Freedom fighter
My mum was killed for what she believed in
Matthew Caruana Galizia still recalls with appalling clarity the moment that changed his life. On October 16 last year, the 31-year-old had spent the day working at home alongside his mother, Daphne Caruana Galizia, the Maltese investigative journalist, at their dining room table. It had been a busy day for both of them, interrupted by a brief lunchtime salad, before around 3pm Daphne left to go to the bank.
She closed the door behind her and two minutes later, Matthew heard an explosion and raced down to find the remnants of her Peugeot 108 strewn across the road after a car bomb had been detonated.
“I was the first person on the scene, and for the first few minutes I was alone,” he says. “It was complete panic and hopelessness. Everything hit me at the same time. In that moment, I knew the rest of our lives were going to be a kind of crisis.”
The six-month anniversary of a murder that shocked the world has been marked this week with vigils held in eight cities (including London), and the announcement that a consortium of international journalists will be continuing her work exposing political corruption in the Mediterranean island nation, the EU’S smallest member state.
Yesterday, in a ceremony at the Telegraph offices, the Commonwealth Press Union Media Trust posthumously presented the 2018 Astor Award – created in 1970 in memory of Lord Astor of Hever, to honour press freedom – in Caruana Galizia’s memory. The citation for the award – collected by Matthew, himself a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist for his joint investigative work on offshore tax havens, his younger brother Paul and father Peter – honoured the 53-year-old as “Malta’s crusading scourge of official corruption, cronyism and incompetence who died for her journalism”.
Daphne Caruana Galizia joins a long list of investigative female journalists killed in the line of duty: the Irish crime reporter Veronica Guerin; the Russian Anna Politkovskaya; and The Sunday Times foreign correspondent Marie Colvin, who was murdered in Syria in 2012 – her family claim at the behest of the Assad regime – to name a few.
Paul, 29, who is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics, says he has read widely into their deaths in recent months and cannot say if the fact they are women made them more of a target or simply their devotion to their work. “When you read about these women, you see so many similarities: determined, principled and never taking no for an answer. There is some solace in knowing my mother was part of this exceptional group of individuals, and there are other families out there who know what we are going through.”
Caruana Galizia started out as a journalist in 1987 on the Times of Malta before later establishing her own blog, Running Commentary. She exposed corruption and cronyism among highranking elites with an acerbic style that cemented her reputation as Malta’s foremost investigative reporter. On some days, 400,000 people would read her blog. One profile written before her death described her as a “one-woman Wikileaks”.
The blog remains online, as the family hope those she accused will one day answer for their crimes. In December, three individuals who are claimed to be contract killers were charged with her murder, but the question of who ordered her killing remains unanswered.
Her last post, in which she vented an increasing frustration over a lack of accountability over government corruption, was published just half an hour before her assassination. “There are crooks everywhere you look now,” she wrote. “The situation is desperate.”
Daphne Caruana Galizia and her husband Peter, a lawyer, lived in the hamlet of Bidnija, half an hour’s drive from the Maltese capital, Valletta. After marrying 32 years ago, they had three sons in quick succession: Matthew, Paul and Andrew, 30, who works for the World Economic Forum in Geneva
‘I knew the rest of our lives would be a crisis’
and could not attend yesterday’s presentation.
Her sons recall an idyllic upbringing. Their mother would pick them up from school every day from the age of four to 16. In the summer, she would drive them to the beach, or sit in the house “bashing out” her columns while they played among the orchard of mulberry, lemon, olive and orange trees she called the “Garden of Empire”.
While she impressed upon her boys the importance of literature and art, Caruana Galizia was less strict about their official schooling. She was relaxed about homework and, after growing weary of their teachers’ criticisms, began to abandon parents’ evening, saying she was “fed up of people saying horrible things about her sons”.
“Knowing right and wrong was a very big part of her personality, and nobody could tell her otherwise,” Paul says. “This totally informed everything she wrote about.”
Despite her best efforts, Paul and his brothers became aware, at an all too early age, of those who wished their mother ill. At seven years old, he recalls picking up the phone “and hearing people slandering my mother in really ugly threats”.
A few years later, she drove the boys home from school to find the family border collie, Messalina, dumped on the doorstep with its throat slit. “She hurried us inside and made us lunch, like she always did, before going back out and burying the corpse,” Paul says.
As the years progressed and Caruana Galizia infiltrated deeper into the corruption that has spread across the island following Malta’s accession to the EU in 2004, the threats grew more sinister.
Vile letters, police handcuffs and human excrement were posted through their front door. One night in 2006, burning tyres filled with plastic bottles of petrol were heaped up against the side of the family home. Paul had been out with friends and returned home at 2.30am, managing to raise the alarm.
“The deaths threat never stopped,” Paul says. “The abuse and harassment was throughout her career. Because her assassination was so spectacular, people have asked, rightly, how this could happen in a modern EU member state.”
Matthew says the worst thing about the ceaseless campaign of violence waged against their mother was that it became normal. “We considered that to be our reality,” he says. “My mother had the sort of personality where she hated complaining. Her response was always to fight back.”
In death, as in life, those who seek to disrupt her investigative work continue unabated. At the time of her death, Caruana Galizia had 47 libel suits lined up against her.
Matthew says that Joseph Muscat, the Maltese prime minister, of whom she was a fierce critic, is continuing to pursue actions against her posthumously, as well as against himself. He and his two brothers have been advised it is not safe for them to live in Malta, although Peter remains in the family home. “The state has all these resources to spend on lawyers and press officers and it’s us against them,” Matthew says. “They have really turned against us. One way or another we will get justice.”
In the days following her murder, an impromptu memorial was established outside the main law courts in the country’s capital with mourners adding flowers, letters and posters of the murdered journalist as well as bay leaves, which have become a symbol of her murder (in Greek mythology, the nymph Daphne was transformed into a bay tree after rejecting the advances of Apollo).
According to Matthew, the memorial has been defaced 10 times in recent months. “Overnight, somebody has scattered the flower pots or torn the photos to shreds or a number of times cleaned it completely, so not even a single petal was left behind.”
And yet the following day, more flowers are placed to grow. As the forces massed against her are discovering, the memory of Daphne Caruana Galizia cannot be erased.
For more information, visit: cpu.org.uk/the-astor-award