By Richard Cottrell:
"The strategy of tension has surfaced once again"
On the morning of Saturday May 19th the devil came to Brindisi, a bustling port city of some 90,000 people perched in the very heel of Italy.
Brindisi is an ancient place, one of the most important nerve centers of the Roman Empire. The great super-highway called the Via Appia ran (and still does, although under tarmac these days) from the waters of the eastern Mediterranean all the way to Rome.
Today, the noisy and boisterous city with its endless chorus of honking traffic lies under a deep pall of gloom.
Saturday May 19th dawned rather sultry, typical for the South. Being a weekend the usual cacophony of the streets was a little calmer.
At the Morvillo Falcone high school it was the usual bustling morning scene that one finds at every school gate in Italy with pupils and parents milling around, the usual jumble of school buses mixed up with the traffic.
Then came a massive explosion fifteen minutes before eight o’clock. One sixteen-year-old student, Melissa Bassi, was caught in the full force of the blast wave. She suffered horrific injuries. One arm was ripped away and practically her entire body was seared by terrible burns. Melissa died in hospital.
Her sixteen-year-old friend, Veronica Capodieci, suffered terrible chest and abdominal wounds. Doctors are fighting to save her life.
Four other students, including Veronica’s older sister, were injured and badly burned. Another girl is at risk of losing both her legs.
The sheer force of the blast can be judged by the statement of a witness who saw everything from the upper floor of a law office close by. Memories such as these can never be erased.
“I was opening the window and the blast wave hit me. I saw the children on the ground. All blackened. Their books on fire. It was terrifying.”
Italy’s Columbine has shattered a nation where family ties and loyalties run deep. The family is the main component of Italian society and thus an attack of this utterly hideous nature has paralyzed and united a nation in grief.
As of now, there have been no claims of responsibility and it appears that the police have no clear leads to help identify the perpetrators.
The main clue is a hazy shot snapped by a surveillance camera which shows a well dressed man, probably middle aged, who seems to be fitting a remote control device to the gas canisters planted close to a row of refuse containers.
Two men were arrested but released without charges. One of these men was said to have had some ‘military experience’ which suggests that at this early stage, there were suspicions of experience and skills in blowing things up generally found among trained artificers.
The subliminal clue is the school itself, which is named after the crusading anti-Mafia magistrate Morvillo Falcone. She and her husband, another famous Mafia persecutor Giovanni Falcone, were killed by a car bomb in the Sicilian capital Palermo on May 23, 1992.
The Mafia are part of the social landscape in Italy, and Brindisi is no exception. A local gang calling themselves Sacra Corona Unita feast on the lucrative wares available in this entrepot port city: import and expert of narcotics and other contraband goods, and human trafficking, which replaces the flourishing slave trade of Roman times.
Earlier in May, sixteen members of the gang were picked up and interrogated after a car belonging to a local anti-Mafia official was attacked. All were subsequently released. It was another middling episode in the endless game of cat and mouse played for generations by the police and their anti-Mafia associates and the mob themselves all over Southern Italy.
So this affair, and the co-incidence of the atrocity at the Morvillo Falcone high school, twenty years almost to the day after the murders in Palermo, directed suspicion of vengeance at the hands of the Mafia.
The socialist mayor of the city, Mimmo Consales, immediately rushed to that conclusion and promised there would be no quarter for the criminals found responsible.
The Mafia does not issue press releases concerning its activities. Invariably what does happen is that someone within the ranks, a pentito (Italian for Mafia turncoat) is so revolted that he comes forward to denounce whoever was responsible. On that score, we can only wait and see.
The interior minister, Anna Maria Cancellieri, was less inclined in the immediate aftermath to rush to judgment. She agreed that the name of the targeted school and the Falcone anniversary taken together might be significant pointers, yet the investigators had so far uncovered no convincing evidence for blaming the ghastly bombing on organized crime.
Given the subsequent unfolding of the story, the minister was clearly out of line with opinions being formed elsewhere in the administration. But for the moment she stood her ground.
“It’s not the usual [method] for the Mafia,” she calmly informed the SkyTG24 television channel. There were numerous ‘alternative hypotheses’ as to the motive.
The minister was correct. The mob are easily capable of and frequently do perform horrific acts, as everyone knows.
But would they blow up innocent school girls? It doesn’t fit. They certainly never flinch at killing policemen, public servants, and not infrequently their own kind and other rivals. But bombing a school seems right out of line with all historical patterns.
Mob violence is coldly vicious because it is aimed at those who get in the way of business, and business in Brindisi is good. Like everywhere in the South, the ‘honorable societies’ flourish because of the high degree of integration and tolerance in the milieu washing around them.
This is the unstated but well- known truth that every Italian understands.
They silence flapping tongues as a matter of course. But an outage conducted outside the normal field of operations – such as a brazen attack on perfect innocents going to school, resulting in a massive state funeral and a grief that can never be healed – amounts to senseless provocation.
