At 1am on Friday, Minister Owen Bonnici’s cleansing department was dispatched to the Great Siege monument in Valletta to remove the flowers and candles laid there by the public, commemorating the second anniversary of the assassination of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia.
Government employees don’t normally work in the streets in the dead of night. Removing flowers is hardly an urgent cleansing job, like some poisonous leak or health hazard.
Photographer Darrin Zammit Lupi was present. He sensed that the workers were “paranoid that I might show their faces, and if I do, well, ‘then we’ll talk’. That’s a threat of sorts, isn’t it?”, he asked on Facebook.
The anniversary was marked in international newspapers and television. Over the course of this week in Malta, there were talks by Louis Galea, Vicki Ann Cremona, Norman Vella, Ivan Callus, Martina Farrugia, and journalists Carlo Bonini and John Sweeney.
Foreign speakers also took part in the main event outside the law courts in Valletta, including Antonio Tajani, Leoluca Orlando, Luigi Ciotti, Ana Gomes, and Rebecca Vincent and Christophe Deloire from Reporters without Borders. It was a strong line-up.
All the talks focused on the media, the rule of law, justice, impunity and the freedom of the press. And the government responded by immediately taking down the flowers and posters at the makeshift memorial in Valletta.
Former Times of Malta editor Victor Aquilina (right) during the Black Monday book launch with former minister Francis Zammit Dimech.In parallel, a timely publication this week was Black Monday: A Night of Mob Rule by Victor Aquilina. The burning of the Times of Malta building on October 15, 1979, is an example of an attempt to undermine, intimidate and destroy the free-thinking press, 40 years ago. The assassination of Daphne on October 16, 2017, only two years ago, is another example.
Aquilina, a former editor of Times of Malta, says that Black Monday remains a “stark warning” against excessive political tension and fanaticism creating “an unhealthy and hostile environment”. He explains that “recounting this story is not meant to reopen political or social wounds but to act as a deterrent against extremism”.
His book works on two levels. Firstly, it recounts details of the political scene and the events leading to Black Monday. He was an eyewitness. In this sense, the book is a valuable historical document in itself.
On another level, the book moves away from the particular, to draw more general lessons from history.
Black Monday was not an isolated event, and was the result of a political climate. Besides other violence, that day the home of Opposition leader Eddie Fenech Adami was attacked by the mob and ransacked. His wife Mary was hit in the face and thrown to the floor. Other difficult events occurred in those years, before and afterwards, such as the clashes with state-employed medical doctors, and with the Church over the running of its schools.
So, what are those lessons of history? In his foreword, Kevin Aquilina cautions that the state apparatus can fail to protect its citizens. People must always be alert. The events also hold a warning against impunity. Nobody was ever punished for the crimes of Black Monday.
Threats to the press will persist. They are real. We must never be complacent, or take the independent media for granted
But the story has positive messages of courage and determination too. The terrorised Times of Malta staff prevailed and still managed to publish an eight-page, daily edition the next day, in a brave, frantic night-time effort, by using the printing press of the Opposition party in Pietà, with flames still raging in Valletta.
A second book, launched together this week by Kite, is Navigating the Maltese Mediascape edited by Fr Joe Borg, fellow columnist in this newspaper, and Mary Anne Lauri. It explores recent developments in the Maltese media, in 16 essays by 18 authors.
Government employees don’t normally work in the streets in the dead of night. Removing flowers is hardly an urgent cleansing job. Photo: Matthew MirabelliOne essay by Giovanni Bonello provides an overview of attempts, since Independence, to gag, silence, intimidate and harass the press in Malta. It is quite an eye-opener. He also looks at the few instances when victims in Malta took their media cases to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.
In all five decided cases so far, not one of the Maltese judgements on defamation or freedom of expression was upheld by the international court. Instead, as Bonello says, the Maltese constitutional courts had “misconstrued freedom of speech as guaranteed by the European Convention of Human Rights and had sided with the oppressor against the oppressed.”
Mediascape is certainly not a book about the murder of Daphne, but no current discussion of the press can leave her out either. In the fluid, fast and often harsh world of the media, Daphne influenced the path of Maltese journalism today. Her work broke new ground.
When she set up her blog in 2008, it was a relatively new medium. The implications of blogging as journalism were not well understood. With this move, she burst out of the constraints of a printed column and away from editorial oversight.
Firstly, Daphne broke new ground on the legal status of bloggers in Malta. An essay by Francis Zammit Dimech in the book notes the 2016 court ruling by Magistrate Depasquale in a case where she refused to reveal her source. This ruling confirmed that a blogger, like other journalists, has the right not to disclose sources.
Another essay by Kevin Aquilina notes that the government attempted to again restrict this right in the Media and Defamation Act of 2018, however this was revised and the law now also recognises bloggers. Since Daphne, the most prominent news-related personal blog in Malta today is run by Manuel Delia, another fellow columnist in The Sunday Times of Malta.
Secondly, Daphne broke new ground on the credibility and relevance of blogs. Attempts to discredit her as a blogger were relentless. Personal blogs do not have gatekeepers or employers, and do not require qualifications or warrants. Bloggers often work alone and are easy to criticise.
Writing a successful and effective blog is hard. The internet is flooded with text and only the most skilled can succeed and gain a steady readership. Not every ‘biċċa blogger’ (tinpot blogger) can manage that. That was Adrian Delia’s slur against Daphne, uttered in the heat of a clash. It is eminently quotable and continues to haunt him.
In truth, it reflects a widely spread attitude. Daphne’s detractors constantly tried to portray her as unprofessional, the ‘woman with a laptop’, working at home in her kitchen, interfering and gossiping with nothing better to do.
But Daphne’s blog posts proved to be serious stuff. Bloggers can no longer be shrugged off as irrelevant. Daphne did work from home and on the go, as many people do. In her case, the ‘kitchen table’ was used to belittle her achievements. Obviously, because she was a woman.
Thirdly, Daphne broke new ground as a woman journalist in Malta. As Louiselle Vassallo notes in Mediascape, very few women in Malta have ever held senior editorial roles in newsrooms. When Daphne set up her blog, it was unique in that here a woman had full control of editorial content and overall direction of a forceful news-related site.
Books do not appear in a vacuum. It is telling that these two books, both examining the role and freedom of the press, were published together now, and edited and written by some of the leading Maltese thinkers, public figures and experts of our day. These books demonstrate that the subject is relevant. People are concerned.
The independent press is constantly under threat from those abusing power, or trying to avoid criticism, and from the underhand or corrupt. This can be physical violence, as in 1979 and 2017, but the pressures are also psychological and financial.
Threats to the press will persist. They are real. We must never be complacent, or take the independent media for granted.