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Berlusconi on balance JUST
Response interviews Domenico Pacitti JUST
Response:
Italy’s
controversial media mogul premier Silvio Berlusconi has had a
whole series of criminal accusations against him. Could you
summarise them for us? Domenico Pacitti:
There
have been 13 criminal cases against Berlusconi so far. Some of
these had multiple charges, most of them have now been concluded
and all of them are pretty remarkable, even for an Italian prime
minister. Let me just give you the list: bribing policemen and
judges, false accounting, tax fraud, illicitly financing political
parties, purchasing property illegally, violating antitrust laws,
money laundering and Mafia involvement. He was also accused of
perjury. That was for denying his membership of the P2 masonic
lodge, an anti-Communist organisation that used Italy’s security
services for political purposes. Well, perhaps the most perplexing
of these accusations – and this really hasn’t received proper
attention – was Berlusconi’s alleged complicity in 2 car
bombings back in 1992. Those were the ones that killed anti-Mafia
judges Falcone and Borsellino together with their police escorts.
Berlusconi was also implicated in a series of 5 car bombings that
shook Milan, Florence and Rome in ’93. Now, all of these
bombings have been officially attributed to the Mafia. But who
exactly the instigators were is, as far as I can see, still very
much an open question. So those are the criminal accusations. JUST Response:
Was
Berlusconi actually found guilty and sentenced on any of these
charges? Pacitti: He picked up an initial total of 77 months from 3
of these cases. Sixteen months were dropped after he won an
appeal. And the remaining 61 months were eventually annulled by
Italy’s statutory law of time limitations. This is a law which
causes criminal liability to expire after a set period, usually 10
years. Eight more cases were similarly annulled as a result of
time expiries and also as a result of amnesties –
another way of helping Italian politicians to evade the
law. There are just 2 charges on which Berlusconi has been found
technically not guilty. One was for bribing financial police and
another was for false accounts. JUST Response:
What exactly happened in the case of the charges against
Berlusconi for his alleged involvement in the car bombings? Pacitti: Basically what happened was that the public
prosecutors in Caltanissetta and Florence who were investigating
Berlusconi's involvement in those killings failed to conclude
their investigations within the allotted time and were thus forced
to drop the cases. JUST Response:
New legislation is reported to have been introduced in Italy
purely in order to favour Berlusconi. Is that right? Pacitti: Three new laws appear to have been purposely
built just to let him off the hook. The first was passed in April
of last year and what it did was to decriminalise the offence of
false accounting for private companies. An investigating
magistrate in Milan has referred this to the European Court of
Justice on the grounds that it’s incompatible with EU law. The
second was the “legitimate suspicion” law as it’s known and
it was passed last November. Now, this law allows an accused party
to request the transfer of his case to another court on the ground
of suspicion relating to a judge’s impartiality. The reasoning
behind this one is that time lost in such procedures would almost
certainly render the charges, again, subject to the statute of
time limitations. And finally, criminal proceedings against
Berlusconi for bribing judges in a 1986 court case have now been
suspended thanks to a new law passed in June of this year which
reintroduces immunity – not to say impunity – for Italy’s
five most senior public officials during their terms in office.
All of these cases plus 1600 court hearings are said to have cost
Berlusconi and his companies about 260 million euros in legal
fees. JUST Response:
Much
Italian and international attention has focused on Berlusconi’s
persistent claim that the judiciary has been persecuting him with
false accusations. How do you see this issue? Pacitti: Quite frankly, there’s so much institutional
corruption in Italy that it’s not always easy to discern
clearly. While it’s true that Italian magistrates qua
Italians are also excessively susceptible to corruption and can be
pretty erratic, the sort of team effort that would have been
necessary to invent such a vast assortment of accusations against
Berlusconi in different courts up and down the country would –
together with a number of other factors – make the sort of
persecution Berlusconi is complaining about extremely unlikely. In
fact, given the high number of bribery accusations against
Berlusconi, given his enormous wealth and given Italy’s culture
of corruption, well if we’re allowed to talk about “legitimate
suspicion”, it might not be too illegitimate to suspect that
some bribes to magistrates might well have been accepted and may
have contributed to prolonging his cases up to their legal expiry
and ditching others altogether. Added to this, Italian ministries
are known to place tribunals under a good deal of pressure to
close or drop awkward cases on political grounds, and I can see no
reason why this shouldn’t also have occurred here. In fact it
would be rather odd if it hadn’t. JUST Response:
That's certainly the way it looks. But is there any conclusive
confirmation? Pacitti: Well, the distinct possibility that Berlusconi
may have been using loopholes in Italy’s labyrinth of laws as
the only way of escaping conviction in a whole string of cases
would appear to be confirmed by a recent United Nations report. It
was published on 31st January this year and takes a dim view of
Berlusconi’s behaviour. I have it right here in front of me. Let
me just give you a couple of quotes. It states: “It is not
proper for the Prime Minister, being the chief executive of the
Government, to be seen as taking advantage of procedural
weaknesses in the system of which all have been calling for
reform, including the Council of Europe.” The report questions
the great speed with which the “legitimate suspicion” law was
passed by the Italian parliament. It also states that the
rapporteur “was satisfied that there was reasonable cause for
the magistrates to feel that their independence was threatened.”
