“When the whole world is silent, even one voice becomes powerful.” Malala Yousafzai uttered those words as a teenage Pakistani activist who was shot in the head by an agent of the Taliban she had publicly and heroically criticised. Years later, worlds away, Malala strikes at the heart of the fifth anniversary of Daphne Caruana Galizia’s assassination.
Daphne often referred to herself as the loudest-voiced journalist in the country. But she was loud because of the relative silence of some and absolute silence of others.
Over three decades of columns and 20,000 blog-posts, few things she said fell outside the broad limits of what’s considered acceptable in a liberal society. Despite that, she attracted an intensity of attention and hostility that, elsewhere, escapes professional polemicists, contrarians and even shock-jocks. The latter’s voices compete with many others in a politically safe environment; she had little competition because others kept their heads down in an environment full of political hazards.
She was loud, relative to the silence, in more than one way. She didn’t shrink from passing public judgement on swathes of society and portions of our history that others only dared say in the privacy of their small circles. Here she could range from disturbing home truths to uninformed interpretations of history and society.
She was rarely the voice of human conscience (with a few notable exceptions, such as on the treatment of irregular immigrants). Nor did she want to be. It was her inimitable voice that she wanted heard.
As she insisted, it was the voice of the daughter and mother of a particular family, social generation, status and culture. She wrote well enough to make it, simultaneously, the voice of an ancient archetype: a scoffing, scornful, sweeping “bloody difficult woman” born of our time and dancing around its open grave.
But to insist on having her voice heard, she also had to insist on the liberty of the press. She operated in a political landscape where it was considered unremarkable to hear demands that political leaders condemn her, where condemnation inevitably means making her a public enemy. Also considered “normal” was the use of the state and partisan propaganda machines against her.
A year after she began her blog, with Berlusconi’s Italy in mind, Umberto Eco wrote in L’Espresso: “When someone has to intervene to defend the liberty of the press, that society (and also a large portion of the press) is sick.”
The loudness of Daphne’s voice on the freedom of the press blared something about the sickness of our own society. It isn’t just sick. It is pitiable. “Unhappy is the land that needs a hero,” retorts Bertolt Brecht’s Galileo after his pupil, Andrea, furious at the master’s recantation, exclaims: “Unhappy is the land that breeds no hero.”
Heroes are needed when systems fail. Unhappy Malta bred a heroine out of Daphne because of documented, massive system failure across the organs of the state and because every pillar of our democracy was unsteady.
Internationally, she’s been described as a one-woman Wikileaks. It’s worth spelling out what made that happen.
Heroes are needed when systems fail. Unhappy Malta bred a heroine out of Daphne because of documented, massive system failure across the organs of the state- Ranier Fsadni
It means people leaked big stories to her rather than to the opposition or other independent media houses. The stories were big because of the scale of the corruption and how deeply they reached into the heart of government. The dossiers were there to be revealed because the evidence was available and, yet, no police or prosecutorial action was taken.
In other words, leakers went to her because they trusted her to have the intelligence to understand what she was given, the courage to act, the tenacity to pursue and the ferocity to protect their names.
The leakers weren’t convinced that other institutions had the necessary qualities and incorruptibility. The leakers knew that Daphne couldn’t be captured.
That is what the term “one-woman Wikileaks” covers. It doesn’t just describe her voice. It describes the rest of us, the relative and the absolute silences of those who could have done something about the pillage of the country.
It’s no exaggeration to call her a heroine. What she documented was dangerous: a cadre of politicians and their entourage who betrayed the country.
There were times when she was not above being capricious but here she stuck to duty. She could be reckless but here she showed bravery under fire. She could get deeply personal but here she was the servant of the public interest.
She could be severely dismissive of Malta but here, unlike the spineless men in authority who only mumbled and cowered, she defended the country’s honour. Here, we could say she was indeed the public conscience.
She was loud, living testimony that not all the country had surrendered to the crooks. That’s why the assassination was also an attack on the country.
To demand justice for Daphne is to do the honourable thing by the journalist who was killed because she defended the country’s interests.
She is not in the dock. The significance of the controversial figure, with the inimitable voice, will be evaluated like all writers are – by historians and cultural critics over the years.
Those who bleat about her imperfections to deny her justice only remind us of the sorry state of Malta. If she was so flawed, then how flawed are they and the rest of us if it was she who turned out to be the heroine?
In the dock is the state. It’s our turn to speak up loudly to defend the country’s honour.
If Robert Abela treats this Sunday like any other day, not the anniversary when the country was attacked and a heroine fell, he’ll be proving his critics right. For the freedom of the press, and the country’s honour, he doesn’t give a fig.