Earthquake Shakes

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If there were a Richter scale for politics the needle of the seismograph in Italy would be straining towards disaster point in the aftermath of the massive earthquake of November.

The appalling loss of life and injury during the earthquake is more than matched by the suffering of those who survived.

The difference is that the living sufferers-thousands of starving, homeless and sick people-are increasingly ascribing their sufferings not to acts of God but rather to acts of God's political party, the Christian Democrats who have dominated Italian government since 1948.

Unprepared

The government showed itself woefully unprepared for such a catastrophe, in spite of recurrent experiences of major earthquakes in Italy.

Its reliet programme has been inadequate, late and unfeelingly implemented to the extent that even among the peasants of the small southern villages it has aroused mass resistance.

Instead of using its resources to distribute adequate tood, temporary homes and medical services to the badly hit areas, the government has ordained that everyone should climb into army lorries and helicopters and be carted off to empty hotels around the coast.

This plan has been brutally offensive to those who have lost family and friends and wish to grieve in the surroundings where they have always lived and in company of their fellow survivors and to begin to rebuild their homes.

Old people especially have been refusing to move in response to the government's wishes-preferring to stay where they are in the appalling living conditions provided for them by the government.

By the end of last week, ot 178,000 homeless only 783 had agreed to move into the hotels offered by the government.

They also suffer callous and cynical exploitation at the hands of the profiteers (mostly run by the Mafia) who have gained control of the black market in food, drinking water and other needed goods.

Basic food was selling in the villages for four times its normal cost last week. One journalist reported that beer was the price of champagne.

Widespread organised looting and even body snatching was also reported.

The Mafia are also in control of a high proportion of trade in building mateials, construction contracts and temporary housing.

The scandalous deficiencies of the relief operation led the State President Pertini (a former leading member of the Socialist Party) to make a TV and radio broadcast, without informing the government, bitterly criticising the government's record of "relief".

Pertini's surprise broadcast produced crisis and perturbation in Forlani's shaky Christian Democratic government-Italy's fortieth since the war.

The Interior Minister, Virgilio Rognoni was stung into offering his resignation, which Forlani later persuaded him to withdraw.

Forlani was forced into calling an emergency meeting of representatives of the parties of his coalition government to see whether a basis still exists for the continuation of his government.

For the moment it is staggering on-but amid increasing speculation that not only is its particular life at stake but so also is the life of the present parliament, elected only 18 months ago, and perhaps even the life of the First Italian Republic itself.

Weaknesses

The weakness of the government has been seized on by the Stalinists of the Italian Communist Party.

They have not only stepped up their verbal opposition to the Christian Democrats -linking this with a new suggestion for a left' alliance against the Christian Democrats-but they have also organised their own relief operations for the earthquake victims.

Far from losing, as many predicted, support for its opportunistic use of the earthquake, the CP appears to have gained.

The deficiencies of the relie operation have comé on top oi major financial scandals about tax payments on oil revenues which are implicating virtually all leading members of the Christian Democrats.

In a declaration published last week the Communist Party said weightily:

"The truth is that all this calls into question not simply the responsibility of one or a few ministers, or of the present government, but a system of power, a conception and a method of government which has produced and will continually produce ineffectiveness and confusion in the working of the state organs, corruption and scandals in the life of the government parties and impunity for the guilty."

The CP went on to that:

*a proposal for a new government be submitted to a discussion of all citizens and call on the political forces with the necessary weight and conscious of the risks which are now faced by the democratic system and by the parties on which the Italian republic is founded."

But the Communist Party itself has not been untouched by the crisis of authority which has followed the earthquake.

This is because the Mayor of Naples is a Communist and Naples is the largest city affected by the earthquake.

Although the destruction and death were not so severe in Naples as in the mountain villages, many buildings were made uninhabitable and as a result tens of thousands of people have become homeless.

But on numerous occasions people have been removed from their homes and provided with no immediate alternativé.

As a result, the homeless have mobilised themselves and 20,000 of them have occupied 120 schools and other public buildings often against the opposition of city government officials-including members of the Communist Party.

Massive burdens

Maurizio Valenzi, the Communist Mayor, is threatening to take over unoccupied flats, houses and even convents.

But he has still shrunk from taking the necessary concrete measures. • Even before the earthquake there were 15,000 homless in Naples. Now there are an additional 50,000 and many refugees are arriving from the country villages.

In Salerno the 8,000 homeless before the earthquake have been joined by 8,000 more.

All these problems arrive in a situation where the masses are already labouring under massive economic burdens of high unemployment (in Salerno it is 16%) and fast inflation now greatly fuelled by the postearthquake profiteering and black marketeering.

The bourgeoisie has been increasingly thrown into crisis by these events which have called even further into question the future of parliamentary democracy in Italy.

It is no coincidence therefore that the post-earthquake crisis has allowed the army to try to present itself as the only force capable of sorting out the situation.

And it has been encouraged in this by a growing number of leading politicians.

The government minister in charge, Zanberletti, has dismissed local administrators and replaced them with generals.

It can only be a matter of time before they say that if the army is the best answer to the problems in the earthquakestriken mountains, it is the best answer to the problems in Italy as a whole.

It was Naples' Communist Mayor who said "this earthquake will have social consequences which have only just begun" . He could be more correct thạt he thought.

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BRING THE TORIES!