By IPS Correspondents
ROME, Oct 26 1999 (IPS)

Italy’s political right-wing is trying to take advantage of the absolution of seven-time prime minister Giulio Andreotti, who had been charged with mafia ties, and turn the court decision around to demand an end to all legal proceedings against their own political representatives.

A Palermo city court announced its sentence over the weekend, absolving senator-for-life Andreotti, one of post-war Italy’s most important political figures, whose trial was based on the confessions of 38 “repentant” criminals.

Italy’s right-wing and centre-right political parties are attempting to prove, using the Andreotti case as an example, that the testimonies of “mafiosos” and other criminals cannot be trusted.

The people offering these testimonies have agreed to collaborate with legal authorities in exchange for reduced prison sentences and protection. Their confessions have been a powerful instrument in the anti-mafia fight.

The Palermo court verdict could turn into a condemnation of the 1,148 “repentants,” or collaborators, covered by the Interior Ministry’s witness protection programme.

Though the court announced it would not release the arguments behind its Andreotti decision for 90 days, the political right- wing has already focused its offensive against judges investigating its party representatives and their “repentant” accusers.

Gianfranco Fini, president of the rightist Alleanza Nazionale, said that Andreotti’s absolution is “the definitive condemnation of judicial theories based on some repentants’ testimonies and on some judges’ aspirations for a leading political role.”

The leader of the opposition Polo per la Libertá coalition, Silvio Berlusconi, who has also been accused of mafia ties, declared “we must put an end to the judicial revolution that has spread like a cancer through our political life.”

Berlusconi also attacked the attorneys and judges who earlier this decade led Operation Clean Hands against corruption in political parties.

These lawyers and magistrates “provoked the dissolution of parties that had guaranteed 50 years of democracy, opening the way for the heirs of an ideology (communism) to take power with hundreds of thousands of deaths on its conscience.”

The centre-left parties leading the current government “are by no means democratic,” he said.

Operation Clean Hands led to trials of leaders from the Christian Democrat (DC) and Socialist parties, two groups that had governed Italy for 50 years but were unable to survive the judicial offensive.

The reinstatement of Andreotti, the DC’s historic leader, has led to speculation about the party’s reconstruction, as had been proposed by Enzo Carra, the right-hand of the DC’s last party secretary, Arnaldo Forlani.

“We must immediately organise a meeting with all who belong to groups arising from the DC,” stated Carra.

Several movements came out of the rubble of the DC’s 1993 dissolution – some aligned with the political right, and others with the left.

Berlusconi also asked for the reinstatement of former prime minister and socialist leader Bettino Craxi, who fled to Tunisia after the courts found him guilty of corruption.

Right-wing political representatives themselves demanded the resignation of Palermo city attorney, Giancarlo Caselli, who was in charge of the Andreotti investigations.

Leonardo Vitale was the first mafioso-turned-collaborator – a very religious and melancholic young man arrested in the early 1970s, obsessed with the memory of a white horse he was forced to shoot with a rifle.

Vitale was declared mentally ill, spent six years in a psychiatric hospital, and upon his release was assassinated by the Sicilian mafia. He had identified Toto Riina as the secret organisation’s leader.

The next collaborator was Tommaso Buscetta, whose 1984 capture resulted in arrest warrants for 366 mafia members.

Judge Giovanni Falcone, head of the Buscetta case, paid for his investigations in 1992 with his life. But soon after his assassination, hundreds of mafia members broke the organisation’s code of silence.

Marcello Dell’ Ultri, member of the European parliament and a Berlusconi confidante, declared full confidence in obtaining absolution, as Andreotti had done.

At the request of the Palermo city attorney, Dell’ Ultri faced trial for associating with the mafia.

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