Daphne one year on: How the Great Siege tussle exposed a big divide

A year ago the nation was stunned by a mafia-style execution in which the journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia was blown to pieces. This was followed by a brief moment of unity which saw thousands spontaneously expressing their grief and the Prime Minister, in a statesman-like manner addressing the nation, promising to leave no stone unturned to bring her executioners to justice. It was a moment of civic awakening, which saw the Maltese media unite under the banner of free speech and civil society groups demanding justice and truth.

Yet this moment lasted only briefly.   

A year on there has been no single official act to recognise her memory by, for example, naming a public building after her. And a makeshift shrine erected in front of the Great Siege monument has been barricaded under the pretext of a restoration project, after months of squabbles between a loyal crowd who kept her memory alive and people who expressed their resentment by repeatedly removing flowers from the shrine.

While regular vigils attended by hundreds of people confirm that her death has served as a wake-up call for some, it has been business as usual for the majority of the Maltese population. Her death has attracted increased international scrutiny on Malta’s institutions, but trust in the government has remained intact after receiving a boost immediately after her death. And despite this general indifference and apathy, Daphne’s death still brings out powerful emotions.

The country has been torn between a vocal minority which shows complete distrust in the Muscat administration and an unwillingness to consider any possibility other than government involvement in her assassination, and the open contempt of some of her detractors.   

The latter have included public officials or appointees who have never been officially censored. Such outbursts included the mockery of her final words by V18 chairman Jason Micallef who posted a photo of St Patrick’s Day celebrations in Spinola, with the comment: “The situation is desperate. There is happy people every where.”

Former trade unionist Tony Zarb, now a government consultant, had this to say to activists commemorating her death:  “Keep messing around, keep placing flowers, you can adore her, but the important thing for our Malta is that she will never be back.”

On the other side of the fence, the Caruana Galizia supporters conjure up an unflinching conviction of direct government involvement in the murder. Her son Matthew Caruana Galizia pointedly asked the Prime Minister: “Where is your laptop and the private email server that you could have used to plan my mother’s assassination?”

Neither was any benefit of the doubt given to the police even after three men were charged with the murder just six weeks after her death – a record time when compared to other politically-charged murders like that of Raymond Caruana which remains unsolved.    

Prime Minister Joseph Muscat and Justice Minister Owen Bonnici met several international press freedom groups at Castille ahead of Tuesday's first year anniversary since Daphne Caruana Galizia's murder

But probably there will be no closure on this front until those who commissioned the crime are also brought to justice. Distrust in the government is grounded in Muscat’s failure to bring closure to the Panama Papers scandal, and the fact that those involved are still in power.

In many ways what happened in the past year was the magnification both of  Daphne Caruana Galizia’s divisive legacy, and also of the disproportionate reaction she often provoked among those who resented her.

It is this toxic environment which strengthens the case for an independent inquiry to establish whether her death could have been avoided. Yet one cannot escape the conclusion that Caruana Galizia also contributed to this toxicity.

Divisive in life... divisive in death

In the Maltese media landscape Daphne Caruana Galizia was one of a kind. She could be irreverent, courageous, analytical, but also cruel in turning her targets into caricatures. Her command of the English language frustrated her adversaries who could not match her writing skills. But she was a walking contradiction.

Daphne Caruana Galizia at a PN electoral meeting in 2013

Her insightful commentary could quickly relapse to her poison-pen in purveying gossip. She could stand for liberal values while pandering to the honour and shame code of the upper middle-class to discredit her targets, often women who departed from traditional mores. She secured the loyalty of Malta’s upper and middle classes by pandering to their darkest prejudices. They were bound to her by an act of faith, which made them liable to believe everything she wrote.

Yet it was one of Malta’s first organically grown internet communities, making it easier to explain why her death triggered a wave of civic activism.

Her overriding approach towards corruption was moralistic... tainted by a prejudice against Labour... She unashamedly espoused a discourse of entitlement

There was also a more sinister side to her ‘running comentary’. Sometimes “the crowd” became participants by sending her photos of potential targets engaged in routine activities like having lunch, which were then published on her site. This triggered a mechanism of social exclusion which inevitably left a residue of resentment among those who found themselves hounded, sometimes just by dint of being associated with Labour.

