State Govt Issues Shoot At Sight’ Orders: The Manipur government has issued “shoot-at-sight orders” as a last resort to control the situation amid spiralling violence in the state between tribals and the majority Meitei community which has displaced over 9,000 people from their villages.
Clashes first broke out on Wednesday in Churachandpur town after tribal Kuki groups called for protests against a proposed tweak to the state’s reservation matrix, granting scheduled tribe (ST) status to the majority Meitei community. Violence quickly engulfed the state where ethnic fault lines run deep, displacing thousands of people who fled burning homes and neighbourhoods.
The violence didn’t abate till late on Thursday evening even as thousands of army and paramilitary personnel fanned across the state, marching through the deserted streets of the state’s violence-hit towns to restore peace, and evacuating at least 9,000 people.
The Indian army in statement late on Thursday said that the situation in the towns of Moreh and Kangpokpi was stable and had been brought under control.
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The Manipur government on Thursday issued “shoot at sight” orders in “extreme cases” after violence in the state spilled over to Imphal. Rapid Action Force (RAF) was flown in and 55 army columns were deployed to contain the spiraling violence.
According to sources, Centre is rushing additional troops to the state. The Indian Air Force (IAF) will airlift forces from Guwahati and Tezpur in Assam. Former CRPF chief Kuldeep Singh has been appointed as the security advisor for Manipur while senior IPS officer Ashutosh Sinha made the overall commander overseeing the peace restoration operations in the state.
Union Home Minister Amit Shah will not be travelling to Manipur today. Mr Shah on Thursday spoke with the chief ministers of Manipur and its neighbouring states and held meetings with top central and state bodies through video conferencing to review the situation in the state.
Although the government is yet to confirm the number of lives lost, if any, or how many have been injured in the clashes, over 9,000 people from various districts have been evacuated and given shelter in special camps. Around 5,000 have been shifted to Churachandpur, another 2,000 people were shifted to Imphal Valley, and 2,000 people to the border town of Moreh.
“The government is taking all measures to maintain the law and order. We are committed to protecting the lives and property of all our people,” Manipur Chief Minister N Biren Singh said on Thursday.
In the wake of the violence, Meghalaya Chief Minister Conrad K Sangma on Thursday directed officials to evacuate students of his state studying in various schools and colleges in Manipur.
The violence began on Wednesday during protests by various tribal groups of Manipur over a court order on Scheduled Tribe status.
The All Tribal Student Union Manipur (ATSUM) called a ‘Tribal Solidarity March’ in Torbung area of Churachandpur district to protest against the non-tribal Meitei community’s demand for a Scheduled tribe status. According to the police, thousands took part in the rally during which violence broke out between some tribal groups and non-tribals.
The Meitei, who are the majority in the state, primarily inhabit the Manipur valley. The Meitei’s claim that they are facing difficulty in view of “large-scale illegal immigration by Myanmarese and Bangladeshis”. As per existing law, the Meiteies are not allowed to settle in the hill areas of the state.
Given the volatile atmosphere in the state, internet services have been suspended across the state till Monday, train operations have been stopped and curfew imposed in non-tribal dominated Imphal West, Kakching, Thoubal, Jiribam and Bishnupur districts and tribal-dominated Churachandpur, Kangpokpi and Tengnoupal districts.
New Delhi: India participated in a two-day closed-door conference on Afghanistan with 20 other countries led by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to discuss the Afghan crisis. The UN was spurred by the deteriorating situation in the landlocked nation to organise the meeting along with the US, Russia, China and other nations.
The UN said that the aim of the meet was to “reinvigorate international engagement around key issues, such as human rights, in particular women’s and girls’ rights, inclusive governance, countering terrorism and drug trafficking. The meeting is intended to achieve a common understanding within the international community on how to engage with the Taliban on these issues”.
The Doha meeting, however, came under criticism from both – the Taliban and also Afghan women for not inviting them both for the discussions.
Suhail Shaheen, the spokesperson for the Taliban said that any meeting without the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA) was discriminatory and unjustified as the Taliban government was the main party.
However, it emerged from Doha that Afghan Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi, who has been banned from travel, will be visiting Pakistani capital Islamabad to hold talks with Pakistani and Chinese foreign ministry officials.
Women’s groups have held protests in Doha, for what they claimed were efforts by the UN to legitimise the Taliban regime despite the throttling of women’s rights in the country. The Taliban, contrary to assurances, after storming back to power in 2021 began steadily curtailing the rights of girls and women to education, stepping out of homes, visiting a doctor, marriage and divorce as well as working for UN agencies. The last one, which was imposed recently, galvanised women’s groups across the world against the Taliban rule.
