An assassination and a murder

Abstract

The assassination of Daphne Caruana Galicia was an assassination of all of us, and it was paradoxically a murder by all of us, too. It will remain forever the former until the perpetrators are brought to justice, and it will remain the latter until we, civil society, ensure that our institutions are cleansed of passive and active complicity, carelessness, disinterest, naked cynicism, protectionism, cronyism, lies, and the funnelling of dirty money greasing the circuits of local palms. And the murder of us all will only end when our elected and appointed representatives treat us, civil society, with the respect they have long disdained. I wish here to reflect on some aspects of this double assassination by State passive complicity, and murder by public disengagement, because we can gain all or lose all, depending upon how we react to it and what we do with it. For the ball is in our court and we must keep it there jealously guarded because the offence has been done to all of us, and it is therefore us, civil society, that has to set the agenda.