The BBC featured this magnificent article by Matthew Caruana Galizia on World Press Freedom Day.
“Supporters of the government openly celebrated the assassination, reminding me of those who celebrated the shooting of Turkish-Armenian newspaper editor Hrant Dink,” Matthew Caruana Galizia wrote. “Others insinuated that I had planned the murder myself, or that my mother had happily risked her life – the same slander that was repeated about James Foley, the US correspondent who was abducted and beheaded in Syria.”
He writes so matter of factly. He almost downplays the exacerbating horror of topping the loss of his mother and being the first witness of the unbearable barbarity of her taking off with the mockery, laughter, celebration and slander of others.
Here we are remembering press freedom day, twenty months after the killing of Daphne, being reminded that her son faces, among other things, the prospect of being accused of matricide by people uninterested in the truth but interested in his pain.
A year ago today I wrote about his father, Peter, Daphne’s husband, mocked and pushed around in court made to defend law-suits filed against his wife with evidence that has burnt with her. His loss aggravated, if it were possible, by the violence and hatred she no longer has to face.
For those like Mark Anthony Falzon and Raphael Vassallo who insist the media is free in Malta, here are the experiences of those who use their freedom to speak not to comply and prop up the powerful, but to dissent and reveal their scandals and their crimes. For the compliant and the conforming, media is free in Malta.
For the others not so.
In Rome today I met journalists from all over the world — declining democracies or tyrannies that are proud of that name. I told them about that afternoon 20 months ago. “Many people felt relieved by Daphne’s death, not necessarily because she wrote about them in her writings or because they did not like something she wrote. They were freed from their own conscience. They felt unleashed from their inner voice that bothers one when they know they’re doing the wrong thing. When that mirror Daphne held up to Maltese society was smashed to pieces, they felt they acquired the right to ignore their own sins and to wallow in their own greed.”