{"id":30331,"date":"2023-12-11T09:22:47","date_gmt":"2023-12-11T07:22:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldmarkaz\/?p=30331"},"modified":"2023-12-11T12:37:52","modified_gmt":"2023-12-11T10:37:52","slug":"assassination-in-malta-how-they-killed-my-mother","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldmarkaz\/assassination-in-malta-how-they-killed-my-mother\/","title":{"rendered":"Assassination in Malta: How They Killed My Mother"},"content":{"rendered":"
Paul Caruana Galizia dissects the Maltese status quo that led to his journalist mother\u2019s murder.<\/h5>\n

 <\/p>\n

A Death in Malta: An Assassination an<\/span><\/i>d<\/span><\/i> a Family<\/span><\/i>\u2019<\/span><\/i>s Quest for Justice<\/span><\/i> by Paul Caruana Galizia<\/span>
\nRiverhead<\/a>\u00a02023
\nISBN 9781529151558<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Teodor Relji\u0107<\/span><\/h4>\n

 <\/p>\n

The line between the personal and political is almost always wafer-thin, but when you\u2019re the son of an assassinated political journalist and blogger in an EU member state, it is arguably non-existent. <\/span>A Death in Malta: An Assassination an<\/span><\/i>d<\/span><\/i> a Family\u2019s Quest for Justice<\/span><\/i> offers an x-ray view of just such a predicament. The book melds biography, memoir, and true crime narrative to deliver a close-to-the-bone story. It recounts the life of the late Daphne Caruana Galizia, from the point of view of her youngest son, Paul Caruana Galizia, now a journalist in his own right at the UK-based news portal <\/span>Tortoise Media<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
A Death in Malta<\/em> is published by Riverhead<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The stated aim of <\/span>A Death in Malta<\/span><\/i> is to make good on one of Daphne\u2019s unfulfilled dreams: publishing a book-length dissection of Maltese society. Her tragically interrupted life stymies any attempt at delivering a straightforward fulfillment of this goal. Instead, the book turns into something of a \u201cone-stop-shop\u201d of the entire Daphne story so far, delivered during one of its many queasy interim periods \u2014 in this case, while we all await the next stage of prime murder suspect Yorgen Fenech\u2019s trial.<\/span><\/p>\n

That <\/span>A Death in Malta<\/span><\/i> juggles a number of different sub-genres is both a blessing and a curse. This is neither entirely an intimate memoir nor a hard-nosed true crime thriller. It is not an anthropological study of Malta\u2019s socio-cultural mores, yet it keeps them \u2014 and the grudges which arise from them \u2014 humming in the background at all times.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Daphne\u2019s murder has already been explored in other books, documentaries, podcasts, and even a compelling stage play, <\/span>They Blew Her Up<\/span><\/i>, by journalist Herman Grech and offering a polyphonic perspective on Daphne\u2019s life (in a way that a book penned by her own son never could). Nevertheless, the book offers valuable insight, written with journalistic crispness yet thrumming with the reverberations of both a personal and national trauma.<\/span> Caruana<\/span> Galizia provides a deft description of the run-up to his mother\u2019s murder, but also its aftermath; the fumbling attempts at reckoning by Labour Party politicians are handled with a sharpness that verges on the kind of satire for which Daphne was renowned. As for the assassination itself, Caruana Galizia\u2019s present-tense depiction of what happened (drawn from the account of his brother, Matthew, who witnessed the event) will sear itself into the reader\u2019s memory.<\/span><\/p>\n

Daphne was assassinated by a car bomb just outside of her home in the otherwise remote and idyllic village of Bidnija on October 16, 2017. The murder occurred in the wake of her writings on the Panama Papers, particularly as they applied to Malta\u2019s business and political elite, along with her allegations of collusion between government and big business in cases such as the <\/span>Electrogas scandal<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

In many ways, her murder broke the adrenaline-pumped, neoliberal spell cast on the Maltese islands by the administration of the twice-elected prime minister, Joseph Muscat, and his Labour Party government.<\/span><\/p>\n

