MURDERED IN MALTA
Kirill Martynov (Novaya Gazeta)
“There are crooks everywhere you look. The situation is desperate.” Those were the final words Daphne Caruana Galizia posted on her blog last Monday, said Marie Verdier in La Croix (Paris). Thirty minutes later, she was dead, blown up in her car – an apparent assassination that has sent shock waves through Europe: we have grown sadly accustomed to investigative journalists being killed or otherwise silenced in Russia or Turkey, but not in tiny Malta. Yet Caruana Galizia had made it her mission to expose the darkness at the heart of that sunny island. For more than a decade, the 53-year-old campaigner went in pursuit of the corrupt politicians, money-laundering businessmen and gangsters that she believed had captured the EU nation and turned it into something resembling a mafia state. And people listened: her blogs attracted up to 400,000 readers a day – a readership almost as large as Malta’s population. Politico recently called her a “one-woman Wikileaks”, and numbered her among the EU’S 28 most influential people.
Caruana Galizia was a tough operator, said The Malta Independent. She was “relentless and abrasive” in pursuit of wrongdoers. With too much to say for one biweekly column in this newspaper, she ran her own blog, often updating it several times a night and moderating the comments herself. She could be very judgemental, and ran some pieces that left people feeling unfairly exposed. But her investigations made for riveting, excoriating copy. That this voice has been silenced is horrifying. Yet hers was a death foretold. Eleven years ago, she narrowly avoided being killed when her house was set on fire. Her murder proves what she so often warned: Malta has become like one of those lawless Latin American countries where journalists risk being kidnapped, killed or “disappeared”.
Who could have been behind this killing? Her targets were many and various, said Frank Psaila in the Times of Malta: she took on politicians from both sides of the political divide, and the criminal underworld that “runs the show”. Her blogs “scared the hell” out of people – and her opponents responded in kind. They hated the woman they described as “the queen of bile” and they incited others to hate her; they swamped her with lawsuits and sent death threats (only two weeks ago she reported them to the police – yet appears to have been given no extra protection). In public, they denounced her murder; privately they must have rejoiced at her demise, the “two-faced cowards”.
Certainly, she was a major thorn in the side of Malta’s political establishment, said Andrea Spalinger in Neue Zürcher Zeitung (Zurich). Over the past two years, she’d become best known for her exposés relating to the Panama Papers leaks: these showed that close political aides of Malta’s PM, Joseph Muscat, had set up offshore shell companies, allegedly to hide money that they’d received from rich Russians in exchange for EU passports. This year she implicated Muscat himself, claiming that at least $1m had been routed from Azerbaijan into a shell company owned by his wife – kickbacks, she said, from a lucrative energy contract with Azerbaijan’s state oil company. As a result of the allegations (which he vigorously denied) Muscat called a snap election in June. He won, but she kept at it, depicting Malta as a failed state; a centre for the trafficking of drugs and people; and a European money-laundering hub.
Whatever the truth of her specific allegations, it is obvious that our political institutions are “rotten to the core”, said the Times of Malta, and an embarrassment to the EU. The police are so ineffective, seven previous car bombings remain unsolved. Muscat realises the importance of solving this murder – he has asked the FBI to help. But bringing the killers to justice is not enough, said Psaila. We must stop turning a blind eye to a crooked system. We must either “stand up to be counted” or surrender. I hope we choose the former – “but it won’t be easy. Not in today’s Malta. That’s the sad truth.”
With five months to go until Russia’s presidential election, the Kremlin is referring to a familiar playbook, says Kirill Martynov. Its strategy involves finding two “spoiler” candidates to make Vladimir Putin look like the sensible centrist choice, thereby giving the poll the veneer of legitimacy. The ultra-conservative has yet to emerge, but we know the identity of the token liberal: a 35-year-old socialite and TV presenter dubbed Russia’s Paris Hilton. Ksenia Sobchak’s father, a former mayor of St Petersburg, is a crony of Putin’s, but after the rigged 2011 elections she (like much of Moscow’s elite) started to speak out against the president. We’re told he is vexed by her “impudent” challenge; in fact, it is exactly what he wanted. With the popular opposition leader Alexei Navalny barred from standing, the Kremlin’s big worry is a low turnout. Sobchak can help with this, by bringing out some voters who might otherwise have stayed away – but not enough to pose any real threat to Putin, especially as their votes will be balanced by his supporters who now go to the polls to keep the detested liberal out. Meanwhile, Western observers are kept happy by the appearance of a contest. Sobchak’s candidacy will make the election less “deadly dull”, but the outcome is as certain as ever.