In conjunction with the fortieth anniversary of la strage di Ustica, Cora Ranci's book provides a detailed historical account that sheds some light on what, today, still remains an unsolved tragedy in the history of the Italian republic. On the evening of 27 June 1980, an Itavia DC-9 plane travelling between Bologna and Palermo mysteriously crashed into the Tyrrhenian sea surrounding the island of Ustica (Sicily), minutes after it had started manoeuvring to land. Eighty-one people lost their lives in what soon appeared to be a massacre for which those responsible have still to be identified.
Although such a catastrophic event has, for decades, sparked a huge number of investigations by the media and, more significantly, by the law, there has not as yet been any attempt to offer a historical reconstruction that could provide a broader interpretation.
To fill this gap, the author examines la strage di Ustica by adopting three different perspectives, which frame the structure of the book. While in chapter one the focus is on the event itself, in the second chapter Ranci examines the international geopolitical context within which the massacre was carried out to conclude, in chapters three and four, by exploring the many obstacles encountered by the victims’ families and by a minority of the press seeking a plausible explanation. By combining these three approaches, the author offers a comprehensive account of, on the one hand, what occurred that night in the sky above the Tyrrhenian Sea, and on the other, the reason why, four decades later, there are still only hypotheses on both the causes of and responsibility for the massacre.
Accordingly, the book begins by establishing the few known facts that have emerged despite numerous attempts to impede and mislead investigations. Whereas, ever since the day of the tragedy, both military and government authorities have explained it as the result of either a structural failure of the plane or the detonation of an explosive device planted inside it, in reality, as two decades of legal investigations have proved, the Itavia DC-9 became involved in a major military operation that night and presumably crashed because it was mistakenly shot down by, or as the result of a near-collision with, a military jet.
Although neither the nature of that military operation nor the nationalities of the jets involved have ever been identified, in the second chapter, the author tries to find some answers in the international geopolitical context of the tragedy. The beginning of the 1980s was characterised by the return to an intense phase of the Cold War, inaugurated by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, which made the Mediterranean Sea a risk zone that many countries wanted to control.
Within this vast chessboard of players and manoeuvres, Ranci identifies the provocative attitude and actions of the Libyan leader, Gaddafi, towards Western powers such as the USA, France and the UK, and, more importantly, the ambiguous stance taken by Italy, due to its closeness to and vast economic interest in its ex-colony, as the key factors behind la strage di Ustica and, more broadly, behind the decades of misdirection on the part of the Italian institutions to prevent the truth emerging.
It is in the third chapter, Anatomia di un depistaggio, with the support of the vast amount of documentation available and information which has recently been declassified by Italian institutions, that the author gives the reader a detailed analysis of the systemic conspiracy of silence built around the massacre first and foremost by the Italian Air Force. Radar tracks that suddenly disappear, information that has been systematically omitted, false declarations and forged documents, are just a few of the bricks used to build an impenetrable wall around the DC-9 Itavia crash. Yet, as discussed in the last chapter, this wall of silence began to crumble slowly thanks to the determination shown by the families of the victims. In contrast to the massacre perpetrated by right-wing terrorists at Bologna station a few weeks after the DC-9 crash, the families of Ustica victims had to find those responsible within, rather than outside, state institutions and, therefore, had to fight even harder so that the deaths of their loved ones would not be forgotten.
As Ranci concludes, la strage di Ustica demonstrates, beyond the search for the causes and those responsible for the massacre, that it is necessary to reflect on why, to this day, it has been impossible to identify them. Unlike many so-called ‘Italian mysteries’, the failure to reveal the official truth about the DC-9 Itavia crash should not be considered a mystery but more the result of a desired outcome, of a conscious decision taken to draw a veil over this tragic event in order to protect specific interests.
