Dave and I became friends as libertarian leftists at Oxford University in the late 1970s – he was in the Labour Party and I was an anarchist, but our points of view were pretty much in sympathy – and we kept up with each other after he moved to Turin in 1980, where he threw himself into the then-collapsing Italian extra-parliamentary left that had inspired us both in the previous five years.
I visited him in Italy for the first time in spring 1981, with Jo, a girl we both loved, just as the Italian state was suppressing the last remnants of the armed-struggle leftist groups that proliferated in the 1970s – which Dave never supported – and I’ll never forget it.
The first day, Jo made it clear that it was Dave and not me in whom she was interested. The second day, I witnessed for the first and last time in my life an armed demonstration – the stewards in certain sections had automatic pistols (“Comrade P38”) stuffed in their jackets. And the next day we turned up to an anarchist centre next to a fly-blown Turin housing project that turned out to have been smashed up by the cops in an anti-terrorist operation the previous night.
Their target had been Prima Linea, the armed-struggle group whose founders had been the far left of Lotta Continua, the quasi-Maoist, quasi-libertarian coalition that until 1976 had been the most important 1968-generation leftist organisation. Dave was a member of another ex-Lotta Continua faction, one that abjured terrorism but was militantly direct-actionist and had some support at Fiat, the giant motor company that was then, as now, the dominant employer in Turin. I had no idea then and have no idea now whether the Centro Eliseo Reclus was a terrorist base: for me they were the Turin contacts for the libertarian left group of which I was a member in the UK. Whatever, we turned up, saw the damage and thought: "Shit!" We then went to the bar across the road for a beer. The bar refused to serve us. But that night we drank the first Guinness poured in the first Irish pub in Turin.
Dave knew Italian politics backwards, and I used his expertise throughout the 1980s and 1990s: he covered Italy for END Journal, Tribune, the New Statesman, Red Pepper and New Times for me. He did so brilliantly, reporting before anyone else in Britain the dangers of Berlsuconi and the fragility of the official (communist and then disintegrating former-communist) centre-left.
But it was always as a side project to working on serious editorial and translation work, which he continued until he was taken ill after Xmas. I was planning to visit him last autumn, but got waylaid and thought I’d make it in spring. Now it’s too late. A fantastically generous, intelligent and sociable man, he leaves his partner of many years, Paola, and a lot of devastated friends.
Here he is on top form in Tribune on 19 February 1993, laying into the disgrace of Bettino Craxi and the Italian Socialist Party. He was better than any correspondent in the mainstream media because he knew what was going on better than anyone else: this is tight reporting of the best standard, right on the money.
The resignation last week of Bettino Craxi, leader of the Italian Socialist Party for 15 years, brings a political era to an end.
With the fall of Craxi, after nearly a year of growing pressure on him to resign over involvement in a giant corruption scandal, the credibility of the PSI, which used its weight to determine the shape of politics throughout the eighties, is utterly destroyed.
Even with an entirely new leadership — and nearly everyone near the top of the party under Craxi has now been implicated in corruption, including the justice minister until last week, Claudio Martelli, who had been tipped as a "clean" successor — the party will find it difficult to survive as a force in Italian politics.
The noose had been tightening inexorably around Craxi's neck since last spring, when Mario Chiesa, a senior PSI figure in Milan, Craxi's power base, was caught with a £3,000 bribe in his pocket.
A wave of arrests of PSI leaders followed throughout last year as magistrates uncovered a massive kickbacks operation.
In December, Craxi himself, long the subject of rumours, was served, with an official communication notifying him that he was under investigation for corruption.
He did what he could to protest his innocence but his time was clearly up.
On January 30, along with a string of other politicians and top civil servants, Craxi was served with further serious charges.
One of them stated that he had not only known about the kickbacks system but had been its mastermind, deciding from whom to take money and where to put it.
