20 July 2007

Borsellino, 15 years on

Today is the fifteenth anniversary of Paolo Borsellino’s death. I want to remember him with a letter from his brother, Salvatore.
19 July 1992 : A State Slaughter.

“For years, after the summer of 1992, I went to many Italian schools to talk about Paolo and Giovanni’s dream, to talk of hope, of the will to fight, of that dawn that I saw was near, thanks to the rebirth of the civil conscience after their sacrifice, after the long night of slaughter without guilty ones and the unending series of assassination of magistrates, police officers and journalists in a so-called civil country.
Then that dawn turned out to be a mirage, the civil conscience that unfortunately in Italy always has to be woken up by tragedy like that at Capaci or in Via D’Amelio, is once more soaked up under the weight of indifference and what seemed like the wish to ransom the State in the fight against the mafia, has once more been extinguished., buried by the wish for normalization and compromise and against the judges, at least against those who are honest and still alive. Another type of battle has started, no longer with explosives but with more underhand weapons, with the delegitimisation of the very function of the magistrates. And every side has attempted to claim the dead ones for themselves and to mystify the message.
Thus, for years I have felt day by day, growing inside myself, feelings of disillusion, of anger and, bit by bit, the hope has been substituted by the mistrust of the State, of the institutions that have not known how to gather the fruit of the sacrifice of those men, and thus I have stopped speaking to young people, convinced that it was not my right to communicate these feelings to them, above all it was not my right to do this as the brother of Paolo who right up to the last moment of his life, always kept alive within himself, and in those who were close to him, the hope, even the certainty, of a different tomorrow for his Sicily and for his country.
Then for years, I didn’t even go back to Sicily, refusing to see, at least with my eyes, the abyss into which this land had sunk even further, how all that Paolo fought against, the corruption, the clientelism, the proximity was prevailing once more, in politics, in the government of public things, how all the old really ambiguous personalities have once more surfaced, often investigated even by Paolo when he was still alive, and new persons who are even worse, given that right now, to be investigated seems to confer an aura of persecution and to almost constitute a title of merit.
My apathy comes from this, this is why I close myself into an ivory tower limiting myself to judge but without ever wanting to act, I have recently been shocked by an illuminating encounter with Gioacchino Basile, a man who has always paid for his choices in person, who inside the Palermo’s shipbuilding yard and in Fincantrieri has always conducted, practically on his own and with even the Trades Union against him, that fight against the mafia that should be the task of the State bodies, the State that rather, according to his denunciations that are backed up with evidence, wove agreements with the mafia transforming State Shareholdings into an organism for the participation and financing and power of the mafia in Sicily.
The facts given in these denunciations, that Paolo Borsellino was dealing with in the days immediately preceding his assassination, have been the subject of a “Report on mafia infiltration in the Palermo Naval Dockyards” by the Parliamentary Committee of Enquiry on the phenomenon of the mafia (headed by Hon. Mantovano) but as unfortunately often happens in Italy with the proceedings of parliamentary commissions, they have not then had developments on a parliamentary level while on a judicial level, as always happens when it’s a matter of investigations into the mafia that pass to “higher” levels, they were subject to the usual archiving.
Gioacchino Basile is convinced that the personal interest that Paolo had for this in going deeper into this thread of the enquiry and had told him about in one of their meetings in Rome in the days immediately preceding his death, is the main reason for the “necessity” to eliminate him with a speed defined “unusual” by even the Caltanissetta Prosecutor and that the disappearance of this dossier from Paolo’s bag is part of the context of the removal of his red diary.
For myself, I believe that this could have been just one of the motives within the wider context of “mafia-contracts” that Paolo himself had led me to guess was the main reason for the elimination of Giovanni Falcone together with the certainty that he was about to be appointed to the position as National Antimafia Prosecutor.
However, I believe the main motive was the agreement of non-belligerence between the State and the mafia that must have been put before him in the office of a Minister in the meetings Paolo had in Rome in the days immediately before the slaughter. An agreement to which Paolo must have been disdainfully opposed.
There’s a worrying silence about these meetings that Paolo must have noted in his diary that disappeared and the epidemic of amnesia that, after Paolo’s death, struck all those presumed participants, has made it become the last worrying State secret just like the State secrets and the omissions that fill up the enquiries into all the other State slaughters in Italy.
But the true State secret, even though I don’t believe it is any longer secret for anyone, is the scurrilous agreement of mutual help established over the years between the State and the mafia.
Starting from when votes guaranteed by the mafia allowed the Christian Democrats to govern in the rest of Italy even though this had as a consequence the abandonment of Sicily just as in the rest of the South, to the power of the mafia, the renunciation of the control of the territory, the acceptance of coexistence, together with State taxes, of taxes imposed by the mafia, the “pizzo” and the extortion.
An even more serious consequence is the renunciation by the young people of the South to hope for work, unless it is obtained by a few at the price of favours and clientelism and denied to many for the lack of development of industrialisation in relation to the rest of the country.
Following on from the “papello” that was subject to a contract between Riina and the State with the threat of taking the war also to the rest of the country (see via dei Georgofili and via Palestro), a contract method that I believe was the main cause of the need to eliminate Paolo Borsellino and to eliminate him in a hurry.
Following on finally from the identification of new political personalities after Tangentopoli had done a clean sweep of a good part of the preceding political class and the “historical” personalities.
These were agreements that made up today’s civil degradation, that allows those who have been investigated for mafia connections to govern Sicily and where at a national level, at least in the surveys, there’s a growing popular consensus towards those who have probably taken on capital coming from the mafia to create their own industrial empire and associated political party.
