The American Author of "The Italian Guillottine" Gives His Interpreations on "Mani Pulite"

by Stanton H. Burnett*

Ten years ago polls showed that Antonio Di Pietro was on his way to becoming the most popular public figure in Italy. The “approval rating” of the Milan pool of magistrates was around 90%. Ten years ago Bettino Craxi was becoming the most vilified figure in Italian public life; a menacing crowd would surround him outside the Hotel Raphael near Piazza Navona in Rome.
What was beginning was not a revolution, as some American writers labeled it. It did not give birth, really, to a “Second Republic.” (The constitution is still in place. The form of government of post-war Italian democracy remains largely unchanged.) But a bloody (thirty suicides) and ongoing palace coup was being launched, one that destroyed all of the five parties that participated in the governing of Italy since 1947 (the pentapartito), destroyed politically all of their leaders, and along the way took down important segments of the leadership of Italian business and industry. Its text-book was not Rousseau or Lenin, but Macbeth.
It took some time for the shape of the coup to become visible through the vigilante fog that descended on the country. When Craxi testified (in the Cusani trial) that his party had, in fact, accepted funding which was probably in violation of the (opaquely vague) campaign financing laws, and all the other parties did the same thing, and demanded to know why the magistrates were not pursuing the luxuriously-financed Communist Party with equal vigor, a fresh load of venom was dumped on the maligned Socialist leader. Now, few question the truth of Craxi’s declarations or the aptness of his questions.
What had happened had had its real beginning well over ten years ago. A small group of hard, determined, radicalized magistrates, with some colleagues (most notably Di Pietro himself), were launching the fire storm that they had promised Italy twenty years earlier via flaming declarations coming out of meetings of Magistratura democratica, the far left wing of that spectrum of parties (for they are, truly, parties) into which the Italian magistracy is divided. They used some extraordinary anomalies in the judicial system to attack certain parties, while protecting others, and to attack selected business leaders, while protecting others. Their own statements during Mani pulite spoke of revolution, of being available to rule if the politicians couldn’t do the job, and of the real job having been completed as soon as an enemy politician, perhaps just on receiving notice that he was being investigated, resigned his posts and withdrew from politics. By their own admission, the presentation of evidence, the trial, and the sentencing, were just uninteresting details after the political task had been accomplished.
This view of Mani pulite, antithetical to the popular passions of the early 1990s, is now generally accepted. Those who question it are more involved in party polemics or self-protection than in serious analysis. There is of course a third, quite respectable, view that, terrible as some of the abuses may have been, Mani pulite performed a necessary cleansing function, achieved an end that justified some rather terrible means.
It did not go entirely smoothly. The Milan magistrates were so exuberant in their decapitation that a vacuum was left into which, to their obvious astonishment, a businessman named Berlusconi walked in the winter of 1993-4, winning the election the following April. But it only took the magistrates seven months to destroy the first Berlusconi government via the famous delivery of an avviso di garanzia to the prime minister while he was chairing a UN conference (on criminality) in Naples. Corriere della Sera received the avviso and published before it was delivered to Pres. Berlusconi. Admittedly, his coalition had other problems which probably would have proven fatal. The first Berlusconi government was, for the magistrates and their intended beneficiaries, a mere bump in the road - until the Center Right had re-gathered its forces for the fresh political effort which gave the country Berlusconi II.
The political situation with which Italy has been left, ten years later, is known to all; in the end, the magistrates’ coup had enormous destructive force but no long-term constructive capacity. The judicial and law-enforcement situation is, however, less broadly understood, although the ten years have produced a significant increase in intelligent commentary on the problem.
It is unlikely that the particular combination of political factors that produced the magistrates’ historic coup will be repeated. But the eccentricities of the Italian judicial system that made it possible are still in place, still giving free rein to even the most politicized magistrates, still permitting the use of long preventive detention for investigation and even, now, punishment (where magistrates believe that a white-collar criminal will never really be punished by the courts), with prosecutors and judges who are close professional colleagues still tilting the system strongly against the defense, in favor of investigation and prosecution. Italy remains the only major Western country where acquittals can be appealed, leading to limitless jeopardy for Giulio Andreotti (as we have just seen) and all citizens.
Ten years after the historic wielding of this judicial weapon to decapitate Italy’s political and business leadership, the Left is finally beginning to realize that this system, much of which remains unchanged from the Fascists' codes which permitted untrammeled investigation, is too dangerous to leave unreformed. One could be optimistic that the two major coalitions might finally get together on serious reform, but they are talking two different languages. The government is most interested in controlling magistrates, while the opposition promotes systemic tinkering too limited to offend its favorite magistrates.
If deep reform is unlikely, where does any hope lie for the Italian citizen who might at any time fall into the clutches of this exceptional and terrifying system? Largely with that power that keeps many other judicial systems respectable: transparency and information. Journalists must be able to investigate and write about cases of preventive detention without becoming targets of the hyperactive factory of law suits and criminal charges with which the Milan magistrates have sought (mostly successfully) to intimidate journalists and scholars. Magistrates, on the other hand, must be permitted proper public comment on issues of the law without end-of-the-world sirens going off. The press and other observers must be permitted to look at the politics of the magistrates’ operations, to weigh and analyze them, to make them topics of public debate.
A genuinely free press is not perfect protection, but it’s the best there is in many countries. For some Italian parliamentarians (e.g., President of Senate Pera, Minister “Rapporti con il Parlamento” Giovanardi), the need for this transparency is a crucial lesson of these ten years, and they are acting on the lesson.

*Dr. Stanton H. Burnett, is Senior Adviser at the Center for Strategic & International Studies in Washington and author, with Luca Mantovani, of “The Italian Guillottine” (Rowman & Littlefield Publishing, 1998)