Others, including many who never actually read her or relied on what others said about her, hated her with an intensity reserved for a class enemy. In an age where Labour supporters were no longer allowed to vent their anger on the fat cats (denounced by Caruana Galizia herself in her later days), she may well have served as a convenient outlet for class conflict.

The ‘witch’ label itself captured the unease created by a fearless and assertive woman who had no qualms ridiculing and cutting to size the ego of macho politicians, including the deceased Dom Mintoff.

But it was Caruana Galizia  herself who would wield a moralistic honour and shame code against women who would fall foul of her own prejudice: somebody baring too much flesh on Facebook or who fitted in the stereotype of “family wreckers”, wantonly ignoring the reality of people falling in and out of love. She once described single parent and then Labour MP Marie-Louise Coleiro Preca as “a serial adulterer and a home-wrecker” Indeed, her blog’s first coup  was a morally charged crusade against “the magistrate who shagged a man while his wife was having a baby.”

Daphne as a political actor

Apart from being a journalist, columnist and blogger Daphne Caruana Galizia was herself a political actor and a veritable protagonist in successive elections and national events.

She was not always the scourge of the establishment. There was even a time in the early noughties when she wrote favourably about Anglu Xuereb’s proposed golf course in Rabat on her Sunday Times column without revealing that she had been hired as a PR consultant. She was then viewed as a benign apologist for the Nationalist administration.

After the narrow win of the PN government in 2008, under Lawrence Gonzi’s government she was often perceived as a gate-keeper who would pounce on critics of the PN administration, including environmentalists like Astrid Vella and people who at that time denounced corruption, errant Nationalist MPs like Franco Debono and Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando, or political newcomers who had picked the wrong party: Labour.

It was when Muscat was elected to power in 2013 that she became a veritable scourge of the new establishment of “taghna lkollers”.

And yet there is a context to her political bias. Her overriding approach towards corruption was moralistic, rooted in a belief in the rectitude of those who fell in her good books and the corruptibility of others who did not. It was tainted by a prejudice against Labour and a revulsion of seeing the new kids on the block making a mockery of the establishment’s own norms. She unashamedly espoused a discourse of entitlement.

A loyal crowd keeps her memory alive but detractors express their resentment by repeatedly removing flowers from the shrine at the Great Siege monument in Valletta

She rarely challenged inequalities rooted in the social and economic system but lashed at impropriety of those who broke unwritten codes of behaviour.

She could also have radical changes in character assessments: for example in 2008, when the PN risked losing the election over a clear case of trading in influence for a controversial planning permit, she expressed her faith in Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando when he was Labour’s target during the Mistra disco controversy. When the PN won that election, she turned against him when he switched sides. She heaped praise on “rising star” Cyrus Engerer when he was a PN councillor, but scorned him upon switching sides. She hated rednecks, racists and xenophobes, but often depicted these ignoble sentiments as a reflection of old Labour’s ignorance.

Daphne and the PN

In reality she was more anti-Labour than pro-PN. Even her family background was not that of a pure-bred Nationalist. Her own father was a founder of the short-lived Partit Demokratiku Malti which had contested the 1987 election. She gave Eddie Fenech Adami the iconoclastic moniker “a village lawyer”, and could give some hard time to Nationalist ministers in her Sunday Times column and interviews. For a time she was even sympathetic towards the nascent green party.

But she harboured a deep fear of Labour as a thug’s party, partly rooted in personal memories of the 1980s. This overriding fear was given a booster by Alfred Sant’s anti-EU campaign and grew stronger in later years.

Daphne Caruana Galizia leaving the law courts with lawyer Joe Zammit Maempel

It was this fear which made her increasingly paranoid of AD and in-betweens who according to her failed to see the big picture, which in her worldview was dominated by the Labour menace. Even with polls showing the PN trailing Muscat’s Labour by 12 points, she spent the last days of the 2013 electoral campaign targeting the tiny AD.

