One year on, the push for change since the murder of Malta's most famous investigative journalist
Camille Fassett
October 15, 2018
Daphne Caruana Galizia
On the 16th day of every month since the murder of Malta’s most famous investigative journalist, a crowd gathers at the top of a hill in the center of the capital city, Valletta.
At the base of the Great Siege monument, three bronze figures representing faith, fortitude, and civilization, a handwritten sign reads: “BE HERE TODAY AT 7:30PM: VIGIL FOR DAPHNE.” In mid-May, on the seventh month since journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia was murdered, I sit at a nearby cafe and watch tourists stop to view the memorial, and read the posters detailing what happened. Like silent actors, their expressions almost identically transition from curiosity to shock to outrage.
“Here? A journalist, killed for her work, here, in Malta? Is this not the European Union?”
People gather at dusk: first, a trickle, then a swell. Some carry candles and flowers that they lay at the base of the statue, while others hold signs with written messages like  “end impunity” and “ġustizzja,” the Maltese word for “justice.”
The vigils, organized by civil society groups, are relatively unobtrusive. But the response both by the Maltese public and government officials is indicative of the state of political dissent in Malta.
Early this year, someone destroyed the memorial with a broomstick. It was reconstructed soon after, but since then, it has been damaged and removed constantly by both government officials and private citizens.
Caruana Galizia was 53 years old when she was murdered on October 16, 2017. She was driving near her home in Bidnija at around 3pm when her car exploded. Her son heard the blast from the family home, and found her remains. Although ten men were arrested and three charged with her assassination, who ordered her killing and why remains unclear.
The death of Daphne Caruana Galizia has divided Malta and shaken governmental and journalistic institutions to their core. The year since has functioned as a national reckoning, a questioning, and a movement.
The way I heard her describe it is the way a painter is compelled to paint—you do it because, what else do you do?
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Daphne Caruana Galizia was called many things, from a “one woman WikiLeaks” to “witch.” Throughout my time in Malta, I needed only to refer to her by her first name for people to know exactly who I meant.
Butshe was also the eldest of three sisters, a daughter, and a mother tothree boys—Matthew, Andrew, and Paul. She was born in Sliema, and waspoliticised young—she was arrested as a teenager while attending protests.
“Evenas a child, she very much had her own mind,” said Cora Vella, CaruanaGalizia’s younger sister. “She was naturally curious, and she read alot, which opened her mind even further. She always liked writing. Butit wasn’t something people did then.”
It wasn’t until after the birth of her sons that Caruana Galizia started writing regularly.
“Itstarted out with her hammering out a column, and she’d send it to theTimes of Malta,” said Vella. “She’d think ‘well, okay, at least I hadfun writing it.’ But she kept doing it.”
Opinion writing wasrelatively new then in Malta. Cora Vella described the journalisticlandscape then as ‘dry as dust.’ “All the reporters were men, andarticles weren’t signed. With few exceptions, there were no properopinion columnists.”
Malta has no journalism school, and CaruanaGalizia received no formal training. She simply began to write, and asshe did, she refined her skill.
She worked as a news reporterfor the Sunday Times of Malta, and wrote columns for both the Times andThe Malta Independent. In 2008, she launched a own blog—Running Commentary—a one-woman operation that regularly racked up 400,000 views a day, outpacing the combined circulation of the country’s newspapers.
“The blog gave her freedom,” Vella said.
Perhapsthe last time Malta made front page headlines across the world was thePanama Papers—documents leaked in 2015 that detailed transnational taxevasion and corporate abuse dating back to the 1970s. It was CaruanaGalizia that led the Panama Papers investigation in Malta, which implicated officials including the Minister of Energy and Health.
CaruanaGalizia was almost uniquely adversarial in her approach to reporting onpower in Malta. Her reporting was uncompromising and she wrotefiercely—with enormous consequences for her personal life.
Instinctively,you know something might happen,” said Vella about her sister’s death.“It’s like someone with a terminal illness. You still don’t expect themto die, it’s still a shock.
Afew months after Caruana Galizia’s death, another journalist wasmurdered in the European Union. Ján Kuciak, a 27-year-old Slovakinvestigative journalist, was shot twice in the chest and killed along with his fiancee, in Bratislava, Slovakia.
The response was immediate.
Justdays after Kuciak’s murder, Slovakia’s Minister of Culture announcedhis resignation on the grounds that he could not cope with the fact thata journalist was killed during his tenure. And in the wake of hisdeath, protests were held in almost 50 cities across the country. Theprotests were endorsed by teachers, artists, and non-governmentalorganizations, universities cancelled their clases, and over 60,000people marched in Bratislava alone.
