Lords of gluttony

In 1946, Giulio Andreotti started his political career as a 27-year-old junior minister. Over a career spanning seven decades, he went on to become Italy’s prime minister seven times.

His followers credit him with transforming a war devastated Italy into an industrial giant, his detractors saw him as a Mafia member and sympathiser who patronised a political system riddled with corruption. He was dubbed Beelzebub, a demon and the lord of gluttony also mentioned in Milton’s Paradise Lost.

Apart from facing 20 parliamentary investigations for corruption, Andreotti was accused and tried for ordering the murder of a journalist and having ties with and protecting the Mafia. He was also alleged to have exchanged a “kiss of respect” with Salvatore Toto Riina, Mafia’s boss of bosses.

Andreotti was sentenced to 24 years in prison, a sentence which was later overturned. Allegations into his Mafia ties were dismissed because of the statute of limitations. However, Italy’s top appeals court upheld that he had “consciously and deliberately cultivated a stable relationship” with Mafia bosses.

Known in Arabic as Madina al Siquilliya and situated on one of the most beautiful promontories of the Mediterranean, Palermo is the historical and administrative capital of the Italian island of Sicily. Its architecture was a beautiful blend of Byzantine, Islamic and Norman influence over the centuries.

During the 60s, Giulio Andreotti nominated Salvo Lima as mayor of Palermo. Vito Ciancimino, a mobster from the Mafia’s infamous Corleonesi clan, became head of public works. Major contracts went to Francesco Vassallo, a former cart driver turned construction magnate because of his ties with Mafia dons Angelo La Barbera and Tommaso Buscetta. In five years, more than 4000 licences for huge buildings were issued. Most went to five pensioners with no construction experience at all; they were Mafia front men.

Funds from the Marshall Plan allocated for war ravaged Italy and the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno, Italy’s development plan for its poor south were siphoned to construct bizarre buildings bypassing laws and rezoning entire districts. It was under the Lima/ Ciancimino tutelage that Palermo’s architectural treasures were razed to the ground. Parks and green belts were asphalted as ungainly apartment blocks, piazzas and car washes sprang up. This devastation of a once beautiful city into a concrete jungle became known as the Sack of Palermo.

Maurizio Carta, professor of Urban Planning at Palermo University describes it as: “Like plundering barbarians, mafiosi devastated the city with cement, disfiguring its parks, landscape and natural beauty. With the sack of Palermo, the mafia exhibited its enormous criminal power. They sent a message to the institutions, making it clear that they, the bosses, had the power to change not only the laws that regulated the urban planning projects but the shape of the city”.

Atanas Atanasov, a former member of Bulgaria’s parliament and head of counterintelligence, famously said that “other countries have the mafia; in Bulgaria the mafia has the country”. Moises Naim, a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has authored ‘Mafia States: When Organized Crime Takes Office’. Naim encapsulates the working of countries where corruption and organized crime is state controlled. He contends that it is used blatantly to advance the personal interests and agendas of the political elite and their cronies.

During the decades, ruling dispensations, khaki and civvies alike, spawned and allowed mafias to become the masters of our destiny. Apart from many others, land, cheeni, aata, transport, tanker, bhatta and kunda mafias became parasitic extremities of our collective lives. Aided and abetted by various cartels, they have our health, education and other vital sectors in an extractive chokehold. These mafias and their power grew because of the complicit absence of institutional oversight and rule of law.

The recent tragedy that saw 17 lives perish in an explosion at an illegally built building in Karachi epitomizes the ingress and lethal fallout of this mafia galore. As usual, following the media coverage, the police have registered a case of manslaughter against the builder and owner of this building. Nothing shall come out of it.

Through all this, the oversight agencies, the real enablers of these sordid crimes, shall be protected by their unchallenged lords of gluttony – the very ones who torment us with their monarchical right to rule us and their endless yet fallacious orations. Their lust for more shall remain unsatiated till their very ignominious end.

Does Pakistan have a mafia or do mafias have Pakistan? Agonising questions that remain drowned in the din of Pakistan khappay, vote ko izzat do and naya Pakistan.

The writer is a freelance contributor. He can be reached at miradnanaziz@ gmail.com