Daphne had dubbed Muscat \u201cthe Poodle\u201d back when the Labour Party was still in opposition, due to his alleged submissiveness to the party\u2019s former leader and Muscat\u2019s predecessor: the austere, intellectual, and decidedly anti-populist Alfred Sant. Caruana Galizia continues the tradition, referring to Muscat by the same sobriquet in <\/span>A Death in Malta<\/span><\/i> 31 times. It\u2019s a rare instance of pettiness in a book that is otherwise impressively restrained. If anything, the problem is that Muscat, whose government emerges as at least partly responsible for Daphne\u2019s assassination, ceases to be poodle-like and assumes a resolutely more sinister form. Indeed, from Daphne\u2019s perspective \u2014 and, by extension, that of her family \u2014 Muscat will have appeared as a nightmarish new iteration of a boogeyman they would\u2019ve thought defeated: Dom Mintoff.<\/span><\/p>\n

Daphne\u2019s opposition to Labour predated Muscat\u2019s tenure as prime minister and went back to Mintoff \u2014 Malta\u2019s post-independence decades-long Labour Party leader, two-time prime minister, and scourge of Daphne\u2019s upper-middle social class. Crucially, the so-called \u201cBlack Monday\u201d incident, during which the Times of Malta building was stormed and then razed by Mintoff supporters, is depicted early in the book. Daphne, a child at the time, witnessed the attack first-hand, and Caruana Galizia portrays it as key to what we might call his mother\u2019s origin story.<\/span>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cOne October day in 1979,\u201d writes Caruana Galizia of a period during which Mintoff was prime minister, \u201cmy mother and her sisters were sitting on the balcony of their grandfather\u2019s house in Valletta. The view was onto the Times of Malta\u2019s building, where Mintoff\u2019s supporters were booing and hurling objects at the facade.\u201d Caruana Galizia goes on to explain that the Times of Malta\u2019s criticism of Mintoff\u2019s \u201cincreasingly autocratic rule and his anti-Western stance,\u201d though delivered via \u201canonymous columns penned without much force,\u201d were too much for the firebrand leader. That the attack by Labour-leaning thugs appeared to be given political blessing \u2014 the only person to subsequently face legal censure was the Times of Malta\u2019s company secretary, for failing to render the site safe \u2014 exemplified the endemic political impunity that Daphne would later lambaste in her journalism.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAs the prime minister sanctioned an attack on the free press,\u201d writes Caruana Galizia, channeling his mother, \u201cthe idea that dissent and scrutiny weren\u2019t publicly permissible became a fact. And, without them, corruption continued to flourish.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In other words, for Daphne, Black Monday was a formative experience. Caruana Galizia sees it as defining her perspective on Malta in general and the Labour Party in particular. Recounting, in compelling detail, his mother\u2019s trajectory as a university student (with kids) turned journalist, Caruana Galizia also sketches how Malta\u2019s hopeless parochialism continued to fuel Daphne\u2019s scathing assessments of Maltese society: \u201c\u2018What a sad island,\u2019 she once wrote, \u2018one giant freak show of a retarded Sicilian mountain village circa 1950, with twenty-first-century exhibitionism plastered on top.\u2019\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\"The
The old city, Valetta, Malta (photo Michal Jerzy).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

For all the political incorrectness of the passage, it is also hard to deny the reality of how clientelism permeates Maltese life. As recently as October 2023, Malta\u2019s current prime minister could be heard minimizing the implications of a highly concerning driving licences scandal \u2014 involving public officials and the former transport minister himself \u2014 with a \u201cbad apples\u201d argument that exonerates a system he considers designed to \u201chelp people.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Neither is the Caruana Galizia family itself immune to the tendrils of corruption that define day-to-day existence in Malta. The author is shocked and angered to discover that his own lawyer father, Peter, was practically cornered into consorting with the enemy.<\/span>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI bumped into Ray Fenech of the Tumas Group a few days ago,\u201d Caruana Galizia recounts his father telling him. \u201cHe said, \u2018Someone like you, I need on our board.\u2019\u201d<\/span>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

