YouSaid · the spoken record

Paul Caruana Galizia

lines on the record: 24
first: 2023-12-01
most recent: 2023-12-01
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yes, I think so. Sorry. So the summary version is that for a long time Malta taught real change had to come through politics. But I think what we've seen in Malta is it can and probably should come through civil society and maybe through the courts, right, through public interest litigation, which is what we've been doing. And for a long time in Malta, we just ignored those tools for change. And they turned out to be the most powerful and the most fast-acting, much better certainly than the parliamentary process.”
2023-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · A Death in Malta: Paul Caruana Galizia on the Legacy of Daphne Caruana Galizia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In a grain of sand, you know, muscard shoots up the power on these impossible promises, rules with a really strong executive, parliament unable to check him, the institutions unable to check him, huge flows of foreign money, Azerbaijan, Russia, China. And what we're left with is just the free press attempting to fight it back.”
2023-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · A Death in Malta: Paul Caruana Galizia on the Legacy of Daphne Caruana Galizia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think so. I think we are unfortunately a kind of a warning to other countries. And, you know, we are now an example of what happens when you ignore institutional rot, when you think of rule of law issues as some abstract distant problems. And we are an example of what happens when you let a populist government kind of free reign to run a country as it sees fit. And it's funny, Muscat was elected in 2013, so three years before Brexit, Trump, all the really signal moments in recent political history. And I thought how funny that if we are looking at Malta as an early indicator, it was all”
2023-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · A Death in Malta: Paul Caruana Galizia on the Legacy of Daphne Caruana Galizia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Crucially, I think as a test for the country is whether any of the senior politicians who at this point undeniably participated in an attempted cover-up of the murder and who are the subjects of her corruption reporting, whether any of those will be prosecuted. Because to this date, there hasn't been a single prosecution related to those big corruption stories. And I feel that's an important test for the country. as much as bringing the murder case to a conclusion, the country needs to be able to say that we think corruption is a major problem. It will be prosecuted and we will bring prosecutions against people who were prime ministers even.”
2023-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · A Death in Malta: Paul Caruana Galizia on the Legacy of Daphne Caruana Galizia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, that's, you know, if that doesn't sound complicated enough, we also had a public inquiry, which looked into the broader circumstances of her murder, which my brothers and I campaigned for. The campaign was based on an idea we had around the special rapporteur, the Council of Europe assigned to Boris Nemtsov's murder to throw light on the circumstances surrounding the murder. Anyway, that public inquiry finally reported about two years ago and concluded that the state bears responsibility for the murder because corruption got to such a point, those institutions collapsed. So the public inquiry has made a number of recommendations, constitutional reforms to prevent something like this happening again. None of those recommendations have been implemented yet.”
2023-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · A Death in Malta: Paul Caruana Galizia on the Legacy of Daphne Caruana Galizia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. So, okay, so broadly speaking, there were three sets of criminal proceedings against the hitman. So three Maltese men who planted the bomb and detonated it. All three have Against the man, he says commission the murder. That man was arrested in 2019, which is what triggered all the protests, and his duty to stand trial for the murder sometime next year. There's also a trial we expect of three men who supplied the bomb.”
2023-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · A Death in Malta: Paul Caruana Galizia on the Legacy of Daphne Caruana Galizia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About the community, it's just your family. And so this kind of change happened, you know, the change my mother always wrote for, you know, always hoped for, always kind of wanted in her columns. And it happened as a result of her assassination. This was a kind of tipping point for the country.”
2023-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · A Death in Malta: Paul Caruana Galizia on the Legacy of Daphne Caruana Galizia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The country erupted in protest completely. And the number of those protest groups had formed immediately after my mother's assassination, especially a group of women who call themselves Occupy Justice. And they set up in 2017 and have been campaigning ever since. But it was that burst of protest in 2019 that made me think the country has changed. This is a new feature of public life in Malta. It's the development of civil society that is spontaneous. It's not church-led, party-led. And it looks like it's there to stay. And to bring it back to that immoral familism point, the one kind of essential symptom of a place that can be described in that way is you have no civil society because it's only the family you care about. You don't care about the state.”