Her worldview was a Manichean struggle between good and evil where the end sometimes justified the means. “It is pointless being good when your rivals are armed and dangerous, and have no moral brakes”, she once suggested.

When in 2017 Adrian Delia came on the scene and she started seeing the same things she saw in Labour, even an association with “members of the underworld”, she pounced on him hard. She described him as “Labour all the way”… “The shocking thing here is that he says something like this – something so Labour – about a journalist to protect himself by attempting to defect the anger he anticipates onto her instead. Again, totally Labour. Totally John Dalli, Pullicino Orlando and Frank Portelli”.

So at the end of the day Daphne was more of a political actor setting her own personal agenda than a journalist following a partisan agenda. Her agenda may have sometimes coincided with that of the PN but she could also be fiercely independent. And it was often the PN that followed her rather than in reverse.

Yet her following remained entrenched among a limited segment of the population. Her influence was even limited within the PN, whose members ignored her advice in electing Adrian Delia. This legacy pervades the anti-corruption movement triggered by her execution, which in many ways carried on her battles without reaching out to ‘in-betweens’ and the Labour-leaning segment of the population. The risk is that instead of being weakened by this kind of confrontation, Muscat may actually be getting stronger. This movement remains a rallying cry for those who, like Daphne, do not recognise themselves in the current PN leadership, thus further weakening it.

Militant journalism and the Egrant stain

A sense of moral mission pervaded her journalistic style, which although rich in verbosity was at times raw and approximative. She acted like a one-person Wikileaks because she  was not bound by newsroom discipline, ethics and standards. Some of her hunches were vindicated by events both during her life and after her death. Panama for one, but also Pilatus Bank, 17 Black and oil smuggling rackets.

She was the first to mention 17 Black as a “company incorporated in Dubai” but only through a photo showing Keith Schembri, John Dalli, Joseph Muscat and Konrad Mizzi, as early as February 2017.

It was  only thanks to the Daphne Project that we learned that 17 Black was listed as the ‘main client’ of Tillgate and Hearnville, the offshore Panamian companies owned by Schembri and Mizzi.

One of the vigils held to honour the memory of Daphne Caruana Galizia

One major factor weighing on Daphne’s legacy  was the way she tackled the Egrant story which has been exposed as false by a magisterial inquiry and which also points at discrepancies between Caruana Galizia’s testimony and that of former Pilatus employee Mara Efimova. Crucially no evidence has so far emerged of the transactions between the Aliyev family and Michelle Muscat.

While it remains doubtful whether Caruana Galizia would have risked the credibility by colluding in a deliberate lie, the story may have fitted so perfectly well in her narrative that she may have let herself get carried away.

As things stand the magisterial inquiry has solidified perceptions of the two polarities unleashed by Caruana Galizia’s execution.

On one side adulators choose to ignore the conclusions of the inquiry by emphasising the sheer impossibility of proving the ownership of secret companies, thus falling back to the safe position of believing whatever Caruana Galizia wrote simply because Muscat can’t ever prove he is not the owner of Egrant.

On the other hand, the inquiry, which still has not been published in full, is used to silence any criticism and as another excuse for vilifying Caruana Galizia’s memory. Both sides are incapable of understanding human fallibility in journalism, which is not necessarily a sign of maleficence but a possible collateral of a process of inquiry.

The problem in this case was that the Egrant claims were politically weaponised in a context where Caruana Galizia herself was perceived as a principle political actor who, in Simon Busuttil, had found a faithful follower.

Still despite Caruana Galizia’s shortcomings and biases, her hunches, tirades and even mistakes may have opened lids for others to probe further.

In a sense the Daphne Project as well as probes by local journalists went a long way in beefing some of her hunches and partial revelations. In the end the lasting legacy of her death is to affirm the role of the media in scrutinising and speaking truth to power, perhaps in a less selective and politically weaponised way while taking inspiration from her irreverence.

This task may well be all the more urgent in a society driven by consumerism, which risks becoming indifferent or hostile to anyone putting spokes in the wheels of economic growth.