Afghanistan’s Khaama news agency quoted Swiss ambassador to the UN, Pascale Baeriswyl, as saying that the situation in Afghanistan under the Taliban administration has turned into a complicated dilemma. “We do not have a magic solution to the Afghan crisis”, Baeriswyl said, adding that she is hopeful that the Doha meeting would lead to solutions to managing the Afghan crisis. Switzerland is currently the president of the UN Security Council (UNSC).
The people of Afghanistan continue to face hardships due to the unending conflict, droughts and economic problems, though the Taliban has $7 billion worth of sophisticated US weaponry which the American troops left behind in 2021 after 20 years of the war against terror.
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Buckingham Palace’s picture gallery contains some of the greatest paintings of western civilisation: 16th-century Titians, 17th-century Rembrandts, as well as works by Rubens and Van Dyck, and that rare thing, a Vermeer. Also on display are some of the most spectacular Canaletto vistas of 18th-century Venice.
It is a fine collection to have on the walls if you are member of the royal family. But access is far more limited for the public.
Outside the brief summer season during which it is officially open to the public, an “exclusive guided tour” of the palace provides visitors with about 5-10 minutes in the gallery itself to enjoy the paintings. The cost of a ticket is £90.
Six Canaletto Venice paintings on display at Buckingham Palace during the 2017 Canaletto and the Art of Venice exhibition at The Queen’s Gallery. Photograph: Dominic Lipinski/PA
The accession of King Charles throws a new spotlight on the royal collection.
Acquired by monarchs over generations, it is the last of the European royal art treasure troves to remain more or less intact in the hands of a sovereign. Similar collections in France, Spain, Austria, the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark have been largely ceded to state ownership and to palaces open to the public, or to more freely accessible national museums, either by revolution or by mutual agreement.
Charles III is known for his love of the arts. He has now become owner of the royal collection as king, but not as a private individual. The Windsor family does own a valuable private collection of art, composed in part of pieces that were bought by the Queen Mother or Prince Philip. But the royal collection is “held in trust by The King in right of the Crown for his Successors and the Nation” – or so the Royal Collection Trust (RCT), the charitable body set up in 1993 to manage it, says with a liberal sprinkling of Royal Capital Letters on its website.
We do not yet know what Charles’s promise of a slimmed-down modern monarchy will mean for the royal artworks. The director of the collection, who is appointed as a senior member of the royal household, declined to give an interview. But important questions remain about its status.
Canaletto’s Venice: The Punta della Dogana and S. Giorgio Maggiore, part of the royal collection. Photograph: Royal Collection
According to the RCT website, the collection comprises more than 1m works, ranging from paintings and sculpture to furniture, carpets, china and ornaments. Only about a quarter of that number, roughly 280,000, are so far catalogued in the RCT’s online database – the trust said that it had given priority to the most significant artworks in developing the catalogue. Of the quarter that are catalogued, just 4% (10,407) are entered with a location tag that enables the public to find out where they may be seen.
The royal collection contains a vast range of works of varying interest. Leaving aside the pen wipers, branding irons and bonbon dishes listed in the database, the Guardian has analysed the status, whereabouts and accessibility of the indisputable masterpieces of painting that the collection contains.
Just a quarter of the 5,641 paintings it has are given a location tag, meaning they are on show to the public. And many of those that are tagged are in palaces or residences that are open only for a short time each year.
Jerry Brotton, a historian and author of a book about the chequered history of the royal collection called The Sale of the Late King’s Goods: Charles I and his Art Collection, argues that the public should have much greater access to what is in effect national art. “The royal collection is not ‘heritage’, it’s art. If you treat it as heritage and an adjunct of royalty, it is reduced to a bibelot, a load of trinkets. We don’t even know where a lot of the stuff is.”
Tracking down the treasures
It takes a bit of detective work to find the RCT’s untagged treasures. For example, the royal collection includes the world’s largest and finest holding of work by Canaletto. Famous for their brilliant evocations of light and space, and for shifting perspectives that improved the view, Canaletto’s paintings of Venice were the ultimate picture-postcard souvenir for wealthy British aristocratic travellers on their Grand Tour of European culture in the 1700s. George III bought 52 of Canaletto’s best oils and a significant body of his drawings in 1762.