How can they then be called “deviated” and not in line with the very essence of this State, those “Services” that for “silence-assent” of the Head of the Government or on his explicit request have spied on magistrates considered to be and defined “enemies” in the relevant dossiers and directly convinced other magistrates to spy on their colleagues who still in the same dossiers are defined as “enemies”, “communists” and “armed wings” of the magistracy with a use of language that is not difficult to find in certain newspapers and in the decalartions of certain politicians.
Gioacchino Basile tells me that it is my right to insist that the State lets me know the truth about Paolo’s assassination, but from “this” State from which I have declined “compensation” that they wanted to offer me as Paolo’s brother, compensation that should anyway be offered to all young Sicilians and Italians for what has been taken from them, I am sure that I will only get silences.
The same silences , the same “wall of rubber” that the offspring of Generale Dalla Chiesa have had to put up with, and the relatives of the dead who died in that unending series of slaughters,
The slaughter of Portella della Ginestra, The slaughter of Piazza Fontana, The slaughter of Piazza della Loggia, The slaughter of the Italicus train, The slaughter of Ustica, The slaughter at Christmas of the 904 train, The slaughter of Pizzolungo, The slaughter of Via dei Georgofili and of Via Palestro, about which today we rarely know the perpetrators and never the brains behind the crimes and often not even the motive for the action, while in our South, thanks to the absence of the other State institutions, one after the other, all the magistrates were killed and the representatives of the security forces who had made the fight against the mafia as their own reason for living, in a tragic sequence that has no equal in any of the other countries in the so-called civilised world.
With bitterness, I ask myself how many other slaughters, how many other deaths, will we need before the State reacts in a way that is decisive and above all long-lasting, as up until now it has never been, that will lead to the defeat of mafia criminality and above all of power connected to it that is ever less hidden, until finally that scurrilous non-belligerence pact is broken, as judge Di Lello said on 20 July 1992, pieces of the State have for decades kept up with the mafia and that has allowed and continues to allow not just the decades of being on the run of the famous bosses like Riina and Provenzano but the freedom and impunity of dozens of “little bosses” who are the true rulers of Palermo and other Sicilian cities.
For my part, I am certain that I will not manage to find the truth in the few years that I have left to live, since I am already 65 years old and I am the only one to survive in a family in which my father, the brother of my father, and my brother all died aged 52. The first ones from natural causes, the latter because he was a foreign body for the State whose Institutions he respected profoundly (always the Institutions, however, not always those that represented them).
I just hope that on this anniversary I don’t have to see and hear the many hypocrites who today cry for Paolo and Giovanni, when if they were still alive they would be shunning them and accusing them in the best of cases of being “antimafia professionals” or they would even be spying on them like squalid people such as Pio Pompa as though they were “enemies” or as “the armed wing of the magistracy”.
On this occasion, I just ask to have some responses to at least some of the many questions, of the many doubts that do not allow me to have peace.
I ask Proc. Pietro Giammanco, moved away from Palermo after Paolo’s assassination, but promoted to a higher position rather than removed as he would have deserved, why he did not arrange for the bonification and the removal zone for Via D’Amelio.
And yet in the same road, at number 68, a den of the Madonia had recently been discovered and apart from the actual danger for Paolo Borsellino’s safety, the indications of real danger that came in, in those days were such that Paolo told Pippo Tricoli on 19 July: “a load of TNT has arrived in the city for me”.
Unless of course, as affirmed by Sen. Mancino, in his speech to the Lower House on 20 July, he too believed that “Borsellino was not a frequent vistor to the house of his mother” in fact he just visited about three times a week!
The same question I also put to Mario Jovine, who was at that time, the Prefect of Palermo, even though he maintains that he has already given the reply with the affirmation given at that time: “No one gave an indication of the danger of Via D’Amelio”.
An affirmation that is obviously laughable: at that time there were many indications of possible attempts on the life of Paolo Borsellino and it would have been enough to question the body guards, five of whom died with him, to find out which were the points most at risk. I ask the Procura di Caltanissetta, and in particular gip Giovanbattista Tona, the reason for the archiving of the investigations relating to the Castello Utveggio line of enquiry, and yet it was exactly from that place where telephone calls were made straight after the attack, from a clone of Borsellino’s mobile phone to dott.Contrada’s mobile, who has finally been convicted by the Court of Cassation for collusion and aiding and abetting.
I ask the same Procura di Caltanissetta, and to the same gip Giovanbattista Tona, the motives for archiving of the enquiry relating to the occult brains behind the slaughters.
For another archiving, the one relating to the happenings of the Fincantieri file I have already sent off an official request for clarification.
I ask the Procura di Caltanissetta not to archive, if he has not already done so, the investigations relating to the disappearance of Paolo’s red diary and to clear up the involvement of all the people, form the police services and others, who were involved with that.
Above all, I ask sen. Nicola Mancino, of whom I remember in the years immediately following 1992, one of his tears, forcibly squeezed out during a commemoration of Paolo in Palermo, a tear about which I was indignant to such a point that I got up and left the room, to search his memory so as to be able to tell us what he talked about in his meeting with Paolo in the days immediately preceding his death.
Or to explain to us why, after telephoning Paolo to meet up with him while he was interrogating Gaspare Mutolo, at only 48 hours form the attack, he instead had him meet up with dott. Parisi, the Police Chief and with dott. Contrada. A meeting from which Paolo left completed turned upside down to such an extent that as Mutolo said, he had in his hands two lit cigarettes at the same time. Otherwise, thanks to the disappearance of Paolo’s red diary, we will never be able to find out.
And in that metting, the key to his death and the slaughter of Via D’Amelio is surely to be found."

Salvatore Borsellino

Posted by Antonio Di Pietro in Justice