2023-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · A Death in Malta: Paul Caruana Galizia on the Legacy of Daphne Caruana Galizia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, public life in Malta was dominated by either of the two political parties or the Catholic Church. And I mean completely dominated. There were no spontaneous protests. It was either party or church. The paper, the media was controlled by those institutions. But then when there were really key arrests starting in 2019,”
2023-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · A Death in Malta: Paul Caruana Galizia on the Legacy of Daphne Caruana Galizia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. So we, it's funny because in retrospect it looks like we have a very well planned out campaign, but in fact we just thought we need to pull on every lever available to us. So the journalism was one thing we thought of. We thought she was a journalist. There were stories she hadn't finished working on. We can't take them up ourselves. Let's pause the material on. And then we, you know, Malta is a small state. very sensitive to international pressure. So we went to the European Parliament. We went to the Council of Europe and brought their pressure to bear down on the country. But the most important, like long-term importance development of that campaign, in my view, is the growth of civil society in Malta. Again, that was another failed institution.”
2023-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · A Death in Malta: Paul Caruana Galizia on the Legacy of Daphne Caruana Galizia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the country, but almost the only source of news. People had nowhere else to go to. And, you know, the flip side of people seeing the harassment of my mother endured that she would keep going with her work anyway showed sources that she is a journalist they could trust that no matter the pressure brought to bear on her she would report truthfully and fully that she wouldn't be kind of intimidated into giving up sources and so on but it did you know as she wrote A few months before she was killed, when the plan to assassinator had, in fact, been set in motion, she wrote something like do your worst, you bastards, until the only option you have left is to take a contract out on my life. And they did do it because there was nothing else they could do to stop her.”
2023-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · A Death in Malta: Paul Caruana Galizia on the Legacy of Daphne Caruana Galizia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, she was. And this is the problem they had with her that they, especially when she started her blog, they had very few leavers they could pull on. So when she wrote exclusively for her paper, The Malta Independent, the government would do things like withhold government advertising revenue, not invite the newspapers, other journalists on government press stores, that kind of thing. But with her blog, they just couldn't, right? It was her. They had no kind of levers to pull on except attacking her directly. But because of these failings, we were talking about that the police wouldn't investigate crimes and that the AG wouldn't prosecute them. My mother became not just the most important source of news.”
2023-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · A Death in Malta: Paul Caruana Galizia on the Legacy of Daphne Caruana Galizia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The ruling party That's right. And the thing about Malta is you have this really good kind of test of how coordinated it is or how spontaneous. So my mother wrote in English. Most of the country speaks Maltese as a first language. Most of the supporters of the ruling party, which is still the ruling party, speak Maltese exclusively. And as my mother once said, they, the supporters and voters of this party are taught to hate me independently of what I write. And it was later that the government just kind of stopped caring. And the prime minister at the time actually assigned an aid to run a campaign of harassment against my mother and my father and my brothers.”
2023-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · A Death in Malta: Paul Caruana Galizia on the Legacy of Daphne Caruana Galizia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Disinformation, all this slander on Facebook. Facebook is really the most popular social media platform in Montel. And people were celebrating her murder. They were celebrating the car bombing of a journalist on the day it happened and continued to celebrate it, you know, even afterwards. And it just, I remember thinking Malta is a really tribal partisan place, but it was at that point I realized how bad things are. It wasn't that we simply didn't have a shared understanding. That we didn't even see each other as humans. Like I could never, I never toured we'd get to that point where you would celebrate a car bombing of your fellow citizen, of a journalist.”
2023-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · A Death in Malta: Paul Caruana Galizia on the Legacy of Daphne Caruana Galizia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It became so oppressive, it affected her physically. She felt unable to leave the house and not allowed them to say even more, she's a witch hiding out in her house. We grew up in the countryside. So they called her the witch of Bidnia, this rural area where we lived. And then she started putting on weight because she was always at home, isolated. So they started calling her fat. fat, lonely, a witch. And it was an attempt to undermine her. It was an attempt to completely dehumanize her. And as a campaign of dehumanization, it was so successful that it continued after her murder. So after her murder, a group of Maltese journalists kind of brought to light all these”
2023-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · A Death in Malta: Paul Caruana Galizia on the Legacy of Daphne Caruana Galizia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That is really what happened to a degree that became extreme in the final years of her life. In part, that had a lot to do with the internet. So growing up, it was always an issue. Growing up, you know, people would call up the house pre-mobile phones and I'd answer and hear a voice saying, tell that poor of your mother to stop writing this, tell that witch you call a mother or people would send stuff in the post. But that, you know, purely for technological reasons that made it feel like less of an issue somehow. But then the internet just kind of allowed that form of abuse to be industrialized, the cos web non-existent. People could just send emails, write their own blogs, you know. You are right, there was something especially ugly, especially misogynistic about the form of abuse. So it was always actually was a witch.”