Of the 52 paintings by Canaletto listed in the RCT catalogue, only 24 are at identified locations: 12 luminous views of the Grand Canal are in a small room down a corridor off the Cumberland Gallery in Hampton Court Palace (adult entry fee £26.10), and another 12 are in Buckingham Palace (£90, or £30 in August and September), although not all of those are in the visitable picture gallery. Others are in rooms closed to the general public. The whereabouts of 28 other great paintings by the Venetian master are not revealed in the online catalogue.
However, the Guardian has managed to track down one. It is rare to get a glimpse inside the royals’ private residences but a promotional photograph taken during a BBC 5 interview revealed that one of these Canalettos has been enjoyed by Edward and Sophie, now Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh, in the drawing room of their private Bagshot Park home.
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An exhibition mounted at Buckingham Palace to mark Charles’s 70th birthday in 2018 revealed that one his favourite paintings in the royal collection was a breathtaking work by Johan Zoffany that took six years to complete between 1772 and 1777. The Tribuna of the Uffizi is a tour-de-force representation of the domed gallery of that name in the Uffizi museum in Florence. In it, Zoffany reproduced dozens of famous paintings and classical sculptures in the style of their master creators through the ages.
Johan Zoffany’s Tribuna of the Uffizi, understood to be in the Grand Corridor at Windsor Castle. Photograph: Royal Collection
The painting has made appearances in exhibitions in 2009 and 2016 and, given its significance, might be expected to be on permanent public view. But the RCT catalogue is silent on the Tribuna’s whereabouts and the trust declined to say where it was. The Guardian understands it is in the Grand Corridor at Windsor Castle, where the king can enjoy it in his private quarters.
With such a surfeit of masterpieces, it is perhaps no surprise that some should hang in private apartments. Robin Simon, an art historian and editor of The British Art Journal, says the question of who has what, and which pieces the public should be permitted to see, is “deliberately very murky”. “A clear distinction was never made between privately owned works and the royal collection … It definitely happens that a royal would like a particular picture and it would go into private rooms to be enjoyed personally. And why not?”
One answer to that “why not” question came in the form of a controversy that erupted in 2016, when the then Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, William and Catherine, hosted the Obamas in the drawing room of their newly refurbished Kensington Palace apartment.
Barack Obama, Prince William, Michelle Obama, Catherine, the then Duchess of Cambridge, and Prince Harry at Kensington Palace in 2016. Aelbert Cuyp’s painting can be seen in the background. Photograph: Stephen Crowley/AFP/Getty Images
The couple had a valuable work by Marco Ricci, a Canaletto contemporary, adorning one wall. Dominating the room on another wall was a vast equestrian landscape from the royal collection by the 17th Dutch master Aelbert Cuyp, featuring a young black boy holding two noblemen’s horses. The painting is known as “the Negro page” from the label in its gilt frame; a pot plant was said to have been placed judiciously in front of the description, but the couple’s choice led to accusations of racial insensitivity. A spokesperson for the palace said the painting had been removed from the apartment several years ago, but declined to say where it was now.
Prince Andrew, although no longer a working royal, also appears to have had the benefit of various royal collection works, including a 19th-century oil portrait of Eugenie, Empress of the French and wife of Napoleon III, by Édouard Boutibonne, which has hung in his Royal Lodge residence. Andrew himself advertised for a maid in 2011 who, for £16,000 a year, would be expected to make beds and draw baths in the lodge, while also dusting “objets d’art” and looking after “picture frames under advice from the royal collection”.
A 19th-century oil portrait of Eugenie, Empress of the French and wife of Napoleon III, by Édouard Boutibonne, which has hung in Prince Andrew’s Royal Lodge residence. Photograph: Royal Collection
It has been reported that the king is considering opening Buckingham Palace for much longer periods to increase access and revenue. Opening it to the paying public for the first time was driven by a need to raise £40m to restore Windsor Castle after a devastating fire in 1992. This royal fundraiser, managed by the RCT, brought in £16.45m in the financial year 2018-19, before Covid closures drove the trust into deficit.
The paying public may have contributed millions of pounds towards the maintenance of the royal inheritance, but resources still appear to be inadequate . One of the most important series of paintings in the royal collection has been out of view for years thanks to a leaky roof.
A ‘dead’ collection?
The series of giant canvases by Andrea Mantegna, which have been described by experts as “the greatest masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance outside Italy” and a “landmark in western art”, were acquired by Charles I, the first great British connoisseur monarch.
Mantegna painted the Triumphs of Caesar series between 1485 and 1506, depicting imagined scenes from the Roman emperor’s triumphal processions. The Mantegnas were taken to Hampton Court Palace by Charles I and have remained there since.