Following the protests, Prime Minister Robert Fico resigned. Although the investigation into his death is ongoing, police have stated that Kociak was likely killed because of his work as a journalist, and that his death had been ordered.
LikeCaruana Galizia, Kuciak reported on tax fraud, government abuse ofpower, and shady connections between officials and high profilebusinessmen. The murders of both journalists sparked were crimes thatdeeply divided their countries. But to Gulnoza Said, Europe and CentralAsia Research Associate at the Committee to Protect Journalists, thestark differences in the responses to the deaths of Kuciak and CaruanaGalizia illuminate the specific press freedom climate in Malta.
“UnlikeSlovakia, there was no public solidarity in Malta when it comes to[Caruana Galizia’s] murder,” Said said. “There was no universalcondemnation, including from the journalist community. Daphne irritated alot of people. And some said that she deserved what she got, and youdidn’t see that in Slovakia.
Shortly before the publication ofthis post in October 2018, a third European investigativejournalist—Bulgarian television reporter Viktoria Marinova—was murdered.Days later, large crowds turned up to mourn her death and protest corruption.
Saidthinks that there is a lack of awareness among the Maltese press andpublic about the implications of the murder of an investigativejournalist, and that if there is no justice for Caruana Galizia, thiscould happen again.
The first anniversary of Caruana Galizia’s death is October 16, 2018. Vigils are planned to commemorate her in cities from Berlin to London—and, in Malta itself, in Valletta at the base of the Great Siege monument.
People don’t understand that when we fight for justice forDaphne, it’s justice for what she exposed.
The June protest wasIl-Kenniesa’s first protest, but after Caruana Galizia’s murder inOctober, the group began to organize around the injustice of hersilencing with impunity. “Kenniesa” means “sweepers” in Maltese, and themetaphorical broom in question aims to clear away corruption across thecountry and stand in defense of dissent, rather than organizing againstany particular political party.
“I think about the women’s marchin the United States, for example and the idea that protest, in recentyears does not result in effective or immediate change, but that doesn'tmean we stop protesting,” Urso said. She noted that when she speaks topeople in Malta about protest, the response she generally gets is thatthere is no point, and that nothing will change.
Despite this,Urso said that she is driven by hope. “I want to empower people toprotest. People don’t understand that when we fight for justice forDaphne, it’s justice for what she exposed. She didn’t just write aboutLabour.”
Malta has few robust civil society groups, and many arepartisan. Il-Kenniesa, in contrast, calls out corruption from both theLabour and Nationalist parties.
“It makes us vulnerable,” Urso told me. “Because we get hate from everyone.”
Ursohas been the target of extensive online harassment. She said that shehas received emails with threatening messages advocating that she shouldbe burned alive, and that rumors are constantly spread about her onsocial media platforms, like the lie that she dated one of CaruanaGalizia’s sons. And early in 2018, Urso’s parents’ home address wasposted on Facebook, and people even planned a protest outside of thehouse.
The rumors and threats targeting not just Urso, but alsoother transparency activists and Caruana Galizia’s family members, seemto originate from large Facebook groups. Their memberships total tens ofthousands of people, including government officials. The phenomenon wasdetailed at length in an investigation by Caroline Muscat, a journalist and co-founder at The Shift News.
“Alongsidethe Prime Minister and Labour leader himself, a minimum of eight seniorstaff working for him are members of Facebook groups containing violentcomments, including the distribution of anti-corruption activists’personal details and calls for them to be physically attacked, sexuallyassaulted, and stalked,” Muscat’s reporting reads.
Urso explainedthe dynamic: “People will create these fake Facebook profiles and putup libellous information about me, and they’ll be shared by realaccounts. As soon as it’s reported, Facebook will take it down a fewhours later, but the information is already out there and it’ll bere-posted and shared so many times. I file police reports because I wantit to be on record, but they asked me to send the URLs of the posts. Iwas like, ‘This was weeks in! Those posts aren’t still up!’ I had thescreenshots.”
(Later, Urso said that some people have beencharged in connection with the police reports she filed, but no courtcases have begun.)
She takes extensive precautions now to protecther personal information online, but she worries that she is being madean example out of in order to intimidate others from speaking out.
“They see what happens to protesters like me and they think, ‘If that happens to me, I will lose my job.’ People are scared.”
Ursosaid that she is still inspired by the people she has seen raise theirvoices and call for change in recent months, and that Il-Kenniesa, willcontinue campaigning for justice for Caruana Galizia and her stories.She hopes for a change in Maltese culture around corruption. “Honoringher means a commitment to not stop asking the questions she was asking.”
