tell them. That rule applies not just in Malta, but to so many countries in our corrupt gilded age where ‘amoral men’ are voted into power and use their positions to enrich themselves, their rich backers and their cronies, while removing the checks and balances that make it possible to hold them to account and also to remove them.