On April 16, 2018, people leave the church of St Francis, after the Archbishop of Malta celebrated mass in memory of murdered journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia on the sixth-month anniversary of her death in Valletta, Malta.MATTHEW MIRABELLI/Getty Images
Paul Caruana Galizia is a journalist at Tortoise Media and the author of A Death in Malta.
At 3 o’clock on a Monday afternoon in October, 2017, a car driven by Daphne Caruana Galizia – Malta’s most famous and influential journalist, and my mother – exploded. She had barely made it out of the lane leading to our house in Bidnija, a lonely hamlet in northwest Malta, when a bomb detonated from under her seat. She was 53 years old.
Everybody read Daphne. She was the first woman in the country to write a political column, and the first person to sign their own name to one. Over 30 years, she investigated presidents, prime ministers and opposition leaders. In a country of around half a million people, her personal blog received as many visits a day, and more than a million during election campaigns – a greater number than the combined circulation of Malta’s daily newspapers.
And for her efforts to expose corruption, she became increasingly demonized and isolated. My two brothers and I grew up thinking it was normal for her to be sued and slandered, to have police officers stationed at the gates of her garden haven of olive and citrus trees, either to guard her or to arrest her. It became part of our daily routine to watch her check the underside of her car for explosives before taking us to school.
The first attempt on her life happened when I was a teenager. I was out with friends and came home at 2:30 in the morning to find the house on fire with her inside it. At school the following Monday, I was told that it was irresponsible of my mother to have let me stay out so late. I remember thinking: There’s a problem in Malta, and it isn’t my mother.
Caruana Galizia outside the Libyan Embassy in Balzan, Malta, on April 6, 2011.DARRIN ZAMMIT LUPI/Reuters
As the Maltese officials she wrote about went from taking bribes from drug traffickers in old Malta to soliciting them from oligarchs in our rapidly globalizing country, my mother graduated from reporting on low-level graft to covering corruption on an international scale. The sums multiplied into the hundreds of millions, with the criminal networks stretching from Panama to post-Soviet states – and under the strain of these illicit inflows, Malta fell apart. Its rickety institutions, never properly reformed since decolonization from the United Kingdom in 1964, nor since its accession to the European Union in 2004, left my mother completely vulnerable in a culture of virtually unchallenged impunity.
At the time of her murder, she was in the midst of reporting on how Malta’s energy minister and the prime minister’s chief of staff had opened shell companies, registered in Panama, within days of their party’s election in 2013. After her death, a group of journalists, working under the banner of the Daphne Project, pursued her work, reporting that the shell companies were set to receive €150,000 a month through a corrupt energy deal between Malta’s government, Azerbaijan and a Maltese businessman. Six years after her death, however, there have been no convictions of any of the people my mother exposed; most haven’t even been prosecuted. The institutions that were meant to enforce the law in Malta have been systematically underresourced, cowed and subjected to political interference.
In the face of international pressure, enough police work was done to arrest four men in connection with carrying out her assassination. All have since confessed; three are serving time and one was pardoned in exchange for giving evidence. Yet it has taken years of campaigning by my family, activists and ordinary civilians outraged by her death to get Malta to mount its first public inquiry, which concluded that the state was responsible for her death. As of this writing, another four men, including the Maltese businessman, are awaiting trial for her murder – but no one has been prosecuted over the corrupt energy deal, nor over any of my mother’s other major stories.
My mother’s assassination wasn’t just a tragedy for my family; it was also a bellwether. After her death, I became a journalist in Britain, a place that has long prided itself on its democratic, rules-based order. But from the vantage point of my own reporting, which mainly focuses on fraud and political corruption, I can see that there’s a problem that goes well beyond Malta. Boris Johnson – with his cronyism and patronage, with his polarizing effect on the electorate, with his moneyed politics and hollowing out of Britain’s ancient institutions, and with his officials’ treatment of journalists – was just one example pointing to a worrying picture for democracies everywhere.
The malfeasance in tiny Malta, which my mother devoted her life to bringing to light – and which ultimately killed her – reflects emerging rot in Western democracies. When a country’s institutions are deprived of their independence or starved of resources, and when the journalists who expose corruption are harassed, intimidated and abused, that country’s democracy will vanish. In Malta, six years ago, it took the car bombing of the country’s most famous journalist in broad daylight to start to turn the tide. I hope it will not take more death to awaken everyone else to this growing threat around the world.