Caruana Galizia's memorial in May 2018
Activistsdefend the memorial, even spending the night at the base of the GreatSiege monument to guard it. And every time the memorial is cleared,whether by cleansing department employees, police, or angry members ofthe public, banners and candles seem to sprout back.
And as for Daphne, I havethis maddening, maddening feeling that she knew what to do to avoid thatend, but wouldn’t do it, because duty calls.
On an overcast day in mid-May, I meet blogger and activist Manuel Delia blocks from Caruana Galizia’s memorial.
Delia’s blog,like Caruana Galizia’s, takes aim at some of the most powerful figuresin Malta, and features sharp commentary on local and European politics.
“Iknew [Caruana Galizia] for the better part of 20 or 25 years,” Deliasaid. “The first time I remember meeting her, I was around 17, and shewas an associate editor at the Independent.”
Delia had written aletter to the editor, and Caruana Galizia called him in for a chat. ButDelia remembers reading her work long before that, ever since he was apreteen reading the news. “Her writing would just jump out at you. I wasaware of her way before she was aware of me.”
While Delia workedin politics for over 15 years, including as a press secretary for theprime minister, he interacted with Caruana Galizia professionally. “Shewould give you hell, but demanded incredible respect,” he said, smiling.“I was always an admirer, and you know, she would whip the people Iworked with. I always had a bit of a teenage crush.”
It wasn’tuntil the last four or five months of Caruana Galizia’s life that Deliagot to know her in a deeper sense, when he started writing a blog in hisfree time. Caruana Galizia noticed his blog after he had written a3,000 word analysis of a recent election, and she put up her own postthat pointed to his—which brought a flood of readers to Delia’s newblog.
As he wrote a few posts a week, Delia said it was clearthat she was reading them. They discussed politics and blogging, andafter Caruana Galizia’s death, Delia quit his full-time job to focus onthe blog.
The day before our meeting, Delia’s website was taken offline completely targeted with a denial of service attack.
“Itwas a massive attack,” Delia told me. “My website hosting managers saidthat in 18 years they’d never seen anything like it. It was meant towork. Someone knew what they were doing.”
Rising readership ofhis blog and denial of service attacks on his website have increased thetechnical and financial burdens of maintaining the site. But despitethe inconveniences and what Delia sees as a chilling precedent of thetargeting of citizen journalists and bloggers in Malta, he is alsoflattered by the attention.
“I suppose it says that I’m annoying people the same way Daphne used to,” he said.
Asan amateur historian, Delia recognizes that it’s a common and easymistake to color the past with the supreme benefit of hindsight. Butyet, reflecting on some of the last things that Caruana Galizia wrotebefore her death, he thinks that she did understand the seriousness ofthe threats to her life, and the potential implications—although not tothe point of accepting it.
“She would write things like, ‘I thinkby now they must have realized that unless they kill me, I won’t stop.’These are not easy things to say: I don’t say them flippantly andneither did she. She was anything but flippant.”
It is, ofcourse, impossible to know to what extent Caruana Galizia had resignedherself to the possibility of martyrdom for her work. And knowing thereis a potential for something to happen is not the same as viscerallycoming to terms with it. But it all feels a bit beside the point. Noneof it makes her murder less tragic or her journalism less powerful. Ifanything, the constant threats and violence that she faced make herdeath only more of an outrage.
Delia refers to a biblical passage in which God asks Jesus to drink a cup of poison containing God’s accumulated wrath and fury against all sin.
“Jesusunderstood what was going to happen, and that he could walk away fromit. And yet, he won’t, because duty calls. And as for Daphne, I havethis maddening, maddening feeling that she knew what to do to avoid thatend, but wouldn’t do it, because duty calls.”
Delia sighs.“That’s a scary thing because in order to go on, you find ways of notallowing that to be in the front of your considerations. And I wonder ifI’m doing that. I’m nowhere near doing what Daphne did. But if I could,I would.”
If Caruana Galizia could have known that her lifewould end the way it did, and foreseen the impact her journalism wouldhave, both in terms of questions she asked and the nationalconversations that her writing sparked, perhaps she would have donenothing differently. But we must be careful to not fetishize sacrificeand legitimize living under constant threat of violence as a cost ofbrave journalism.
Daphne Caruana Galizia was unreasonably,impossibly, brave. Her life’s work challenged not only the narratives ofthe powerful, but also pushed the Maltese public to question and thinkdifferently. One year after her death, even as the search for answerscontinues, her work continues to drive the movement against corruptionand for transparency forward in Malta.