The exchange angers Caruana Galizia, though it would scan as jarring to pretty much anyone even vaguely familiar with the <\/span>dramatis persona<\/span><\/i> in question. While Ray Fenech\u2019s nephew and scion of the Tumas-Fenech hotelier group, the aforementioned Yorgen Fenech, hadn\u2019t yet been arrested on suspicion of masterminding Daphne\u2019s murder by that point, he had been outed by her as the owner of 17 Black \u2014 a shell company seemingly set up for the benefit of high-ranking government ministers to funnel funds into Panama companies.<\/span>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cHis approach to my father seemed to me like an attempt to use my father to launder his reputation,\u201d observes Caruana Galizia. \u201cI was even angrier that my father couldn\u2019t seem to recognize this. He kept saying, \u2018It might not be what you think.\u2019\u201d This hammers home to the author how, \u201cin Malta, people are so close they have to compartmentalize one another to extreme degrees.\u201d<\/span>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

Caruana Galizia may have the luxury of experiencing Malta at a distance. Yet his father, by dint of his profession as a Malta-based lawyer \u2014 for whom encounters with the Tumas Group and their ilk are an occupational hazard \u2014 has no choice but to labor at the coalface. This, notes the author, \u201crequire[s<\/span>]<\/span> constant moral and ethical compromise.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

As it happens, however, Caruana Galizia\u2019s depiction of his father also stands as a bittersweet reminder of what a book of this kind would have been like had it not been almost entirely framed by the specter of political assassination. Peter emerges as a becalming, practical presence, perhaps pragmatic to a fault, but still an oasis of something resembling normality as the family navigates the unthinkable period of trauma. He is on hand to offer legal advice and bankroll his sons as they turn their quest for justice for their mother into a full-time job. Moments of genuine wit are punctuated with relatable instances of \u201cdad-cringe.\u201d When the family welcome the Archbishop of Malta to their home soon after Daphne\u2019s assassination, he comments on how the three sons take after their mother. \u201cYes,\u201d Peter replies, \u201cit\u2019s like having three wives.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

And after Caruana Galizia reads out, in Maltese, a passage from Revelations in a Valletta church during an event marking the second anniversary of his mother\u2019s death, his comedown from having just channeled the lofty prose is swift: \u201cGood,\u201d his father tells him, \u201cbut you mispronounced a few words.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

A wry commentary on the Maltese upper middle-class? Possibly, although Caruana Galizia never quite confronts a key elephant in the room of Daphne\u2019s legacy: the accusation that she was \u201cclassist.\u201d There\u2019s an atypical lack of self-awareness at play in certain passages, such as when he describes how the family moved from the heavily urbanized commercial town of Sliema to the rural idyll of Bidnija for some peace and quiet, with the same logic applied to their change in beach-going habits from the gorgeous but increasingly crowded Ghajn Tuffieha to a gated beach resort. The inherent privilege of these options is never commented upon, which is a shame because it would have been interesting to observe how a member of the Caruana Galizia family might process the accusations of elitism frequently leveled at them.<\/span><\/p>\n

On the other hand, the real upshot of the Daphne story is that no degree of cocooning was enough to buy the family peace of mind. Even prior to the assassination itself, the journalist and her family were hounded both online and off: their personal property was vandalized, and their pets were brutally murdered. So there is, of course, a bubbling anger simmering beneath the surface of <\/span>A Death in Malta<\/span><\/i>.<\/span> But Caruana Galizia sails through the rage to deliver a story that is as complete as he can make it. It\u2019s the eye of an ongoing storm. <\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Daphne Caruana Galizia’s family established The Daphne Foundation<\/a> for the protection of journalists and to address impunity in their murder.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Teodor Relji\u0107 reviews Paul Caruana Galizia’s book in which he dissects the Maltese status quo that led to his journalist mother\u2019s 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