Yesterday, I announced that in collaboration with Michael Kaden, the media producer who runs NEWZ.mt, I will be publishing an extensive 80-minute interview with the former president of Repubblika, Robert Aquilina. The interview, held in Robert’s home after he politely offered to host us, is a frank conversation between two activists who have been in the trenches since Daphne Caruana Galizia’s brutal assassination on 16 October, 2017.
While I encourage you to follow this website’s Facebook page to catch up on the details of yesterday’s announcement and ensure you set a reminder for Monday morning at 9am, I’d like to share a few more photos which were taken throughout the interview and talk a bit more about the context that led to it.
First of all, I owe heaps of gratitude to Michael, who immediately agreed to collaborate on this project. In a country with a media climate that is in constant decline, collaboration between freelancers is essential to our survival and he is one of the journalists who gets it. I consider myself lucky to have the opportunity to work with a colleague whose skill set compliments mine and am hopeful that this will be the first of many fruitful collaborations to come.
Bear in mind that producing this kind of high-quality content normally takes a significant amount of material resources which are hard to come by and that, since it’s just two people working on this, it will likely consume all of my attention until publication on Monday. Please consider supporting more initiatives of this kind by donating to this website. Help us prove that public interest journalism matters by tangibly providing an open source, not-for-profit project the funding that is necessary for its expansion. The more people donate, the more it’ll be possible for me to work with fellow freelancers and perhaps even eventually be able to assign budgets for major projects.
I wanted to interview Robert shortly after he publicly announced his decision to resign from his role as president of Repubblika, the NGO that dedicates all of its resources towards honouring Daphne Caruana Galizia’s legacy by exposing the government’s litany of corruption scandals and seeking to hold accountable those who are responsible for the undoing of the nation’s rule of law.
Following the conclusion of his stint at the helm of Repubblika, an organisation which quickly established itself as the de facto anti-corruption NGO of the country, Robert will now be focusing purely on representing the organisation in its multiple, high-profile legal cases with which it is seeking the judicial redress the country’s been denied at the hands of this kleptocratic government. In this interview, we delved into what the building blocks of his forma mentis were when he was growing up, how he dealt with the recent past and present, and his other plans for the future.
Naturally, he explains why he took the decision to resign in spite of the overwhelming support in favour of his re-election as president. He also spoke at length about his hopes for the future of the country, and he delves into why he fervently believes in the cause he has championed so passionately, often at great personal cost and risk.
Most of all, I wanted this interview to be a fitting homage to someone who has inspired significant, long-lasting change and has managed to serve as a lightning rod for people’s hopes for a better future.
Stay tuned – we’ll see you on Monday.
