By Aleksandar Novaković for DiEM25.
The brutal political murder of Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia (53) mother of three, has shaken the European political scene.
Caruana Galizia’s work highlighted cases of alleged corruption among Maltese government officials. Known for her direct, no-compromise attitude and uneasy questions that shook both government and opposition alike, she led the investigation into the “Panama Papers” that exposed Malta’s ties to tax havens. She struggled, in this small island EU country, for the right of the people to know what’s happening behind the curtain of so-called democracy.
With Caruana Galizia’s death, the fight for transparency, freedom of the press, for human dignity has received a terrible blow. Today is a day that European ideals bleed.
This unprecedented crime reminds us of those journalists that lost their lives fighting the same enemy: Anna Politkovskaya in Russia, Veronica Guerin in Ireland, Slavko Ćuruvija and Milan Pantić in Serbia. Those journalists, and many more, paid for their belief in a free press with their own lives.
So, let us not say: “Never again”, as we did after the fall of Third Reich. Let us instead say: “This ends now!” There will be no justice and no democracy in Europe until those who committed this crime, both the executors and the ringleaders, face justice. And we need to go further: we must establish new European laws to cut off the heads of this modern Hydra of tax havens.
Aleksandaris a member of DSC Belgrade 1, a writer, dramatist, historian and journalist. His main points of interest are media freedom and European cultural politics.