They were housed in recent years in a gallery created in the Orangery, which had to be closed in 2020 and whose roof is leaking. It is not expected to reopen before 2026. Luckily the paintings were not damaged. Historic Royal Palaces, the charity that runs the unoccupied royal palaces, depends on admissions for most of its funding. “We lost most of our income with Covid, so we have to phase expenditure,” a spokesperson explained. It took HRP 12 years to repair the roof in another part of the Tudor palace.
The RCT is sensitive to criticism that the public has too little access to the collection and has put emphasis on increasing educational and loan programmes in recent years.
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After the Guardian’s inquiries about the Mantegnas, the RCT said last week that the king had just agreed to lend six of the nine paintings in the series to the National Gallery to exhibit for a period from this autumn, although the details were still being discussed. Two others in the series have just been put back on show in a new location in Hampton Court and one is with RCT conservators.
Loans are also made from the print room at Windsor Castle, which is home to the royal collection of prints and drawings, including the world’s most important grouping of Leonardo drawings. The room is not open to the public – the 600 priceless Leonardos, along with hundreds of Holbeins, Hogarths, Canalettos and more, have to be kept in an atmosphere-controlled environment to preserve them – but the trust team host student visits, and are expanding the digital catalogue. They also manage the frequent dispatch of fragile works for external exhibitions.
Martin Clayton, the RCT’s head of prints and drawings, is the leading authority on Leonardo drawings. It would be “irresponsible” to have them on permanent public display, he said, because they would rapidly deteriorate. Instead selected works are lent in rotation to major exhibitions and in manageable groups of 10-12 to galleries around the UK, where they had attracted huge audiences and often served to “revitalise local arts venues”, Clayton added.
A spokesperson for The RCT said: “The aims of the trust are the care and conservation of the royal collection, and the promotion of access and enjoyment through exhibitions, publications, short- and long-term loans, educational programmes and digital initiatives.” Funding of its work comes from admissions and sales rather than government and the collection is a living and working one, “spread among some 15 royal residences and former residences across the UK, most of which are regularly open to the public”, the spokesperson added.
For Brotton, the historian, the effect of the collection being held by the sovereign rather than the nation is the opposite, however. He argues that it has become a “dead” collection. “There’s precious little serious new acquisition and no showing of the collection’s art in context, so that the public and art critics can evaluate it, and debate its merits and significance against other art movements in the way that new exhibitions elsewhere shed new light on key artists.” He would like to see Charles III follow the example of Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s consort, who gave priceless Raphael cartoons for tapestries to the V&A museum on permanent loan for the public to see.
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
Riyadh: The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s Supreme Court on Friday called on all Muslims living in the kingdom to sight the crescent moon of Shawwal 1444, 2023 on Thursday evening, 29 Ramzan corresponding to April 20.
In an announcement, the Kingdom’s court called on Muslims who sight the moon with the naked eye, or through binoculars to report to the nearest court and register their testimonies, or report to the nearest centre that can contact a court.
If Thursday, April 20, is the last day of Ramzan, Shawwal will fall on Friday, April 21, as the Islamic month is 29 or 30 days long according to the lunar calendar. But, if it completes 30 days, Shawwal will fall on Saturday, April 22.
The sighting of the crescent of Shawwal will also mark the day of Eid Al-Fitr which will begin either fall on Friday or Saturday.
What is Shawwal?
In Islam, Shawwal is the tenth month of the Islamic calendar, also known as the Hijri calendar or lunar calendar consisting of twelve months beginning with Muharram, and ending with Zul-Hijjah. Each month starts with the sighting of the moon. Eid Al Fitr, on the other hand, marks the end of the month-long fast.
The calendar has been observed for more than 1,440 years and is used to date important Islamic events including the start of Ramzan, Eid-Al-Fitr, and the beginning of the Haj.
The month of Shawwal is also of special importance to the Muslims. It is during this month that Allah has bestowed the Eid-ul-Fitr celebration. The month is considered to be Allah’s reward for the successful completion of Ramzan.
Fasting for a period of six days in the month of Shawwal is of immense virtue to the Muslims. It also compensates for any short falling that one might have made during the fasting of Ramzan.
At 8.20am last Monday, Andrea Bonafede was queueing at the check-in of a private medical clinic in Palermo, Sicily. Suffering from colon cancer and thought to be 59, he had already undergone two operations and chemotherapy at the clinic, often bringing the staff presents of olive oil and exchanging phone numbers, and text messages, with his fellow patients. He was known to dress in flashy clothes: that morning he was wearing a sheepskin coat, a white hat, Ray-Ban shades and an expensive Franck Muller watch.