We return to the possible meanings behind the remarks of Minister Cancellieri concerning alternative suspects, about whom she did not elaborate. But there are important avenues worth exploring.
Let’s start with the daily life of Italians under the Monti regime. All reports from the country make clear that Italy is gripped by a rising state of ferment. Since last autumn a number of parcel bombs have been directed at offices of the widely-loathed tax collection agency Equitalia.
The perpetrators are said to be a shadowy protest organization of anarchists calling themselves the Informal Anarchist Federation (FAI).
The same group is under suspicion for the recent shooting and wounding of Roberto Adinfoli, head of the nuclear subsidiary of the sprawling engineering – and scandal prone – corporation Finmeccanica.
He was hit by a drive-by motorcyclist in the northern city of Genova, which is now being pictured as a hotbed of seething anarchist malcontents. According to unverified reports by the Italian news agency Ansa, police were examining recent pronouncements calling for “a shift to a new phase that could lead to armed action”.
So, viewed in this context the Brindisi bombing has added to fears of a possible return to the culture of widespread political violence which scarred the 1970s and 80s as the anni di piombo – the ‘years of lead’ attributed to the urban guerrillas calling themselves the Brigate Rosse – the Red Brigades.
The technocrat premier Mario Monti has declared war on tax evaders, which in normal circumstances might have earned plaudits from the long suffering Italians who do cough up and resent the privileged ones getting a free ride at their own expense.
But he doesn’t seem much concerned with the yacht owners, with their fine villas and fancy lifestyles which call for rather more than their annual tax return listing annual income of a thousand Euros. Sgr. Berlusconi’s efforts in this department are said to place all rival works of fiction in the shade.
The real issue is the €20 billion EU- imposed austerity program which has sent taxes and especially property taxes spiraling to record highs, inflicting huge cuts in public spending which are decimating Italian small business, sponsoring lay-offs in every industry and company and last but not least the country’s fourth recession since 2001.
Against this bleak background human tragedies abound. In the northern city of Brescia recently, a father who had just lost his job in an advertising agency first pushed his two small children from a 5th floor apartment balcony, struggled and failed to dispatch his wife after them and then jumped to his own death.
It seems that he broke down during a domestic row about money and how to feed the children while meeting the soaring costs of all household utilities.
Within hours of the Genova shooting, Monti ordered the deployment of 14,000 police and extra anti-terrorist patrols to protect some 500 designated sites around Italy. He even said that he would send the army to protect the beleaguered tax offices.
Such a massive, instant reaction speaks of well-laid plans, requiring only a primed fuse.
Minister Cancellieri has clearly come under immense pressure to change the tone of her original, measured remarks. She was clearly ordered to arrange a summit of local officials in Puglia, the province which includes Brindisi, to organize a massive clamp-down of police and anti-terrorist experts. Significantly, these reinforcements were drafted from outside the region.
On May 24th, five days after the atrocity, the elderly Italian president, Giorgio Napolitano, travelled to Sicily where he participated in two high profile ceremonies clearly intended to dramatize the threat that the Mafia outrages pose to law and order.
In the space of a week, the south is ravaged by a dreadful atrocity, while the father of nation conducts, as the media dutifully reported, ‘a tour against the Mafia’ in their own island stronghold.
At Corleone (a grim little town renowned as the inspiration for Mario Puzo’s Godfather) he paid homage to an agricultural activist Placido Rizzotto, who was chained hand and foot and pitched off a high cliff 64 years ago.
Rizzotto angered the island’s landowners by inciting peasants to occupy untilled land.
The contract on his life was awarded to Luciano Leggio, boss of the powerful Corleonosi criminal clan, the most feared and powerful in all Sicily. So, it was the island’s traditional ruling caste who called for the assassination, rather than some plot of the Mafia itself.
These distinctions were lost as the dead man’s remains were disinterred and ceremoniously laid to rest once again, this time with all the pomp and circumstance of a full state funeral.
In similar vein the president was next to be seen paying more respects to further victims of Mafia terror, this time at the Porta delle Genestra on the outskirts of Palermo.
There, on May Day 1947 a peaceful assembly of jubilant communists, who had just triumphed in the island elections, was attacked by gunmen who killed eleven people, including four children.
In fact, as I explain in my new book (below) the supposed mastermind behind the outrage, one Salvatore Giuliano, was chiefly renowned as a feisty independent bandit and campaigner for Sicilian independence rather than any Mafia connections.
He always insisted he was hired by the island’s feudal landlords horrified by the communist victory to fire some shots and frighten the assembled host. And indeed, there is strong supporting evidence that the deadly shots were actually fired from surrounding hill tops.
There has always been a marked degree of ambivalence in relations between the Italian state and organized crime, never better typified by astonishing charges laid against the nation’s most iconic political figurehead.
