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“Once we exited the residency door I knew something was wrong,” interpreter Melsa Deniz said. “The last I saw of him was when his jeep turned into a building marked ‘police station.’ I counted five white men. I knew it was over.”
Turkey had finally got its man. Fifteen years after the organisation he founded, the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) announced the beginning of armed struggle, a heavily drugged and blindfolded Abdullah Ocalan was bundled onto a Falcon jet bound for Turkey.
Known as “Black Day” for millions of Kurds, the weeks leading up to the eventual capture of Ocalan in the Kenyan capital Nairobi on February 15 1999 read like a spy thriller involving the intelligence services of the world’s most powerful countries including the US and Israel.
This week in history: February 1-7
31 January 2021
Antonio Maccanico
On February 1, 1996, merchant banker and two-time former cabinet minister Antonio Maccanico was named as interim prime minister of Italy. He was the first would-be premier to receive the support of both the ex-Stalinist PDS (Party of the Democratic Left) and the neo-fascist National Alliance, an event that marked a further stage in the rightward evolution of the remnants of the Italian Communist Party.
The right-wing Forza Italia of Silvio Berlusconi also supported Maccanico’s selection by President Oscar Luigi Scalfaro to replace another non-party technocrat, banker Lamberto Dini, who resigned a month prior after a year in office. But Maccanico was unable to form a government despite the support of the three major voting blocs, and returned his mandate two weeks later.
Disputed heritage
The pathetically weak remnants have been marking the centenary of the Partito Comunista. Toby Abse reports from Livorno
January 21 2021 marked the centenary of the foundation of the Italian Communist Party, or, to be more exact, of the
Partito Comunista d’Italia (PCd’I: Communist Party of Italy) - it only became known as the
Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI) in 1943, the year in which Stalin wound up the Comintern.
The centenary was given relatively wide coverage in the Italian media, with television documentaries and radio dramatisations, as well as many newspaper and magazine articles. Moreover, a fair number of books were either published or reprinted to mark the occasion. However, the continuing Covid-19 pandemic obviously imposed very severe limits on attempts to celebrate it in physical locations, as opposed to websites, Facebook pages or Zoom meetings.
The formation of governments in Italy doesn t necessarily have much to do with voting. The 66 administrations that have been and gone since the Second World War were mostly reshuffles of similar coalitions; only twice since 1945 has a general election led to a direct exchange of power between left and right. But no previous premier has ever achieved what Giuseppe Conte did 18 months ago: remaining prime minister while switching to a politically opposite coalition. His resignation yesterday (26 January), designed to give him a mandate to form a new administration, is unlikely to be the end of his career, even if he cannot form a third government.