It goes on to criticise Berlusconi’s failure to testify and
expresses regret that he declined to meet UN rapporteur
Cumaraswamy during his two fact-finding missions to Italy last
year. JUST Response:
So how is Berlusconi managing to get away with this in Italy? JUST Response:
I take it the three journalists you're referring to are Enzo
Biagi, Michele Santoro and Daniele Luttazzi? Pacitti: Yes. As you know, they had the unpardonable
audacity to express views that were seriously at variance with the
official government line. Getting back to your question about how
he's getting away with all of this, Italians know perfectly well
that Berlusconi owns the country’s 3 biggest private TV channels
and that as prime minister he also has control of the three state
channels. And they’re not worried about that either – just as
long as they’re continuing to be fed the sort of TV
entertainment they’re looking for. But they’re largely unaware
of the systematic filtering of information on news programmes or
further restriction of scope of discussion on talk shows. So here
we have Italy’s prime minister heading the European presidency
until the end of the year, openly snubbing his nose at the law and
giving Europeans their first Italian lesson on how to avoid
prosecution on criminal charges that are normally associated with
Mafia gangsters. I think it’s just scandalous, though hardly
surprising, that Italians are not out there in the streets
protesting – not even the political opposition who have
obviously, as is customary in Italy, struck a friendly deal over
alternate terms of government and goodness knows what else. So
much for Italian democracy. JUST Response:
Do you think Berlusconi has any positive qualities? Pacitti: His chief positive quality is that he has so far
shown himself to be far more capable of governing Italy than any
of his Italian politcal colleagues on the left or right. This
observation should of course be perceived from within the accepted
conventional paradigm of what constitutes good government in a
western imperialist context. JUST Response:
So what exactly has Berlusconi done that is positive? Pacitti: Well, for example, his foreign policy over the
US-UK invasion of Iraq was understandably perceived by Italians to
be a highly commendable piece of tightrope walking that allowed
Italy to cut an honourable figure internationally. Italians see in
Berlusconi a premier who is at last respected by his foreign
counterparts. Berlusconi has also introduced a number of
commonsense measures no doubt designed to increase his popularity
that are having a positive impact on many Italians. For example,
the local policeman has been brought back on the beat, giving city
dwellers a much needed sense of security. His introduction of a
new points system for car licenses which comes down heavily on
driving offences is reported to have reduced road deaths by twenty
per cent over the past months compared with last year. His
latest proposal to raise the retirement age by five years is
already seen by many as a sensible step in the right direction of
reducing increasing debt caused by overgenerous pensions. These
and other measures such as restricting cigarette smoking in public
places and raising minimum retirement pensions have done a fair
amount to give Italians the welcome sensation that this prime
minister actually wants to do something positive for ordinary
people and that he has established a closer contact with them than
most of his predecessors. JUST Response:
And do you think this makes up for Berlusconi's apparent moral and
criminal shortcomings? Pacitti: Of course it doesn't. It is only natural for anyone who believes in truth and justice as absolute values to think of their ideal political leader as morally upright and untouched by corruption or criminality. The question is: how realistic is it to expect a political leader to act morally and truthfully? Is George W. Bush any less of a criminal than Berlusconi? Or is Tony Blair? What about Ariel Sharon or Hu Jintao and others? How many honest premiers and presidents are there in the world today? Could there ever be such a thing as a truly honest political leader in the modern world? Or is the term "honest political leader" simply a convenient formula that happens to be a contradiction in terms? That's certainly something worth thinking about. |
