More alive than dead

Like what happened after President Kennedy’s death, people kept trying to remember where had they been at the moment of the assassination.

Like what happened after President Kennedy’s death, people kept trying to remember where they had been at the moment of the assassination.

It’s three years since Daphne Caruana Galizia was killed and like many I keep going back to where was I, what was I doing, at that precise moment when first we heard there had been an explosion at Bidnija and only later the tremendous rumour started going round, later to be confirmed.

These have been three rollercoaster years and the echo, the reverberations, have not stopped. Daphne may be dead and buried but her work goes on, making significant victories all the time.

This does not seem to be the time for more public manifestations at the time of the pandemic. Instead we have come to rely on the continual stream of news coming out of the Law Courts and the many court cases spawned by this or that aspect of the assassination.

In her death, she has reached results she probably never hoped for in her lifetime – the enforced resignation of Joseph Muscat being one of then. The arrest of key figures in the Muscat team. The sidelining and enforced resignation of Konrad Mizzi and Chris Cardona.

Looking further down the road we see other heads rolling until we come to reversing the decisions which epitomise the sleaze that will remain the signature tune of the Muscat years.

With a weak and vulnerable prime minister as Muscat’s successor, who also has to struggle to cope with the Covid pandemic, Labour is fast losing that aura of invincibility that repeated victories at the polls gave it.

This and much more is the legacy of Daphne. The more time passes, the more memories fade, the more we, the country, the world itself, forget some aspects of her life and writings and focus on her real strength and what seems to have led to her death.

Her real claim to greatness is that she sensed the dangerous ground she was treading where many would have trimmed their sails but instead of beating a prudent retreat she forced her way ahead, obtained cache after cache of authentic documents to prove her assertions and claims.

Most court cases are still open, awaiting judgement, but some things are emerging as very clear. What seems to have led to her murder is linked to Labour’s claim to reduce the people’s expenditure on water and electricity.

The previous government based its policy on the interconnector from Sicily but typically did not manage to get the project off the ground by election time.

Labour based its policy on changing from the use of heavy fuel oil which led it to jettison an almost brand new power station and uselessly build a completely new one.

Then a decision was taken to switch from less harmful oil to gas and, since no preparation had been made for this, base an

LNG tanker at Delimara. It is only now, years down the line, that preparations are being made for a gas pipeline from Sicily which, like the Interconnector, will pass at sea bottom level.

The switch from oil to gas is welcome and maybe late as it is but the whole deal is riddled with possibilities of graft. And it would seem that Konrad Mizzi’s nimble mind and his way of cutting corners came in handsomely and the availability of willing accomplices did the rest.

From what we now know, this seems to have been the background to Daphne’s murder. No Mafia war for stolen Libyan oil, nor any personal revenge for one of Daphne’s more barbed comments on the personal lives of people.

The mechanism that was set in motion seems, at least according to the most prevalent allegations, to have come at middle-management level but then the topmost levels, faced with a fait accompli, struggled to keep the background hidden until it was caught in the act, with dire consequences for all.

So Daphne keeps winning, day after day and her name has become world-famous, except in her birth-country where slights still rankle. And while the European Parliament dedicates a media room to her, a pusillanimous Maltese Parliament refuses to do the same.

Whatever. Ironically one can say that dead she has registered more successes than alive.

Those who treasure her memory must strive to make more and more details of her life known, especially the records of private conversations that must still lie about.

The indomitable courage and the abhorrence of anything bent make her one of the most inspiring personalities of the end of the past millennium and the beginning of the new one.