In the 1990s and onwards into the new century, Italians witnessed the extraordinary spectacle of seven-time Christian Democrat premier Giulio Andreotti arraigned for associations with the mob and complicity in the murder of well-known investigative journalist Mino Pecorelli.
Andreotti won a technical acquittal because the case dragged on well past the legal sell-by date, as is quite usual in Italy’s slow-coach courts.
But the court nonetheless concluded that Andreotti indeed possessed strong associations with the Mafia until 1980, and used them to further his political career to such an extent as to be considered a component of the Mafia structure.
As compensation, he was made a senator-for-life. Very Italian.
I mention these details by no means to excuse the Mafia from their abominable crimes, their sapping of so much energy from the economy and the fear and distress they spread, but simply to explain some important background understanding pertaining to current events.
Italy is the consummate paradise of illusions. So, even as the full apparatus of the state rolls out in condemnation of Public Enemy Number One, we discover in the very same month of May that in former years Rome’s most infamous – and ruthless – gangster had been laid to rest in a diamond-studded coffin in one of the Vatican’s holiest of holies.
This is called payola, Vatican-style.
During the infamous ‘years of lead’ Italy was rocked by a wave of violence perpetrated by the Gladio secret soldier network originally established by NATO as a ‘stay behind’ force in the event of a Russian invasion.
In an episode eerily reminiscent of Brindisi, the central railway station in the city of Bologna was virtually destroyed by a massive bomb which exploded on the stifling morning of August 2nd, 1980. 85 passengers waiting to catch holiday trains to the cooling airs of the seaside died and another 200 including railway staff were badly injured.
The government eagerly rushed to blame the Brigate Rosse, but almost immediately it emerged that the atrocity was performed by neofascists calling themselves the Nuclei Armati Revoluzionari, in cahoots with rogue elements of Italian secret services.
The equivalence between Brindisi and Bologna is quite obvious.
With both atrocities absolute innocents are selected as the victims. Their terrible martyrdoms are then exploited to focus the fears of the populace at large on some insidious presence in their midst.
At Bologna it was supposed to be the menace of urban guerrillas tied with Moscow, although the plot line soon collapsed when neofascists connected to organized crime and the secret services were exposed as the actual perpetrators.
The years of lead were characterized by synthetic false flag violence designed to keep Italians teetering on the precipice of fears indicating their way of life was under siege from the enemy within. The Italian political scientist Claudio Celani coined a superb phrase – ‘the strategy of tension’ – which evolved into a generic label for the crimes of the Gladio secret armies throughout Europe.
The years of lead were intended to frighten Italians away from the hugely popular communist party and into the outstretched arms of safe Right-wing, devoutly Christian politicians. (Especially those of the mob-fraternizer Giulio Andreotti, who interesting connections we just discussed).
The same hectic fear is now being propagated by Mario Monti. Anarchists, he says, are seeking to destroy Italy, if necessary by inciting a revolution. The parallel with the Brigate Rosse is so plain, it is a wonder that anyone falls for it.
Questions.
Is the ‘anarchist menace’ anything more than a purely ephemeral invention to distract attention from the woes of Italians suffering under the blanket austerity package? In other words, the revitalized, spruced-up strategy of tension.
The Brigate Rosse – like the Baader-Meinhof gang in Germany – had known, branded leaders.
Why then are there no descriptions of those who are supposedly leading the insidious anarchist cell based in Genova? Are the local Carabinieri and their special anti-terrorist unit Digos that dumb? I rather doubt it.
And perhaps the most difficult question of all in present tragic circumstances, concerning Brindisi.
The government continues to propagate the Mafia as the villains, pressing the need for ‘strong central authority’ to rule chaotic Italy. The message chimes with those same anarchists bent on overthrowing the system.
By yet another amazing co-incidence, this particular week was selected for ‘Tarzano’ Luca Montezemolo, Grand Duke of Ferrari, to announce his Christian Democrat list that will run for office in the general election next year.
This is coupled with the flyer emanating from Monti’s office, with the active support of none other than Silvio Berlusconi, stating that Italy urgently needs a popularly-elected head of state, instead of the nominated individual presently chosen by parliament.
The post-war constitution specifically avoided an elected head of state because of fears that some populist of the future would come to power in the guise of a new Mussolini.
Signor Monti indeed displays a distinct authoritarian stripe that suggests that he sees himself as a fixture of the Italian political landscape. I have written previously for End the Lie on the prospects of a Monti-Montezemolo combination that seem to be coming home to roost.
A French style, Gaullist presidency is the last thing that Italy – or Europe – needs. But that is what Italians read in their morning newspapers this weekend. How many are chilled by the prospect, it is difficult to say.
In the aftermath of Brindisi, the impact of the austerity crisis temporarily fades while the autocrats get on with shaping the future. The purifier Monti delivers his endless sermons on the necessity for ‘sacrifice’ to save Italians from themselves and from the malcontents in their midst.
From Bologna to Brindisi, the strategy of tension has surfaced once again.
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