Waiting for his Covid test, he went outside and walked towards the Fiat Brava, and the driver, that had brought him there. The undercover officers watching him worried that he had realised he was under surveillance and that he might be about to bolt. A colonel from the Carabinieri, Italy’s militarised police, decided to move in: “Are you Matteo Messina Denaro?”
“You know who I am,” came the weary reply.
A police composite photo of mafia top boss Matteo Messina Denaro, left; and, right, as he looks today. Photograph: AP
The 150 police and Carabinieri who had been in position inside and outside the clinic suddenly sprang into action. Totò Schillaci, the former international footballer from Palermo, was caught up in the blitz, later comparing it to “a madhouse, a wild west”. Armed forces in balaclavas burst out of unmarked vehicles and blocked exit routes and streets. After 30 years on the run, Italy’s most wanted man – nicknamed U Siccu, or “Skinny” – had finally been captured.
Realising what was happening, members of the public began to applaud. Some high-fived the men in balaclavas. In less than an hour, the arrest of Messina Denaro was front-page news across the globe. The Italian president, Sergio Mattarella (whose brother, Piersanti, was murdered by the mafia in 1980 when he was governor of Sicily) thanked the police and prosecutors. The prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, immediately flew to Palermo to congratulate the special forces on capturing the man who had helped plan a terrorist-style bombing campaign across Italy in 1992 and 1993.
In those years, as the certainties of the First Republic disintegrated, the standoff between the Italian state and Cosa Nostra had turned into violent confrontation. Two dogged investigators, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, had persuaded a former mobster, Tommaso Buscetta, to turn state’s witness. The mafia’s secretive organisation and political connections were, for the first time, clearly revealed. In mass trials, 338 mafiosi were convicted.
When those sentences were upheld on appeal, the mafia took its brutal revenge: their political protector, Salvo Lima, was executed in March 1992 and later that year both investigators were killed in very public bombings on the island. Falcone, his wife and three bodyguards were murdered on the road between the airport and Palermo in May; Borsellino was murdered in Palermo in July, along with five bodyguards, as he visited his sister and mother. Messina Denaro was involved in the operational planning of both bombings.
The following year the terror campaign turned to the mainland. At 1.04am on 27May 1993, a bomb exploded outside the Uffizi gallery, in Via dei Georgofili in Florence, destroying various works of art and killing five people, including a nine-year-old girl, Nadia, and her two-month-old sister. Two months later, on 27July, a bomb outside a contemporary art gallery in Milan killed five; the next day, there were two further bombs in Rome, this time without victims. Messina Denaro was convicted, in absentia, of having also ordered and planned the mainland bombing campaign.
The scene outside the Uffizi art gallery after the 1993 bombing, in which five people were killed. Photograph: Sipa/REX/Shutterstock
Born in 1962 in the province of Trapani, Matteo Messina Denaro is the son of a convicted mobster who had worked for the wealthy D’Alì family. He became the protege of Totò Riina, the boss of bosses, and was renowned for being both a party-loving womaniser and a ruthless killer. He fell in love with an Austrian woman working in a hotel in Selinunte and when her manager, Nicola Consales, was overheard complaining about the “little mafiosi” who were lounging around the hotel, he was – in Palermo in 1991 – shot dead.
A year later, another mobster complained about Riina’s strategy of a frontal assault on the Italian state. Messina Denaro invited Vincenzo Milazzo to a meeting, shot him, and strangled his pregnant partner, Antonella Bonomo. Later that year, he was part of the group that attempted to murder a policeman, Calogero Germanà. When one mafioso turned state’s witness, Messina Denaro was part of the cupola – the group of top mafia bosses – that ordered the kidnap of his 12-year-old son, Giuseppe di Matteo. The boy was held captive for 779 days before being strangled and dissolved in acid. Messina Denaro once boasted that he had killed enough people to fill a cemetery.
But during his three decades in hiding, Messina Denaro also took the mafia in a new direction. Drive-by executions and semtex bombings guaranteed only crackdowns and bad headlines, and U Siccu had seen how the Calabrian mafia, the ‘Ndrangheta, had enriched itself by quietly infiltrating and investing in legitimate businesses. Messina Denaro put his dirty money into clean energy, using an unknown electrician as a front to build a wind-power empire worth €1.5bn. He created a €700m chain of 83 shops through another frontman.