A close collaborator had apparently admitted that Craxi had thought up and was implementing a new annual oneoff payment by companies to politicians as a way of avoiding the more risky practice of demanding a cut from every public works contract.
This might have seemed bad enough but Craxi still held on. What finally did for him was the confession of Silvano Larini, a mysteriously wealthy friend of Craxi, long on the wanted list, who turned himself in at the French border on February 7.
Larini had been identified as the person who opened a numbered account in a Swiss bank that had first been discovered (along with a note claiming that it was run by Martelli for Craxi) when the villa of Licio Gelli, the notorious boss of the P2 Masonic lodge, was searched in 1982.
The account apparently contained 7 million dollars from the near-bankrupt Banco Ambrosiano, then run by Roberto Calvi, paid for in thanks for an illegal 50 million dollar loan from ENI, the Italian state-owned petrol company, then run by Leonardo Di Donna, a PSI appointee.
Subsequently, the Banco Ambrosiano went bust and Calvi died in mysterious circumstances under Blackfriars Bridge in London.
Precisely why Larini started talking is unclear, but it appears that his lawyers told him that others were spilling the beans and that anyway time was running out for the secrecy of the Swiss bank accounts he controlled.
Whatever the reason, his confession immediately convinced Florio Fiorini, a former ENI financial director now in prison in Switzerland on unrelated fraudulent bankruptcy charges, to start talking about his former company's political slush funds.
Larini's decision also prompted magistrates to send Craxi and Martelli formal communications advising them that they were under investigation for involvement in the illegal bankruptcy of the Banco Ambrosiano. Last Wednesday, with the PSI holding a special conference on the leadership, Martelli resigned as justice Minister and from the party. Craxi resigned the leadership on Thursday.
By law, all accused MPs have to be examined by parliament, sitting as a kind of grand jury, to see if there is a prima facie case against them. So far this year, only one MP involved has been saved by his colleagues. Craxi has to defend himself against a total of six charges, five relating to the Milan kickbacks scandal and one on the Banco Ambrosiano affair — and more could come.
Some of the major figures charged in the investigation say that magistrates have vastly more information than they care to admit to the press and act only when certain of conviction.
Craxi was replaced as leader by Giorgio Benvenuto, a former secretary of the UIL, the smallest and most right-wing of Italy's trade union confederations, who beat off Valdo Spini, an intellectual with a clean reputation, after getting the support of the PSI's regional bosses.
What exactly they were fighting over is difficult to tell, however. Of course, the PSI remains in the government — the prime minister, Giuliano Amato, is a socialist and has so far remained untouched by the scandal. But, by clinging to power, Craxi and the PSI leadership have lost the PSI its last shreds of credibility.
The party's vote fell to between 3 per cent and 4 per cent in its northern heartlands in the last local elections and membership is said to be down to 25 per cent of its level a year ago. The party will be hammered in the next general election, which most commentators expect to happen later this year, winning most of its votes in areas of the south dominated by organised crime.
Needless to say, the dirt has rubbed off on those with whom the PSI has been associated, particularly the Christian Democrats, who have also been rocked by the corruption scandals, but also those on the left, relatively clean, with whom it has formed local government coalitions.
Unfortunately, the national leadership of the Party of the Democratic Left (PDS) does not seem to realise the dangers of being seen in public with a political leper: it continues to talk vaguely of a national coalition of the left, ignoring not just the desperate state of the PSI but also the fact that it has not been noticeably left for more than a decade.
There is also an international dimension. PSI MEPs sit happily with colleagues from all the other EC socialist parties in the Socialist Group in the European Parliament and the PSI is a member of the Socialist International. Some serious signs of disapproval of the PSI's methods from other European socialist parties might just help to push it to clean up its act thoroughly and to rebuild itself from the base. Silence could well be interpreted as approval of or even complicity in its rotten practice.
RIP.
1 comments:
Ciao David.
Un amico dall'Italia.
Post a Comment