Solo in a no-man’s land - Daphne Caruana Galizia

When Daphne Caruana Galizia was murdered by a car bomb as she drove down a country road, Maltese society shook and the world zoomed in with shock.

There is, throughout Malta, a genuine outpouring of grief and anger that the private life of a young mother and the public life of a wellknown media figure has ended with such ruthless brutality.

With vigils taking place throughout the Island, silence being observed in some places as a mark of respect, deep emotions align with anger now, all clear evidence of a genuine sense of communal loss. To this grief is added a layer of shame that Malta is appearing before the world as the kind of unsettled, mafia state where journalists get killed and the law seems powerless.

But savage as it was, Daphne’s murder, presumably on the orders of those who alleged crimes she had been investigating, merely underlined what we already maybe knew that whatever innocence there had ever been on this Island was now lost. Daphne had shown, in the months before her death, heroic and immense courage. But her death itself brought to mind Berthold Brecht’s dictum: “Unhappy the land that needs heroes”. With over 41 libel cases against her, her bank accounts being blocked, threats against her life, she must have been feeling the strain but continued with vigour and determination

The burden of risk that Daphne bore, many would argue should never have been carried by an individual journalist. Daphne was assassinated because she stood between the rule of law and those who sought to violate it. If others had taken up her mantle at the time, as opposed to her taking on such dangerous investigate work alone, then the attackers would have to kill an entire team of journalists and supporters to stop a story, and I don’t believe that even the amoral people who murder Daphne would be capable of this task. Understanding the shock of colleagues, Daphne had little assistance from others. She was a lone crusader.

Her very success had created a logic in which it was easier to up the ante by confronting alleged corruption more and more directly than to switch to a more low key, collective approach to the same stories. Daphne stripped away the cloak of anonymity which made politicians key profile business men and companies into cartoon figures, and to name names, a lone journalist was left face to face with some very dangerous dodgy people.

But the reading Maltese public enjoyed the drama unfolding in her blog. The brave woman tracking stories and confronting the bad guys had the air of a movie thriller. There was a vicarious thrill in being brought into her blog at a safe distance into the stories of the day and corrupt world of dealings. That the movie might end in the appalling death of an immensely talented reporter and a greatly loved wife and mother was not supposed to be part of the script.

Daphne herself was, paradoxically, trapped not only by those entanglements but also by the very danger she was in. The very public nature of the threats on her life made it difficult for her to step back without seeming to give a symbolic victory to some of the corrupt elements in Maltese society today. It is clear that she continued, not out mindless or reckless courage, but out of a feeling that she had no choice. She made it her mandate to thrust “cronyism that is accepted as something normal in Malta into the spotlight. “I can’t bear to see people like that rewarded,” she has said.

The Government should not have needed a savage murder to know we are now living with a criminal under tone in our society. The criminals should have been too worried about the Police, the customs and the tax authorities to concern themselves with one journalist working on her own, but between what should have been and what was stretched a no man’s land in which Daphne was caught alone and in the open, with nowhere to take cover.

Daphne stripped away the cloak of anonymity which made politicians key profile business men and companies into cartoon figures, and to name names, a lone journalist was left face to face with some very dangerous dodgy people.