As human rights are trampled on globally, two new books highlight gross wrongdoing and the journalists who shine a light on it.
A Death in Malta: An Assassination and a Family’s Quest for Justice sees Daphne Caruana Galizia’s son, Paul, tell the story of his mother’s decades-long fight against corruption. Her killing, which was carried out with a car bomb in 2017, shocked the world. The idea that this could happen in an EU country seemed unfathomable but, as this book shows, it was also somewhat unsurprising.
On her tiny island Daphne was a trailblazer and often a lone wolf. She was born in 1964, the year of Malta’s independence, and became Malta’s first woman columnist at a time when her newspaper didn’t employ women as a matter of policy.
Politico called Daphne “a one-woman WikiLeaks, crusading against untransparency and corruption in Malta, an island famous for both”. She covered, among many other things, how Malta was selling passports to the wealthy, while mistreating or attempting to turn away refugees desperate for protection.
Daphne – a keen adopter of the internet – produced 20,000 blog posts and three decades’ worth of columns. In that time she angered many people on an island with a population of just over half a million.
The book details her increasing isolation and ostracisation: she was painted – by those she attacked – as a “witch”.
What is it like to take such a stance in a tiny country, where everyone seems connected by blood, employment or schooling? What is it like to stand against the destruction of institutions and the rule of law? What is it like, as Paul asks, to “swim upstream for thirty years”?
Daphne’s work affected her family. It strained her relationship with her husband and seeped into the daily experiences of her three sons. Despite those struggles, their love for this amazing woman shines through.
Persecution continued after her brutal death. A week later her husband and sons were in court facing a libel charge against her. Rather than giving up, they began campaigning on her behalf, making sure her sacrifice would not be forgotten.
This is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand what it takes to be an iconoclast and a trailblazer, but also how growing impunity in a state can mount a feeling of responsibility on an individual in ways that may be necessary for some preservation of democracy, but certainly aren’t fair.
It is a compelling and essential book. It’s a history of Malta, from long before it became an EU member state. It’s also a klaxon for how deep corruption can run when not kept in check.
More than 10,000km away, in Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in the Philippines, we meet another exceptional journalist. “I was born in the year democracy returned to the Philippines. I am here to report its death,” writes Patricia Evangelista, who has written an extraordinary book documenting the Philippines drugs war. Millions of her country’s citizens were considered by president Rodrigo Duterte to be “drug addicts”. A wave of murders and extrajudicial killings followed.
It is still not known how many people died, though the largest estimates put the toll at more than 30,000. Even with more certainty, “numbers cannot describe the human cost of this war, or adequately measure what happens when individual liberty gives way to state brutality”, writes Evangelista.
She worked as an investigative reporter for online news website Rappler under Maria Ressa, who won the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize. “My job is to go to places where people die,” Evangelista explains. She interviews grieving family members, but also police officers and others drawn into the killings.
This is not just a documentation of the drug war, but a history of the Philippines; an account of what brought Duterte to power; and a rumination on what it is like to be a journalist covering brutal atrocities. “Every story began with the ordinary because it underscored what happened next. The blue sky before the flood of corpses. The kiss goodbye before the barrage of bullets ... I layered detail over detail ... the colour of the shoe, the tenor of the scream.”
Importantly, the book is also a reckoning with the fact that many Filipinos supported Duterte and his actions.
Evangelista – a one-time international teenage public speaking champion – examines the use of language as playing a key role in covering up abuses. Instead of being murdered, suspects are “neutralised”.
“The language failed as the body count rose,” she writes.
Like Daphne, Evangelista was reporting on her home country. In contrast to foreign reporters, she specifies, she cannot easily leave.
Recently and more broadly, when it comes to abuses carried out globally against the marginalised and the oppressed, I keep being asked whether there is any reason to hope that things will get better. Yet I’ve come to feel this question can be almost irrelevant. Should it matter, when it comes to doing the right thing? “I’m a trauma reporter ... I did not traffic in hope,” writes Evangelista.
Both of these books tell the stories of people who continued to take prolonged action against wrongdoing despite likely having no hope.
Through it all, they documented and recorded. They held a mirror up to society and occasionally they saw breakthroughs, however small. Their work needs to be appreciated, with readers hopefully asking themselves how any of this was ever condoned, and how easily could the same happen elsewhere?
