What remains of democracy? Egypt, Italy and ‘the lesser evil’ after Giulio Regeni
Protest demanding justice for the death of Giulio Regeni and other victims of the Al Sisi government in Egypt. Rome, Italy, on February 13, 2016. Ronchini Andrea/ Press Association. All rights reserved.Two years
after the murder of Giulio Regeni, the truth finally seems at hand. Or at least
we know where to look for it: in the murky academic environments of the
University of Cambridge which cynically used the researcher, Giulio Regeni, to
build a pro-Islamist conspiracy, perhaps even an anti-Italian conspiracy.
The fact
that Regeni was killed in Cairo and not in Cambridge might be thought to be relevant,
but even on that front as well, there is good news: the Egyptian Prosecutor, spurred
on by the Italian government, has forwarded important papers to Rome, thus
proving – as Interior Minister Minniti avows – the will of Al-Sisi to cooperate
in the quest for the truth, from which clearly Field Marshal Sisi has nothing to
fear.
This is
roughly the sum of what has been read and heard in recent days, and it is
enough to urgently ask the question which for two years has been hovering over this
all-but-obscure affair: does Italy still have a news media, or has it decided stoically
to do without? Retracing the contortions that Italian journalism has been
capable of, we might well say the latter.
The arrest
and murder of Giulio Regeni are overall uncomplicated, transparent events.
Apparently reported on by an informant to the Egyptian secret services out of personal
revenge or due to some misunderstanding, Regeni was arrested on the day most
feared by the regime – January 25, the anniversary of the Egyptian revolution, later
extinguished by the coup of 2013 – and in the vicinity of a highly symbolic
place, Tahrir Square, where the Uprising began[1].
The security
apparatus that held the researcher tortured him for seven days and finally
deliberately ended his life (with a karate chop, as the autopsy ascertained),
probably to avoid him recounting what he had suffered. It is probable that the elimination
of a westerner required the authorization of al-Sisi himself. In any case, the
regime has been immovable in refusing to accept blame for that death. But after
many uncouth lies, when it finally decided to concoct a convincing version of
events, it ended up exposing itself. At the end of March 2016, almost two
months after Giulio Regeni’s death, the police blamed the murder on five
Egyptians who died in a strange 'gunfight' with security agents.
However, when
the Italian embassy and the Regeni family lawyer, the combative Alessandra
Ballerini, scrutinised events, it emerged that the researcher’s documents – which
according to the regime had been found in the home of one of the Egyptians killed
and which were thereby deemed to provide 'proof' of their responsibility – had in
fact been planted there by a police officer. An officer whose name the Rome
Public Prosecutor has since discovered.
This stunning
own goal forced the Italian media and its many ‘muses’ to abandon the thesis which
had until then been advanced by major newspapers and news outlets: namely that Regeni
had been killed by enemies of Italy and of al-Sisi in order to ruin the
fruitful friendship that has been woven between Rome and Cairo. Al-Sisi himself
had made this narrative his own in an interview with La Repubblica (Italy’s second largest broadsheet) in which he recalled
the many reasons that made this friendship precious to Italy, from ENI's gas
fields to Egypt’s influence in Eastern Libya, as well as the mutual friendship
and esteem that bound him personally to Prime Minister Matteo Renzi.
At the time,
almost all Italian news media aligning themselves with Renzi’s position, ENI became
a great publicist,
and in the eyes of many journalists al-Sisi still appeared to be the 'lesser
evil', a 'pro-Western' tyrant who keeps 'the Muslims' at bay with an unavoidable
brutality. The sum of these factors resulted in highly selective news, built on
the refusal to acknowledge the relation between Giulio Regeni’s murder and the
methods of a putchist regime which had announced itself to the world by massacring
1,200 demonstrators and butchering hundreds more within its torture chambers.
Yet our sole
interest must be confined to the death of Giulio Regeni, at least officially.
So, if for example al-Sisi were to hand over three unsavoury types, we would
return to greeting him, as Renzi did, as 'great friend', a 'statesman', and a 'saviour
of the Mediterranean'. But since even this tactical withdrawal does not seem to
be in the intentions of the regime, it is becoming complicated for the Italian
government to reconcile two clearly contrasting goals, namely not to irritate
Cairo while simultaneously pretending to maintain its commitment to an unfailing
desire for truth.
This is the
context in which what we might call 'the Cambridge hypothesis' emerges. Espoused
by former Prime Minister Matteo Renzi and by Foreign Minister Angelo Alfano in
a thundering volley of pronouncements, it suggests that Regeni's PhD supervisor
has hidden the secret of his death, now presumed to be a conspiratorial masterplan
lubricated by ten thousand pounds. There are nebulous investigative accounts
which allude to this, in which whatever seems certain in the first paragraph
becomes highly doubtful by the third.
Instead,
even a basic knowledge of Egypt would suggest that the only context in which a
conspiracy against Sisi can really take shape is at the summit of the military
regime, which is certainly not within the reach of Cambridge academics. But presenting
Regeni as the victim of some sort of score-settling between Egyptian secret
services[3]
appears to diminish the scandal of his death.
And shifting
attention to the 'university track' helps justify al-Sisi’s return as our valued
interlocutor[4].
In December, Italian newspapers reported without betraying even the least
hesitation, that the dictator expressed to the Minister of the Interior Minniti
his "sincere wish" to obtain "definitive results" in the
investigation.
In turn,
Minniti stuck to the script: he reiterated that Italy "demands the
truth" and hailed the delivery of new documents to Italian investigators
as proof of renewed collaboration. There was little of substance in those documents,
but this fact was withheld from the media’s trusting readers.
The
important thing was for the farce to continue, since nobody knows how to close
it down. But when information becomes theatre by commission, when it is reduced
to the recitation of texts suggested by powerful patrons, or at least a docile
instrument of the system[5],
what remains of a democracy?
[1] Protests started in the areas surrounding Cairo’s city centre, and
elsewhere across the country – protests were unprecedented both in scale and in
their nationwide geographical coverage.
[3] One of the early
‘theories’ explaining Giulio Regeni’s death was that part of Egypt’s
intelligence services wanted to discredit Sisi, and killed Regeni as a way of
embarrassing him before Italian authorities (an Italian trade delegation was in
Cairo the day his body was found). This theory originated in the Egyptian
press, and has all the hallmarks of disinformation typically seeded by regimes
like Egypt’s.
[4] This is a reference to the highly controversial decision by the Rome
government to return the Italian ambassador to Cairo – a decision announced on August
14th, perhaps Italy’s biggest public holiday, when nearly everyone
is on holiday and few people are following the news. It should be noted that
the decision was announced to the Regeni family a mere 15 minutes before it was
officially communicated.
[5]
The original says
“sistema-Paese”, literally “system-Country”, which here means something similar
to the Arabic nizaam (regime,
system). The meaning is a corporatist management of all aspects of a country’s
economic and public life.
This
piece by Guido Rampoldi, published in its original version in Il Fatto
Quotidiano, on January 23, 2018, is translated into English by Andrea Teti, published here by kind permission of the author.