Our disastrous year

“After the spring of investigations comes the darkness of vendettas. We diagnosed an illness but they treated us instead of the sickness. If you don’t plough the field regularly, the weeds will come back. Politicians must fill this role, not the magistrates”. This was the lament of a Milan magistrate Antonio Di Pietro, who spearheaded Mani Pulite or Clean Hands, an anti-corruption campaign.

Mani Pulite uncovered a massive web of corruption and criminal patronage in Italy that, for decades, had become a tacit code binding politics and businesses. The fact that lay unveiled was that the ruling class had no moral bindings and regard for the people when it came to their accumulation of personal wealth and power.

Over 3,000 politicians and business leaders were found to be involved in institutionalized payoffs during decades of power-sharing. More than half the Italian parliament was indicted and over 400 town and city councils were dissolved on corruption charges. The value of bribes, estimated in euros, paid by local and foreign companies annually in the 1980s stood at a whopping 3.4 billion.

Politicians, businessmen, and Vatican bank officials were arrested, many resigned and some even committed suicide. In 1994, Bettino Craxi, head of the Italian Socialist Party and the then prime minister, was sentenced to eight years in prison. In 1994, he fled to Tunisia to avoid the sentence. He died six years later and was buried there. His self-saving exile caused the fragmentation of the once all-powerful Italian Socialist Party.

In 1992, with Mani Pulite in full swing, Toto Riina, Cosa Nostra’s (Sicilian Mafia) boss of bosses, said: “We must declare war on the state so as to make peace afterwards”. In a ruthless defiance of state authority, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, two courageous magistrates supporting Di Pietro’s campaign, perished in separate bomb attacks, the latter in a car rigged with 90 kgs of Semtex. The scale of exposed corruption and retaliatory killings had the Italians dubbing 1992 as Annus Horribilis – Latin for ‘a disastrous year’.

The purge of Italian politics merited concrete measures so as to avoid a governance vacuum. However, the compromised system of the status quo prevailed. Di Pietro was investigated for allegations of misconduct and had to resign whereas crucial political, judicial and institutional reforms were never carried out. As a result, despite allegations of massive fraud and bribery, the year 1994 saw Silvio Berlusconi elected to the prime minister’s office. Bettino Craxi was ousted from office on charges of corruption; Berlusconi, his protege, now occupied it.

A wiretap revealed Mafia boss Leoluca Bagarella warning that “in future we cannot allow politicians to turn their back on us again”. Another revealed conversation saw Mafia’s Giuseppe Guttadauro demanding: “Berulusconi has to solve our problems in order to solve his own”. Berlusconi’s party, Forza Italia, was created and maneuvered into power to provide relief to the Mafia and its political cohorts. Marcello Dell’Utri, a close associate of Berlusconi and co-founder of Forza Italia, approached the Mafia seeking their cooperation. He pledged that the government would roll back laws targeting the Mafia, ease prison conditions for their convicted members and review their sentences. This infamous pact, finalized in 1994, was dubbed La Trattativa or the State-Mafia Pact.

In April 2018, a bunkered Palermo court headed by Judge Alferdo Montalto, convicted eight people, including state officials and Mafia members, calling it the “murkiest chapter in Italian history”. Dell’Utri was sentenced to 12 years in prison for undermining the state, as were two retired Carabinieri generale Mario Mori and Giuseppe De Donno along with Antonio Subranni, a former colonel. Antonio Di Matteo, prosecutor of the case, still faces death threats from the mafia and its affiliates and lives under strict protection.

There are instances in history, some recent, some from long ago that give one a surreal sense of deja vu. Ever mired in a constant battle of survival, we have regressed constantly. This year, undoubtedly, has been our very own Annus Horribilis. An ignoble record indeed, it witnessed the alacrity and abdominal speed with which the ruling cabal brought about an unprecedented downslide in all facets of our lives.

As we bid adieu to our Annus Horribilis and the machinations that brought it about, its single redeeming factor is that it thoroughly exposed a power elite that had always held us hostage to its claimed Midas touch. It did wonders for none but itself. History shall bear witness to this fact and that everything else they did and touched just shriveled and withered away.

The writer is a freelance contributor. He can be reached at:

miradnanaziz@gmail.com