TMID Editorial: Victory Day, but no victory for Daphne

Malta will celebrate Victory Day on Tuesday, 8 September, a national day rooted in some of the most important moments in the country’s history. It commemorates the defeat of the Ottoman forces during the Great Siege of 1565, the expulsion of the French in 1800 and the end of the World War II siege in 1943.

It is, by its very name, a day about triumph. About overcoming threats. About defending Malta and its people.

Yet there is a bitter irony in the fact that, for almost nine years, one of the country’s most important symbols of victory has also been the place where Maltese people have gathered to remember one of the darkest failures of the modern state.

The Great Siege Memorial in Valletta has become synonymous not only with the victories of Malta’s past, but with the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia.

On 16 October 2017, Daphne was murdered in a car bomb attack. Since then, the memorial has become a place of remembrance and protest, where, on the 16th of every month, people have gathered to commemorate her and demand justice, accountability and respect for the rule of law.

For the past two months, those gatherings were suspended while the trial of Yorgen Fenech was taking place at the law courts, directly opposite the memorial.

Now the gatherings are to resume. But they will no longer simply be vigils. They will be protests.

That distinction matters.

The trial has ended, but the wound has not been healed.

Fenech was acquitted by a jury of involvement in Daphne’s murder. The trial has not answered all the questions surrounding the assassination, nor has it erased the political and institutional failures that preceded and followed it. If anything, it has added questions and exposed more failures than we had previously thought existed.

Indeed, evidence and testimony heard during the trial have provided further insight into the extraordinary circumstances surrounding Daphne’s murder and the environment in which it took place. The trial has also put renewed attention on the workings of Joseph Muscat’s government and the use of political and government structures before and after the assassination.

This is why it would be profoundly wrong to regard the conclusion of the trial as the conclusion of the Daphne Caruana Galizia story.

There is another uncomfortable irony surrounding the memorial itself.

For years, candles, flowers, photographs and messages left there in Daphne’s memory were repeatedly removed by people hostile to her or supportive of the government. Under the Muscat administration, former Justice Minister Owen Bonnici repeatedly ordered the removal of the makeshift memorial, eventually being found by the Constitutional Court to have violated freedom of expression.

The State was, in effect, fighting against a memorial to a woman whom the State had failed to protect.

That history cannot simply be erased.

Victory Day remains an important national commemoration. Malta should remember and honour those who defended the country and its people during its darkest hours.

But we should also recognise the uncomfortable contrast.

There was victory at the Great Siege. There was victory over the French. There was victory in the Second World War.

But there was no victory for Daphne.

There was no victory for a journalist who was murdered for doing her job. There was no victory for the principles of accountability and the rule of law. And there can be no victory for Malta until the full truth surrounding her assassination and the failures that enabled it are confronted.

Daphne’s murder remains an open wound in Maltese society. It will not go away simply because a trial has ended. It may take decades to heal, if it ever does.

And perhaps that is the most appropriate message for this year’s Victory Day: a country cannot truly celebrate victory while carrying an unresolved defeat within it.

Today, 8 September, Malta will celebrate the victories of its past.

On 16 September, people will return to the same memorial to remind us of a failure that belongs to our present.

That is no victory.

 

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