Investigators became suspicious about various builders and salami-makers who were suddenly making millions through slot machines, stolen archaeological treasures, transport hubs, building companies and tourist resorts and so they began arresting those they suspected of being fronts for the Sicilian “Scarlet Pimpernel”. In 2011 alone, they arrested 140 suspected sidekicks and frontmen, a few of whom flipped and gave investigators insights into Messina Denaro’s business empire.
But the man himself remained elusive. Investigators didn’t even know what he looked like. There was only a photograph from 1993 which had been artificially aged. The operation to locate him was called Tramonto (“sunset”), named after a poem written by the nine-year-old Nadia who had been killed in Florence. The breakthrough came when wiretaps of his relatives revealed Messina Denaro had colon cancer. Investigators obtained lists of all patients aged over 55 undergoing oncological treatment for the disease in the provinces of Agrigento, Palermo and Trapani.
Giuseppe di Matteo, who was murdered on Messina Denaro’s watch.
Of the possible matches, one stood out: Andrea Bonafede was the name of a man on the fringes of the mafia and it emerged that when he was supposed to be on the operating table in Palermo, his phone actually revealed his presence in Campobello di Mazara, near Trapani. The obvious conclusion was that Bonafede had lent his identity to someone who couldn’t reveal their own. On 29December, “Bonafede” booked an appointment in the Palermo clinic for 16January and when, last Monday morning, the real Bonafede remained at home, the authorities decided to act.
But despite the initial euphoria at the capture of the famous fugitive, details of his life on the run have shocked the country in the last week. Looking surprisingly similar to the artificially aged photograph, Messina Denaro was living openly in Campobello di Mazara, next to his birthplace in Castelvetrano. He used to go regularly to the local bar, pizzeria and even, according to reports, to Palermo’s football stadium. The Viagra found in his flat suggests he had company. One doctor who was treating him took selfies as if he knew he was in the presence of a star. In a town of just over 11,000 people, Messina Denaro was referred for treatment by a GP (known to be a member of a local masonic lodge) who presumably knew the real Bonafede.
“He was hiding in plain sight,” says Federico Varese, a professor of criminology at the University of Oxford, and author of Mafia Life. “It is extraordinary and disconcerting that it took 30 years to arrest this man and that speaks to one fact: there was no help from local informants because of a deep mistrust of people in this part of Italy towards institutions of the state.” Another former fugitive, mafia boss Bernardo Provenzano, was able to elude capture for 43 years.
But more than just the passive omertà, or silence, of the local community, many investigators spoke last week about active collusion. Pasquale Angelosanto, the commander of the elite troops behind the Tramonto operation, lamented how the long hunt had been “marked by politicians, law enforcement officers and state officials being arrested or investigated for warning the boss that the circle was closing in”. Repeatedly authorities thought an arrest was imminent, only to be foiled at the last minute: on one occasion, police burst into the suspected meeting place in Bagheria where Messina Denaro was thought to be meeting one of his lovers, Maria Masi. They found only fresh caviar, a scarf, a bracelet, Merit cigarettes and a jigsaw, all hastily abandoned.
The suspicion of an overlap between institutional figures and organised crime has deepened in recent months: in December last year, Antonio D’Alì – a former under-secretary at the interior ministry during Silvio Berlusconi’s 2001-06 government – was convicted for “external complicity with the mafia”. Both Messina Denaro and his father had worked for the D’Alì family. In September 2022, Totò Cuffaro, a former governor of the island who spent almost five years in prison for “aiding and abetting” Cosa Nostra and breaching investigative secrecy, stood for re-election. His party or “list” won five seats in the regional assembly. In an on-going trial, many other politicians stand accused of negotiating with the mafia in those crisis years of 1992-93.
The faint hope that the captured man might collaborate with the authorities and reveal some of the secrets of that dark period has also receded. The decision to appoint his niece, a notorious defender of mafiosi, as his lawyer suggests he will not make any revelations or confessions. Nor is there much hope that the organisation will be significantly weakened. “Mafias are not reducible to their ‘bosses’,” wrote Luigi Ciotti, a lifelong anti-mafia campaigner, last week: “[they have] developed into a lattice of organisations capable of making up for the disappearance of one individual through the strength of the system.”
“The longevity of this criminal organisation is extraordinary,” says Varese. “It has been around since the 1830s, far longer than most businesses. We need to ask what is being done to get rid us not just of the head, but of the root causes of the mafia.”
Tobias Jones lives in Parma. His most recent book isThe Po: An Elegy for Italy’s Longest River
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
