Two years.
That’s how long it has been since my aunt, Daphne Caruana Galizia, was assassinated.
My family’s lives changed that day at exactly 3pm, our world turned upside down by the pure hatred and fear of exposure that someone had towards my aunt, leading them to order her assassination.
On October 16th 2017, I was in a lesson at my previous school, being asked what I’d like to work as in the future. I remember saying without hesitation that I’d like to be a journalist like my aunt, only to go home a few hours later and find out she had been murdered. That answer remains in my mind even now; it almost seemed like I knew something would happen to her.
Daphne was, and is, someone who I look up to. She never gave in, no matter what life and people threw her way.
Malta was left without one of the few journalists who would write about things that she knew we had the right to know – about offshore accounts held by government officials, ministers who were supposedly on business on behalf of the government taking care of their own business, to put it politely.
These past two years have been a blur of vigils, meetings, protests, news reports, articles dripping with hate and false accusations against my family, being verbally abused in the street, being told – at school – that it would have been better if someone had placed a bomb under my seat too.
This is what our ‘normal’ has become.
What my family goes through on a daily basis should NOT be normal, but then again Malta is not a normal country right now. After all, a journalist would not have been killed by a car bomb if it were.
I was lucky enough to have known Daphne as I was growing up – something that not even her own granddaughter will be able to say.
I shared many memories with her in the fifteen years she was in my life, memories filled with laughter, love, and – most of the time – endless supplies of food.
The thing is, I should have had more than fifteen years with her.
Daphne deserved to have a longer life. She should have been able to see her family grow, to see all the places she didn’t see, to write what she had to write.
She deserved the better version of the Malta she was fighting for up until her last moment; my aunt did not deserve to be murdered.
Although Daphne’s life was cut short, her legacy lives on through my strong and brave grandparents, Rose and Michael, my aunts Cora and Helene, my mother Mandy, my sister Megan, Daphne’s sons Matthew, Andrew and Paul, and my uncle Peter.
Going through what my family have been through in the past two years is a lonely feeling, but we are lucky enough to have the women from Occupy Justice, Il-Kenniesa, Repubblika, The Shift News and Manuel Delia amongst many others, including all of you who are here today helping us fight Daphne’s fight, which is YOUR fight too.
Justice for Daphne has not – and will not – come easily, with even the Minister for Justice, Owen Bonnici, who is supposed to be protecting our rights, working against us by ordering the daily clearance of the protest memorial site calling for justice for Daphne.
We will keep on coming every day to put up posters, flowers and candles until justice is served.
We will meet here every month on this day for as long as we need to.
To those who ordered Daphne’s assassination: you will NOT get away with what you did. No matter what money, power or position you hold, you can’t escape the truth, and you CANNOT, EVER, erase Daphne’s memory.
Justice for Daphne.