2023-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · A Death in Malta: Paul Caruana Galizia on the Legacy of Daphne Caruana Galizia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Civil servants, we had begun turning to my mother. And if you think about it, the situation is absurd. You know, police officers would acquire material and felt unable to do anything with it other than pass it on to my mother who'd report on it. But at the same time, that exposed her a great deal. And as my brothers and I always said, it is significant that in the end it was my mother, a journalist who was murdered rather than a police officer, a magistrate, a judge, or a politician.”
2023-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · A Death in Malta: Paul Caruana Galizia on the Legacy of Daphne Caruana Galizia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, that's right. And so when those institutions really started failing, and as is often the case in countries like Malta, journalists become the kind of institution of last resort. It took me a long time to realize something's really wrong because my mother always reported on corruption, but it was low-level bribery, you know, Maltese drug traffickers bribing Maltese judges. But then almost imperceptibly, she found herself reporting on huge floats of money coming from post-Soviet states looking for a way into the European Union. You know, oligarchs buying Maltese passports. And it happened so quickly. Again, she almost realized herself. And because those institutions couldn't bear those massive strains of money, the few kind of non-corrupt.”
2023-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · A Death in Malta: Paul Caruana Galizia on the Legacy of Daphne Caruana Galizia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the accession program began in the 90s. And my mother really believed it looked like things were. But then what we didn't realize, and I think my mother didn't realize, is that while the economy was reformed, the forms of governance we had in Malta were never properly reformed since 1964, since decolonization. So Malta ended up putting this very globalized economy, but these rickety, you know, 1960s, immediately post-colonial institutions. And that proved to be a real toxic mix.”
2023-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · A Death in Malta: Paul Caruana Galizia on the Legacy of Daphne Caruana Galizia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Anyway, she called it. And that was available to her through British magazines and newspapers, her parents subscribed to my maternal grandparents subscribed to. As she grew up, so late 70s, early 80s, the prospect of union membership started seeming like something that might happen one day in Malta. So she spent much of the 80s thinking about it, hoping for it. Again, it was also part of what was happening around the world. And in Malta, in the late 80s, we had a really important general election, a kind of in the book I call it, like Malta's end of history moment, where the country had a choice between continuing down this pro-China pro-Libya part or turning west towards NATO and the European Union. And the western side one, but really just by a whisker.”
2023-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · A Death in Malta: Paul Caruana Galizia on the Legacy of Daphne Caruana Galizia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, that's right. And there was something I realized when I was writing it really tragic about the Ark of her life because she was born just two weeks before Malta became independent from Britain, two weeks before it decolonized. It was September 1964. And for most of the 60s, her early early childhood, it looked like Malta might become an independent, prosperous nation. But starting in the 70s, as was the fashion at the time, Malta became very socialist, started experimenting with ideas of closing off its economy to become self-sustaining and so on. And so she grew up in that very closed world where you'd only have one brand of chocolate or toothpaste available, all made domestically one type of shoe you could buy. And so for her, the idea of Europe became very important, the idea of the West.”
2023-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · A Death in Malta: Paul Caruana Galizia on the Legacy of Daphne Caruana Galizia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My mother increasingly, especially towards the end of her life as Malta became more corrupt, saw it as a very useful way of understanding the problems she was reporting on every day.”
2023-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · A Death in Malta: Paul Caruana Galizia on the Legacy of Daphne Caruana Galizia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As part of that cause, learnt about this idea you mentioned so that some areas have a social structure that is sometimes called a moral familism. And you tend to find it where formal state structures are very weak. And so the family unit develops in response to that. So the bonds within a family are much stronger than the loyalties you might feel to the rule of law, to democracy itself. So you would never report a relative to the police. You would think only about the immediate material interests of your own family and you would assume other people do the same. And that has really serious implications for governance. So in the simplest example I can think of is USU no one pays tax, then you don't pay tax yourself. And so institutions lose funding, the state becomes even weaker, and the family becomes more important.”
2023-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · A Death in Malta: Paul Caruana Galizia on the Legacy of Daphne Caruana Galizia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, of course. The idea of the book is to introduce people to my mother. And quite early on, I realized I couldn't do that unless I also introduced Malta, the country that shaped her and made her a journalist. And my mother, as a university student, studied anthropology.”
2023-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · A Death in Malta: Paul Caruana Galizia on the Legacy of Daphne Caruana Galizia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT