Monthly Archives: January 2012

Nation that went down with a ship

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Italians fear being lumped with the Costa Concordia’s skipper.

GIGLIO, ITALY

Even Hollywood at its cheesiest would be wary of cramming such a clutch of omens into one script.
When the cruise liner Costa Concordia was launched in 2006, the champagne bottle failed to break against its side, causing gasps of dismay from onlookers.
When its captain, Francesco Schettino, was interviewed a year ago, he said, “I wouldn’t like to be in the role of the captain of the Titanic.” Last week, its passengers included Valentina Capuano, whose grandmother survived the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 but whose great-uncle, a waiter on the ship, did not.
When the Costa Concordia hit rocks and foundered last Friday night, it was dinner time and the band was playing the love song from the film Titanic.
Within an hour, disaster movie scenes were playing out in the dark winter waters near the tiny port of the island of Giglio, off the coast of Tuscany in Italy’s north-west.
Francis Servel, a 71-year-old Frenchman, gave his wife his lifejacket because she could not swim. He jumped into the water and cried out to encourage her in. Nicole Servel, 61, managed to get to shore but her husband was swept away and has not been found. “The last thing I heard him say was that I would be fine. Then I never saw him again,” she says. “I am angry because there was no boat for us and there was no one to save my husband. I owe my life to him.”
Another Frenchwoman, Beatrice Micheaud, 58, and her 61-year-old husband, clung to the side of a life-raft for more than an hour. “We … kept lifting our heads to shout to ask to be taken on board but the people in the raft didn’t hear us, or didn’t want to hear us. We were exhausted.”
The long-haired drummer in the ship’s band, Giuseppe Girolamo, is among the 21 still missing (11 are confirmed dead). Girolamo had a place in one of the lifeboats but gave it up to a child.
It is not the stories of courage, selflessness and tenacity that have captured Italy’s imagination, however, but the actions – and inaction – of the man at the helm: Francesco Schettino, apparently a captain of skill but a deeply flawed personality now undone by his own hubris. The over-reaching Icarus flew too close to the sun; the arrogant Schettino, convinced of his superlative navigational ability, sailed too close to the rocks.
For both, the crash back to reality was devastating. Schettino has become a national figure of shame not just for having crashed the ship as part of an ego trip but for allegedly having committed the captain’s mortal sin: abandoning his ship and escaping to safety in a lifeboat while hundreds of passengers were still struggling on board.
A coast guard commander, frustrated when Schettino resisted his orders to return to the ship and oversee evacuation, was recorded roaring at Schettino, “Get on board, for f—‘s sake!” He demanded that Schettino tell him how many women and children needed help. Within hours of that exchange being broadcast, Italians were wearing mocking T-shirts with “Vada a bordo, cazzo!”, and the phrase became Twitter’s top-trending Italian hashtag.
Newspaper commentators were quick to pounce on the damage to the national standing — and the allegory of the shipwreck with Italy’s broader troubles as it comes close to the reef of the euro zone crisis, among other problems.
“We had just come out of the tunnel of bunga bunga,” Caterina Soffici wrote in a blog for the left-leaning Il Fatto Quotidiano. “We were just drawing that little relieved breath that would enable us to toil again up the hill to international credibility. But [now] … we’ve gone straight into the Titanic nightmare [and] Italy is once again the laughing stock of foreign newspapers.”
Writing for Silvio Berlusconi’s paper Il Giornale, Cristiano Gatti cringed at the world taking delight in an image of “the same old rascally Italians: those unreliable cowards who turn and run in war and flee like rabbits from the ship, even if they are in command”.
But Gatti and others pointed out that the story did have heroes. Schettino might have been in a lifeboat with his first and second officers at the height of the crisis but an off-duty ship’s captain stayed and managed the evacuation, along with Schettino’s junior officers.
But the man who has come to stand for everything Schettino failed to be that night is actually the coastguard commander, Gregorio de Falco, whose enraged demands that Schettino live up to his responsibilities have become legend.
Schettino, in his early 50s, is a handsome man with a small pot belly, a deep tan, dark hair and blue eyes with lashes that curl.
He comes from a family of several generations of seafarers and began his career on ferry boats before becoming a captain in 2006. He was a controlling, perhaps even narcissistic commander, seen to have had a stellar rise in the cruise industry.
One of the officers on board the Costa Concordia, Martino Pellegrino, told La Repubblica newspaper: “If I had to make a comparison, we got the impression that he would drive a bus like a Ferrari.” Pellegrino also said Schettino was an “authoritarian” who was often “inflexible”.
One of his former commanders, Mario Palombo, told reporters: “I’ve always had my reservations about Schettino. It’s true, he was my second-in-command, but he was too exuberant. A daredevil. More than once I had to put him in his place.”
On the night of the shipwreck, Schettino told an investigating magistrate this week, he took the liner near Giglio’s rocky coast because he wanted to give a “salute” to Palombo, who lived on the island. Cocky, he navigated without using charts.
“It’s true that the salute was for Commodore Mario Palombo, with whom I was on the telephone … I made a mistake in the approach.
“I was navigating by sight because I knew the depths well and I had done this manoeuvre three or four times. But this time I ordered the turn too late and I ended up in water that was too shallow,” he said.
About 9.30pm, the ship hit a rocky outlet called Le Scole, which tore open a gash in the port side of the hull. Schettino said: “I don’t know why it happened. I was a victim of my instincts.”
Actually, the 11 dead and 21 missing were the real victims of his instincts. And his instincts, once the ship struck rocks with a shuddering groan, remained poor.
His initial reaction seems to have been denial. The coastguard, alerted by a passenger’s mobile phone call, contacted him twice to ask if the ship was all right. Twice, he denied there was a serious problem.
On the decks below, there was panic. Cabins were plunged into darkness. Drinks slid off tables, plates smashed. An English crew member, Rose Metcalf, said: “It was just terrifying … people were white, people were crying, screaming.” Video footage shows children shrieking “mummy!” and “daddy!”
But Schettino announced an electrical fault and said it was not serious. James Thomas, who had been working as an entertainer on the ship, said the staff then heard two short blasts followed by alternate tones, “which means there is a leak on board and so the crew were divided, very much so. A lot of people said, ‘No, just tell everyone to stay calm, that’s what we’ve been told to say.’ But then other people took the initiative and said, ‘OK, let’s tell everyone to stay calm but hand over lifejackets.”‘
It was only at 10.30pm that a reluctant Schettino, under pressure from the coastguard, finally sent a mayday. The vessel was then listing 20 degrees.
It was another 20 minutes before he gave the order to abandon ship, but it seems that some of his junior officers defied his inaction and began lowering boats before he made the decision. The only passengers who recognised the abandon-ship signal — seven blasts of the horn — were those who had sailed on earlier cruises, as this shipload had not had its emergency drill.
Passengers said there was almost no help from crew with the evacuation. Metcalf recalled: “We were literally throwing each other. We were creating human chains to try and pass people over gaps that, if they dropped down, there was no recovery from. What was vertical was becoming horizontal.”
Discipline broke down among the crew and many passengers reported that it was waiters, chefs and entertainers who helped with the evacuation. Englishwoman Sandra Rogers, 62, later told the Daily Mail: “There was no ‘women and children first’ policy. There were big men, crew members, pushing past us to get into the lifeboats. It was disgusting.”
She said the men had knocked her and her two seven-year-old granddaughters. “And when we finally got into a lifeboat, people, grown men, were trying to jump into the boat. I thought, ‘If they land in here, we are going to capsize.”‘
The captain was in a lifeboat himself by 11.40pm, although the last passengers were not evacuated until 3am. He claims this was an accident.
During questioning this week, Schettino is reported to have said: “The passengers were pouring on to the decks, taking the lifeboats by assault. I didn’t even have a lifejacket because I had given it to one of the passengers. I was trying to get people to get into the boats in an orderly fashion. Suddenly, since the ship was at a 60 to 70 degree angle, I tripped and I ended up in one of the boats.”
The judge questioning him, Valeria Montesarchio, said Schettino had not made “any serious attempt” to return to the vessel or “even close to it”.
This was despite the furious bollocking he received from the coast-guard commander, Gregorio de Falco, who was appalled when Schettino told him he was in a lifeboat while hundreds of people were still aboard. De Falco ordered him back to the bridge, saying, “Captain. This is an order. Now I am in command. You have declared the abandoning of a ship and are going to co-ordinate the rescue from the bridge. What do you want to do? Go home?”
When Schettino protested that the ship was tilted, de Falco said: “There are people who are coming down the ladder on the bow. Go back in the opposite direction, get back on the ship, and tell me how many people there are and what they have on board. Clear? Tell me if there are children, women and what kind of help they need. And you tell me the number of each of these categories. Is that clear?
“Look, Schettino, perhaps you have saved yourself from the sea but I will make you look very bad. I will make you pay for this. Dammit!”
But his lawyer claimed Schettino “saved thousands” with his final manoeuvre, bringing the ship closer to shore to make evacuation easier, and that getting back on board was impossible. “You try and see if you could get back on a vessel in that condition,” Bruno Leporatti said.
“You need a helicopter.”
It was Roberto Bosio, the off-duty captain from a sister ship travelling on the liner as a passenger, who stayed behind to man the bridge after it was abandoned. Two other Italian officers also stayed to try to bring order to the chaos.
Afterwards, Bosio was scathing about Schettino: “Only a disgraceful man would have left all those passengers on board. It was the most horrible experience of my life, a tragedy, a heartache that I will carry with me forever … don’t call me a hero. I and the others with me just did our duty. We looked each other in the eyes for a second and then we just got on with it.”
The next day, Schettino left the harbour master’s office at 11.30am. He took a taxi a short distance to a Giglio hotel. Driver Ottavio Brizzi told reporters: “He didn’t say very much apart from asking me where he could buy some dry socks. He looked very cold and scared — he looked like a beaten dog.”
Schettino has been savaged since. He has been released from jail but is under house arrest and faces two police inquiries: one into his changing the route and one into the evacuation of the ship. He could receive up to 12 years in jail if convicted of manslaughter and abandoning his ship before his passengers did.
La Stampa newspaper said in an editorial Italy had had only two months to restore its international reputation since technocrat Mario Monti replaced the buffoonery of former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi: “Two months to forget the worst of ourselves: the superficiality, the carelessness, the pomposity, the abdication of responsibility.
“And then, with a single nudge of the rudder, Captain Schettino has sunk our international reputation, along with his ship.
“… We are looking at a type of Italian that we cannot pretend not to recognise: more full of himself than sure of himself. One who does stupid things for the sake of having fun and seeks to hide them with the mantra, ‘everything’s OK, no problem’.”
Schettino’s wife and family have spoken out in his defence, and they were joined by members of his local town, including his priest, Don Gennaro Starita, who told parishioners he was “really angry” about the way Schettino had been portrayed.
“He has been pilloried by the media,” he said. “Humanly speaking, they have killed him. It’s a shame. There are so many dead already, why do we want another?”
The debate is now moving to how to deal with the vast wreckage of what is tipped to be the most expensive insured disaster in maritime history.
Schettino is likely to find himself wrong on yet one more point. In the newspaper interview he gave last year, he was asked about what impact the sinking of the Titanic had on people’s perceptions of ship safety at the time. He said: “Luckily, people quickly forget tragedies.”

First published in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Divers describe a dark, silent world turned upside down

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GIGLIO ISLAND

THE Italian navy divers work in pairs underwater; one with a light and video camera, to record what they find and how they find it, and another with two lights. They are roped to each other for safety and one is roped to another diver above – just in case.
The dark, dreamlike world inside the sunken part of the Costa Concordia is strange even to them, used as they are to murky depths. “The ship is full of carpet,” says junior lieutenant Marco Saponangelo.
“You will see the carpet not on the floor but on the ceiling, floating in the water and rippling, like smoke. Whenever you look back, as you are swimming, everything has changed because everything is moving … It is cold and it is dark, and you lose track.”
The worst, he says, is seeing documents and clothes floating by, because that is a reminder of the human loss.
Lieutenant Saponangelo is one of 12 divers from the navy’s rapid-response team working with divers from the Italian Coast Guard and the Vigili del Fuoco – firemen who do emergency rescues – to find those missing. The mountain rescue team has studded the part of the ship still out of the water with grip-points and cables to help workers clamber over its curves.
Lieutenant Saponangelo helped put charges on to the boat to blow open access to areas thought to contain missing passengers. Using tape embedded with plastic explosive he taped areas 1 metre square, retreated 80 metres himself for safety and then detonated: “We send the electricity and it goes boom!”
He says the charges were small but the booms ripped across the normally quiet port as it woke to a pink dawn and sent hundreds of gulls screaming into the sky. The blasts cut neat holes, windows into the watery graveyard. A 20-metre opening they created in the stern just under the waterline allowed rescuers to find the most recent five bodies on Tuesday.
It was loud because they were blowing up a window that was meant to be unbreakable, he said; they go in through windows because they can see what is waiting for them. “If you open a door and don’t know what is there, it could be something heavy and dangerous, especially with the ship upside down,” he says.
When working, they communicate with tugs on the ropes. Two or three pulls mean “Coming back.” Five means: “Come to the surface.”
It is five for finding a body as this must first be reported to the commander and noted by state lawyers. Then the Italian coast guard must come in to remove the person. The place must be marked: “If we find a body, we have chemical lights, so they can know where they are. We break the bar and attach it so that the body is easy to find again.”
If they think the body is hard to find, they use a technique like Ariadne’s thread: “We attach the body to a reel [of cable], so that we can feel our way back.”
In the first day or two, as they searched the area above water, their hearts would beat faster as they saw what looked like a person but it usually turned out only to be a life-vest with its lights still blinking.
They work for only an hour at a stretch as the task is demanding and dangerous. To add to the peril, the ship is sitting on an undersea ledge and it is feared that choppy weather due to arrive today could send it over the edge – and completely under the water.
Rescue teams are finely balancing the safety of their men, the human need to find the 21 people who remain missing, and the environment’s need for salvage of the ship’s fuel before the ship’s tanks rupture and spread still greater catastrophe.
The final two goals are hard to reconcile, as the drilling and heavy machinery needed to empty the tanks makes continued recovery of humans difficult, if not impossible.
Says Cari Luca, a spokesman for the 130 firemen involved in the project: “In the next hours or days they are trying to find a solution to do both at the same time.”
But hope of finding more survivors is well-nigh gone, he says, despite the fact that not all parts of the ship still in the air have been closely searched.
“Without water for four days, it is impossible for someone who is unconscious to survive.”

First published in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Captain drove liner like a Ferrari, say prosecutors

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GIGLIO ISLAND

THE captain of the Costa Concordia drove his ship like a Ferrari and was trying to show off by sailing close to the island of Giglio, prosecutors claimed in a bail hearing.
Captain Francesco Schettino was released from jail to house arrest and ordered to face a drug test as the number of confirmed dead from the wreck of his ship rose to 11, and the operations were due to shift overnight from rescue to salvage. Twenty-four people remain missing.
Once efforts to rescue them have been declared over, a Dutch salvage team will begin drilling through the ship towards 17 tanks that hold more than 2000 tonnes of fuel.
They will try to prevent leakage that would cause an environmental disaster. Speaking to reporters on Giglio Island on Tuesday night after meeting the mayor and local people, the president of the cruise liner company Costa Crociere, Pier Luigi Foschi, said the main missions were still to find any remaining survivors.
“The hope that someone is still alive is always with us,” he said. The hope was also to avoid an environmental tragedy by “taking away this giant, which has come here to die”. It has emerged that a junior officer challenged Captain Schettino’s authority when the captain went into denial and refused to issue a mayday.
Statements from the crew claim a second officer, Roberto Bosio, decided to take action and ordered the lifeboats to be lowered, even though the captain was not responding to reports of flooding in the engine and generator rooms.
One junior officer said in a statement: “For the first 40 minutes after the impact the ship stayed upright. We could easily have lowered the lifeboats from both sides. We could have reached dry land without even getting our feet wet.”
Captain Schettino says his actions saved hundreds of lives that night, and his wife, Fabiola, issued a statement defending his professionalism and asking people to understand the human impact of the tragedy on him.
But transcripts of radio calls and telephone recordings between him and the coast guard contain an extraordinary exchange in which a coastguard official roars at him to get back to his ship to oversee the evacuation, yelling:”Get the f— aboard!”

First published in The Age.

Screams from passengers on sinking ship rang across night sky

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As catastrophe unfolded, islanders rushed to save people from the Costa Concordia.

GIGLIO ISLAND
ALVINO Bartoli was one of the few to see all the Costa Concordia’s death throes. He watched as the ship crawled into Giglio’s curving harbour, already flooding, hull gashed, nose pointing north.
Then he saw the anchor dropped — and to his disbelief, the ship rapidly spun around 180 degrees before listing to one side and slowly sinking until half-submerged.
Dropping the anchor is a move he thinks was a deliberate effort by the captain to set the ship in shallow waters to help with evacuation. “He made a big mistake [in sailing too close to shore] but he also saved many lives,” Mr Bartoli says. “Making the ship change direction and go down there stopped it from going into much deeper water.”
Mr Bartoli said he heard no sound from the ship itself but the screams of those aboard pierced the night.
He was out watching because he had just received a call from his cousin, a waiter on the ship, to say it had struck something. There have been claims that Captain Francesco Schettino sailed close to the island so that the waiter could see his home from the ship.
After the ship rolled, Mr Bartoli froze, feeling as if he was watching a movie. Then he raced to his small fishing boat, Smile, and launched it. Giglio’s Dunkirk had begun.
The holiday island, with its pretty harbour ringed by gelato-coloured houses, is home to only 600 people in the off-season. That night nearly all of them were involved in rescuing or sheltering the 4200 souls fleeing the sinking ship. They did all they could — but now are left to worry that the Costa Concordia’s disaster will sink Giglio’s future, too.
That night Mr Bartoli tried to help people in the water who were screaming for help, but he feared that, in the dark, his engines might kill them. He headed instead to the small orange lifeboats that had no engines and could not navigate, piling people into Smile and puttering them back to shore, again and again.
By midnight nearly all the town’s fishing boats were in the water with him, joined by the coast guard. On shore people came running with warm clothes. The church was opened to refugees; then the school; then people’s own homes. Eighteen strangers stayed with the Bartolis that night. The phones were in meltdown: Can you bring a hot meal? Bread? Coffee?
He says the survivors all had different reactions. “For instance the crew were taking photos: ‘We are alive, so please take a picture of me in the port.’ People who were looking for friends or family were crying. Other people were shuddering with cold.”
Now Mr Bartoli and other fishermen hardly recognise their own harbour, dominated as it is by the vast 114,000-tonne vision of improbability that somehow fills every glimpse of the bay.
They have also found themselves barred from sailing because the waters must be kept clear while recovery efforts continue — even though fishing is their only income during winter.
Most of all, the islanders are worried about the risk that the ship will sink further, break up and belch its 2380 tonnes of fuel into Giglio’s clear waters, which include a marine park. The ship is perched on an undersea ledge and rescuers are working frantically for fear it will slip off to 100 metres deep.
“At the moment, the risk is just 10 per cent,” says Mr Bartoli, “but the problem is that if the boat sinks deeper, it will just break up in two and the risk will go up to 80 per cent. And if that fuel leaks, it will really be the death of Giglio for years.”
Locals fear the fishing and the beaches would be ruined by a thick slick of chemicals, killing two industries in one blow.
Some, like freelance translator Milena Cardaci, think the catastrophe has put Giglio on the map in ways that could boost tourism if the fuel does not leak: “Giglio is now known in France and the US and Australia in a way it wasn’t before.”
Though she and others think that has a dark side too: they are not looking forward to Giglio finding itself on the disaster-tourism trail.

First published in The Age.

D-days for the Europe experiment

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LONDON

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. The euro was supposed to make trade quick and easy. The new, integrated Europe was supposed to contain Germany and protect France and cement the place of the old world in international affairs. And globalisation – well, that was supposed to open up markets and make everyone richer.
But the 10th birthday of the euro passed uncelebrated on January 1, like the birthday of a disgraced relative who has brought shame on the family name. The leaders of the European Union spent much of last year at one another’s throats behind closed doors and smiling frostily in public, barely keeping up appearances. And globalisation, some now say, has become Europe’s economic doomsday machine.
If last year was rough, with no fewer than 15 failed summits, each falsely trumpeted as the saviour of the euro zone, 2012 is destined to be even tougher. Take it from the leaders.
In their New Year addresses, the French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, said Europe was “without doubt [in] the gravest [crisis] since the second world war”, and the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, said 2012 “would no doubt be more difficult than 2011”.
The managing director of the International Monetary Fund, Christine Lagarde, went further. She warned that if Europe failed to sort out its debt crisis, it could trigger “retraction, rising protectionism and isolation. This is exactly the description of what happened in the 1930s and what followed is not something we are looking forward to.”
Depression and mass unemployment? A spike in fascism and race-hate? Could it be that the rampant looting and arson of London’s August riots, and the months of street protests in Spain and Greece, are but a taste of what is to come?
Because the truth is Europe, including Britain, might not be suffering under temporary austerity measures. Prolonged economic decline may be the new reality as wealth and power shifts from the old world to the emerging economies of Asia.
Questions are being asked about how Europe’s democracies can thrive – or even survive – when its governments cannot hold out to their people the promise of a return to the prosperity of the past. The same goes for the European Union; support for the “European project” is at risk of falling at the very time its leaders most need to push for greater unity.
Sixteen million people in the euro zone are unemployed and voters are becoming angry and disaffected as austerity bites. In Greece, poor people who are diabetics cannot get insulin, cancer sufferers are missing out on drugs and even paracetamol is in short supply. The Greek Orthodox church this week reported cases of parents abandoning their children into care because they could no longer afford to support them.
In Britain, 2.85 million unemployed means the welfare bill has rocketed and austerity is expected to last at least a decade. The Coalition government now wants to means-test benefits for people with cancer and young people with disabilities – moves the Labour opposition is resisting, arguing people made payments to support those benefit schemes and should not lose them when they are most in need.
Schools, hospitals, police, defence and councils are being slashed. Anxiety is morphing into long-term pessimism: almost two-thirds of Britons believe this generation of children will have a lower standard of living than their parents.
The British are known for their stoicism in the face of hardship but this is not like World War II, when everyone was in it together. In Britain, as across much of Europe, there is resentment over the rise in inequality. For a family with three children earning £35,000 ($52,000), with both parents working, real household income has fallen by £3150 compared with 2010-11.
But, as ordinary workers see the pension age extended to 67, jobs disappear and workplace rights eroded, an estimated 2800 bankers in London are each earning more than £1 million a year.
For some, pessimism has spiralled into utter despair. Across Europe, the number of people committing suicide has jumped. Figures published in The Lancet show the British suicide rate increased 8 per cent between 2007 and 2009. The Greek Parliament reported its national suicide rate rose by 25 per cent in 2010.
Stephen Platt, a professor at Edinburgh University who has been studying suicide behaviour for 30 years, told The Guardian he fears a decade of unusually high suicide rates. “If you look at the research literature about suicide and economic recession, it’s pretty clear that there is a relationship,” he says. “The idea of a lost decade is quite possible.”
The West launched globalisation as a way to open markets and increase competitiveness – and it did both. But what was perhaps not so well foreseen was the degree to which capital and manufacturing jobs would move to countries with cheap labour. As billions of low-paid workers have been absorbed into the world economy, and productivity has risen due to technology, jobs have stagnated in Europe. Asia makes, and is booming; Europe borrowed, in order to consume, and is now going bust.
The American political scientist Francis Fukuyama questions whether democracy can survive the resulting decline of the middle class. Writing in this month’s Foreign Affairs magazine, he argues the lightly regulated form of globalised capitalism has created new wealth and rising middle classes, with democracy in their wake, all over the developing world. But in the West, he says, it is eroding the middle-class social base on which liberal democracies rest.
In the same magazine, the professor of international affairs at Georgetown University, Charles Kupchan, argues globalisation is producing a widening gap between what electorates are asking of their governments and what the governments are able to deliver. Voters want them to respond to the fall in living standards and growing inequality, he says: “Globalisation has handsomely rewarded the winners but left losers behind.”
But he points out democracies have less control over outcomes in a globalised world. Traditionally, countries in economic trouble devalue their currencies to make their exports more competitive. The 27 nations of the euro zone, though, cannot do this individually; their currency is shared, and the euro’s settings are fixed by the European Central Bank.
So the only answer to date from Europe’s leaders has been to cut back and back, creating an age of austerity with no end in sight. As markets and voters watched in dismay last year’s agonised, ham-fisted talks over saving the euro, the standing of European institutions fell.
In Britain, pressure is rising on the Conservative Prime Minister, David Cameron, to leave the union, with half the nation’s voters and many of his own MPs wanting out.
There are now openly Eurosceptic parties in Finland, France and the Netherlands, and many voters perceive European institutions as foreign rather than shared. Their disaffection could fuel a retreat to isolationism and nationalism, which might be only a step away from xenophobia.
Kupchan says generational change is also taking a toll of popular support for European integration: “Europeans with memories of World War II see the EU as Europe’s escape route from its bloody past. But younger Europeans have no past from which to flee … current leaders and electorates tend to assess the EU through a cold – and often negative – valuation of costs and benefits.”
It is probably not in voting booths that Europe’s future will be decided, but in financial markets. It is not political analysts but economists who are being asked to cast the runes on the odds of the EU surviving in its present form.
Professor Douglas McWilliams, chief executive of Britain’s Centre for Economics and Business Research, earlier this month forecast a 60 per cent probability the euro zone will start disintegrating this year and a 99 per cent chance it will collapse entirely within the next decade. A BBC poll of leading economists put the chances of a break-up at between 30 and 40 per cent.
Any fracture would probably begin with the exit of Greece, which would come suddenly and without fanfare in order to prevent a run on its banks. Once Greece was gone, lairy investors would turn a harsh eye on Italy, which is also carrying high debt. If they refused credit to Italy and the huge Italian economy collapsed, the European Union in its present form would fall. The result: currency chaos and massive unemployment, possibly a depression. That kind of suffering risks resurrecting Europe’s old bogy, race.
Toughing it out with the EU will also be hard. Europe’s banks are suspected to be carrying large amounts of toxic debt. French and German banks might need to be bailed out to compensate for write-downs on sovereign debt, or even nationalised, as happened in Ireland. Either way, money will be tight for a very long time.
The architects of the EU always envisaged there would be crises over the euro and thought the crises would impel closer integration. The union’s true believers insist that is what happening here – if Sarkozy and Merkel can pull it off.
But Merkel is already hamstrung by domestic politics, with Germans furious at bankrolling bailouts for their neighbours, and Sarkozy is facing an election this year, so he must also have more of a weather eye out for local politics than usual. Already it is proving difficult to wrangle the rest of Europe into line, with Hungary and the Czech Republic warning they will join no new deal that means losing control of their tax policies.
Through that sliding door to an alternative reality – one in which the EU pulls closer over joint taxes and spending, which would stabilise the euro – we might one day see a “United States of Europe”. But right now, no one is offering odds on that happening.

First published in the Sydney Morning Herald.

British PM likely to face media inquiry

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LONDON

BRITISH Prime Minister David Cameron is likely to be summoned to give evidence to the Leveson inquiry into media ethics about his relationship with Rupert Murdoch and senior figures from News International who are being investigated for phone hacking.
The Times reported that a source close to the inquiry said Lord Justice Leveson was “99.9 per cent certain” to call the Prime Minister to be questioned under oath about his meetings with newspaper editors and proprietors.
“I can’t see how you can look at the relationship between the press and politicians without talking to top politicians, including the Prime Minister, the previous prime minister and the Leader of the Opposition,” the source said.
But the final decision had not yet been made as the inquiry was looking first at press dealings with the public and police.
Mr Cameron’s office responded to the report by saying “of course he would attend”, but that no request had been received yet.
The Prime Minister would probably face questions about his decision to hire Andy Coulson, a former editor of News of the World, as his spokesman, despite stories in The Guardian claiming that phone hacking was rife under his editorship.
He might also be asked about his 26 meetings with News executives and his relationship with former chief executive of News International, Rebekah Brooks, who was arrested and bailed over phone hacking in July. Last week Vanity Fair reported that he was so close to her that he signed his letters to her with “love David”.
On Monday, the inquiry was told that former Labour prime minister Gordon Brown threatened to “destroy” News International during a furious phone call to Rupert Murdoch after The Sun switched its support to the Conservatives.
A former editor of The Sun, Kelvin MacKenzie, said Mr Murdoch told him Mr Brown had called him and “roared at me for 20 minutes”, saying: “You are trying to destroy me and my party. I will destroy you and your company.”
The Sun had not run Mr Brown’s 2009 keynote speech to the Labour Party on the front page and had declared that “Labour’s lost it”. News International declined to comment. A spokesman for Mr Brown said: “It has already been pointed out that there was no such phone call nor communication between Mr Brown and Mr Murdoch.”
Mr MacKenzie also told of a legendary conversation he had with Conservative prime minister John Major. He said Mr Major phoned him in September 1992 when he was seeking support for suspending the country’s membership of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. He asked how the paper would cover the move the next day. Mr MacKenzie said he told him: “I’ve got a bucket of shit on my desk, sir, and I’m going to pour it all over you.”
Mr MacKenzie told the inquiry: “Why you would call up the editor of The Sun in the middle of an economic crisis? I’ve got no idea.”
Mr MacKenzie said Mr Murdoch took a “hands-on approach” to his British newspapers and once gave him “40 minutes of non-stop abuse” after the paper paid a £1 million settlement to Elton John.
In 1987 the paper had falsely reported that the singer had paid for sex with under-age “rent boys”.
“Murdoch thought I’d gone too far . . . It wasn’t the money, of course — it was the shadow over the paper.”
The Sun’s current editor, Dominic Mohan, said in a written statement that he had “always been determined to foster a culture of honesty, integrity and high ethical standards at The Sun”. Showbiz editor Gordon Smart said Sun staff “act ethically and we act responsibly at all times”.

First published at theage.com.au.

Justice at last for Jeanette, as killer jailed

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A French detective never doubted she would catch Jeanette O’Keefe’s killer, writes Karen Kissane.

VERSAILLES

FRENCH policewoman Captain Cathy Nicol first met Jeanette O’Keefe, the young Melbourne woman who would consume much of the next decade of her life, on January 2, 2001.
Nicol had been having lunch with colleagues from the criminal brigade, which is based in the graceful Louis XIV town of Versailles, when the call came. Two young boys had found a body in a sleeping bag in a car park on the dingy western outskirts of Paris.
Nicol was 25 and had been in the homicide brigade only six months. This was not her first murder case, but it would become her passion. The victim, so badly beaten she was unrecognisable, was a young woman, like herself.
Jeanette, 28, was the woman in the sleeping bag.
Nicol was determined to find this killer: Jeanette was “une innocente”, a nice Australian girl who had been caught like a fly in a web in one of the grim, hostile ghettos that scar the outer rings of the French capital.
“There are different categories of crime,” Nicol tells The Sunday Age through an interpreter. “There are gangs who do revenge killings; there are drug killings; there is alcohol and violence. But Jeanette was a completely innocent victim. She was the true victim, the poor girl who this never should have happened to.”
Her whole squad, she says, was touched by the case they came to call “L’affaire O’Keefe”.
Their years of perseverance paid off. On Friday, 11 years and six days after Jeanette was beaten and strangled to death on New Year’s Eve 2000, 37-year-old Adriano Araujo da Silva was jailed for 30 years, with a 20-year minimum, for her murder. He had pleaded not guilty and has vowed to appeal.
But for now, there is relief not just for Jeanette’s family — her parents, Kevin and Susan O’Keefe of Ferntree Gully, and her three siblings — but for the detective who was determined to track down her killer.
Nicol and Jeanette lived half a world away from each other, but they had in common things other than their youth. Nicol is small and slight, with piercing green eyes that blaze when she talks about the case, her words rapping out like machine-gun fire.
Jeanette was also small, “five foot nothing”, say her two sisters and brother, and she, too, was a pretty, green-eyed brunette.
They also shared a stubborn streak. Jeanette’s might have inadvertently led her to her death; Nicol’s helped to solve the case, though she scrunches up her face in Gallic distaste at the suggestion she is “stubborn”. “I am tenacious,” she declares.
There is another factor that led to the two women’s paths crossing: chance. A series of small mishaps seem to have led the normally cautious Jeanette into mortal danger on the night she was killed.
Eight years later, it was one small mishap followed by a routine police procedure that saw her killer caught.
Da Silva, a Brazilian-born petty criminal who was raised in Guyana before emigrating to France, told the court Jeanette, whom he met on the night she died, was the love of his life, the woman he saw as the future mother of his children.
Police told a different story. They alleged he had bashed the petite computer programmer around the head 13 times with an iron bar. When she regained consciousness, he strangled her with his hands. When that did not work, he strangled her a second time with an electric cord. Then he threw her body out a window before dragging it clear of his apartment block.
Jeanette was a reserved woman, careful about whom she let into her private circle, “not a person who went to nightclubs”, says her sister Denise. She was musical, writing ballads as a hobby and playing guitar, piano and violin.
She was also savvy, especially about work. Says her brother, Craig: “She went to work for PricewaterhouseCoopers and only earned $25,000 but they put her through a $10,000 course in Oracle [a computer script]. So then she quit and started being a consultant for $75 an hour.”
Jeanette had been travelling alone on a European holiday when she decided to study French in Paris during November and December 2000. She checked out of her hostel on December 31 because she was due to fly to the United States two days later.
The hostel took bookings by the month and staying even one more night would have cost her four weeks’ accommodation. “She didn’t want to spring for a hotel,” Denise says, and intended to stay at the home of a new French friend, Elise, before catching a flight to New York.
The plan was for Jeanette to get to the outer-suburban train station nearest Elise’s house, where Elise would pick her up with a car because she was carrying a large rucksack.
Here came the first mishap. Elise waited at the station for an hour, but Jeanette did not appear. Elise waited several more hours at home but did not hear from Jeanette. She is uncertain, now, whether she might have confused the time she was due to meet her friend. Neither of the women had mobile phones.
Jeanette called another friend, a man named Tony, to ask if she could stay with him. He agreed to meet her on the Champs Elysees but did not turn up as arranged, he later told police. This was Jeanette’s second mishap.
“He was annoyed at her because a few weeks earlier she had pulled out of an outing with him because she was sick,” Denise says. “Tony later told police that [he didn’t want her to stay over] because it meant he would have to sleep on the floor and he had a bad back. So he was deliberately late for the rendezvous.”
He later had a change of heart, but it was too late.
Jeanette, by now tired and stressed, with partygoers filling the centre of Paris, then rang Elise’s home and spoke to her mother. The mother gave her complex directions in French for getting to the train station again.
Police later worked out that Jeanette had made the call from a public phone box only 50 metres from where Tony had finally turned up to meet her.
Here came the third mishap: Elise’s mother did not replace the phone properly in the cradle. If Jeanette had tried to call again, she would not have got through.
A small woman with a large backpack, worried about the cost of a night in a hotel, was stranded in Paris. And here came Jeanette’s fourth and unluckiest mishap: she ran into Adriano da Silva, and for some reason agreed to go back to his apartment with him.
Her family thinks da Silva may have offered to carry her rucksack. Maybe she was lost on the wrong train. Maybe he offered to get her to a phone, speculates Denise. No one knows for sure because da Silva isn’t saying.
Ultimately, however, Denise believes at some point in the evening Jeanette “refused him [sex] and he lost it”.
Da Silva says he met her that night on the Champs Elysees — but he has said many things that he now admits were lies.
This was all unknown to Cathy Nicol when Jeanette’s body was discovered. Her squad’s first task was to identify the victim. It was not until Interpol in Canberra sent police Jeanette’s description that Nicol had a clue.
Nine days after they first knew their beloved Jeanette was missing, the O’Keefe family’s worst fears were realised.
In Paris, police tried to retrace her last hours. They spoke to people at the hostel and set up three lines of inquiry: kidnappers on the books; offenders who had committed crimes on trains; and about 200 single men in the apartments near where Jeanette’s body was found. The men were sent orders telling them to present to police to give a DNA sample. Only 10 men failed to respond. Da Silva, police realised much later, was one of them.
France’s full DNA database was only created in 2005-06, Nicol says, and it was another two years before technology was able to get a useful sample of the flesh found under the fingernails of Jeanette’s right hand. She had scratched her attacker.
It was this evidence that kept hope alive for Nicol. Never did she doubt that the killer would be found: “I knew that one day we would get a match.”
That day turned out to be February 2, 2009. Nicol said she will never forget the call confirming the database had found a match.
“It was incredible,” says Nicol, who had been emailing Jeanette’s mother for years. With tears in her eyes, she recalls: “I was oh, so happy. I have goosebumps just thinking about it.”
Nicol, by then the last remaining member of the original investigation team, shared the interrogation of da Silva, a man who lived on the edge of society.
He had been born to a white Brazilian mother who fostered him out as a toddler before he was retrieved by his black Brazilian father, who took him to French Guyana to grow up with his step-family. He had identity issues, a derogatory view of women, problems facing reality, and lacked the capacity to feel both compassion and guilt, a psychologist would later tell the court in Versailles.
He had been caught after he ran a police roadblock because he was unlicensed and uninsured. He later went to police claiming the vehicle had been stolen from him; they didn’t believe it and charged him, taking DNA as part of that process.
During the interrogation he denied ever having met Jeanette and said he didn’t recognise her photo. Told there was DNA evidence linking him to Jeanette’s murder, he said there must be a mistake, before creating an elaborate story about having saved her from two “black” attackers.
When he was told that not only was his skin found under her nails but one of his hairs had been found inside the sleeping bag she was dumped in, he asked to phone his girlfriend. Sitting in the police office opposite Nicol, he told his girlfriend that he had killed a woman with an iron bar — a detail not released publicly.
“We could see the relief when he confessed,” Nicol says. “When somebody wants to get the truth off their shoulders we see a physical change. He just relaxed.”
The team was too tired to celebrate, she says, as they hadn’t slept for 48 hours: “But it was a good tiredness.”
Celebration would have been premature. In April, after three months in jail, da Silva recanted.
In court last week he pleaded not guilty and Jeanette’s brother and sisters sat through a long and salacious tale in which he alleged consensual sex with Jeanette in a variety of ways. He claimed he threw her out when she refused more sex with him, and gave her the sleeping bag to sleep in.
Earlier in the trial, the judge warned him that his refusal to take responsibility would weigh against him. It did; 30 years is France’s maximum sentence.
Nicol was at work when the verdict was delivered. But she arrived later to congratulate Jeanette’s family and friends. They wanted a private photo to commemorate the moment and gathered under an archway in the court complex with uncertain expressions. What is the etiquette for this kind of snapshot?
At the end of the line stood Nicol, shoulders back, wearing the tiniest of smiles, and unshed tears in those fierce green eyes.HOW IT HAPPENED
December 31, 2000, 9pm Jeanette O’Keefe makes a phone call to a friend’s mother from the Champs D’Elysees in Paris, her last known contact
January 1, 2001
Adriano Araujo da Silva got rid of her body from his apartment by throwing it out a window and
dragging it to a spot 120 metres from his home.
January 2
Jeanette’s body is found. Police investigate, but leads prove fruitless.
2007
Using new technology, a DNA sample is extracted from material found under Jeanette’s
fi ngernails and is registered with France’s DNA database.
February 2008
Da Silva runs a police roadblock because he is uninsured and unlicensed. He later goes to
police claiming the vehicle was stolen. They do not believe him and take his DNA. The sample
waits for months to be crosschecked.
February 2, 2009
French policewoman Cathy Nicol receives a call from a magistrate saying the DNA on Jeanette’s
fi le now has a match.
February 17
Da Silva is arrested
February 18
He phones his girlfriend, in front of police, and confesses to Jeanette’s killing.
February 19
He confi rms his confession, saying: “I know I am a criminal.”
April
He retracts his admissions, saying he was manipulated by police, who told him if he confessed he would receive only eight years’ jail.
January 6, 2012
He is found guilty of murder and sentenced to 30 years’ jail. He says he will appeal his conviction.

First published in The Sunday Age.

Melbourne family’s grief laid bare in French court

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WITHOUT A TRACE – ‘It was nine days of weeping, of unbelievable torture’

VERSAILLES

THERE are many thoughts that torture the family of murdered young Australian woman Jeanette O’Keefe. One of the worst, her sister Denise told a French court on Thursday, was how she would have suffered while being strangled to death.
“Her worst fear, always, as a child and teenager, was that she couldn’t breathe,” Denise said. “She wouldn’t wear necklaces until she was much older. How did it feel [to be killed like that]?”
Denise, 42, and her sister Christine, 31, stood in the Versailles courtroom holding each other up, with one speaking for the other each time one broke down — which was often.
They were telling a judge, two magistrates and six jurors what the effect had been on the O’Keefe family of the death of Jeanette on New Year’s Eve 11 years ago. She failed to board a flight she had booked to New York, and her body was later found bashed, strangled and dumped in a sleeping bag in a car park in a dingy Paris suburb.
Earlier in the trial, a juror had asked a forensic witness if it had been a quick death. No, was the reply; she was beaten many times around the head, probably with an iron pipe. It appeared that she regained consciousness and was then strangled; and then strangled again.
Adriano Araujo da Silva, 37, a Brazilian-born Guyanese who emigrated to France, is charged with Jeanette’s murder and has pleaded not guilty. He was arrested in 2008 when DNA evidence allegedly linked him to the crime. He confessed three times to police and judges before retracting his confession.
By January 2, 2001, the family knew Jeanette, a computer programmer who had been on a European holiday, was missing. Before her body was found, “it was nine days of weeping, of unbelievable torture”, Denise said.
On the other hand, no body led them to hope against hope, said Christine. “Until this happened we had some belief that maybe, maybe it wasn’t her . . . you hold on to every little bit of possibility.”
Even now, she said, family members still have dreams of Jeanette still alive, and feel new grief every time they return to the world of daylight. “Nothing compares to that feeling of having to wake up to the reality of it,” she said.
Their mother had feared she had cancer but refused to go to the doctor until the remains of her daughter, 28, could be brought home to Melbourne for a funeral. Because of the police investigation, this took months.
“And by the time she went to the doctor, the cancer had spread, so her risk of not surviving was very high,” said Denise, weeping. “So then we thought that we would lose our sister and our mother in the same year.”
The sisters’ parents, Kevin and Susan O’Keefe, felt too ill to make the trip to France.
Araujo da Silva watched impassively as the sisters struggled to tell their story.
A psychologist, Sylvia Lefort, told the court that she had found Araujo da Silva derogatory towards women, whom he viewed as objects, as well as lacking in self-control, compassion and guilt. But she said he was not a psychopath. She also reported that there was a disconnection between reality and his perception of reality, and that he changed his versions of stories to make them correspond to how he imagined himself. But he was not delusional, she said.
The judge-and-jury panel of nine was expected to retire to consider its verdict overnight. Five votes are required for a conviction, and if the verdict is guilty the panel will also decide upon a sentence. Araujo da Silva has said he would appeal a guilty verdict.
For the O’Keefe sisters, even a guilty verdict will not put the matter to rest. Jeanette’s movements in her last hours are still a mystery. Only her killer knows the full story.
At the end of her speech, Denise told the court that what the family most wanted was the truth. She shot a look at the accused and told him, with barely controlled fury, “Just the truth!”

First published in The Age.

A candle for Stephen after guilty verdicts, but not before police shame

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LONDON

STEPHEN LAWRENCE was not the first young man to die on a London street simply because he was black. Nor has he been the last. But he was the one whose death became a pivotal moment in race relations in England – even if it has taken 18 years, the length of his own life, for him to finally receive justice.
On Tuesday two of his killers were convicted of murder, after a cold-case investigation that uncovered minuscule forensic evidence, including hair and bloodstains, not detectable at the time of the crime in 1993.
Lawrence’s case is all over the English media not because of forensic triumphs, but because of a human one: his parents’ steadfast insistence on justice for their son, and the way their long battle exposed institutional racism in the police force and led to a slew of laws on racial equality.
His mother, Doreen, says now: “Stephen no longer had a voice so I had to be his voice.”
The way the Lawrences carried themselves transformed British attitudes, says the chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, Trevor Phillips. “For the first time the British public saw parents, a family, whose grief was so patent and whose dignity was so clear that everybody could identify with them. White Britain realised that, actually, black Britain and black Britons aren’t really all that different.”
Stephen Lawrence was in his final year of high school, a former Scout who wanted to be an architect, when he and a friend were approached by a gang of white boys at a bus stop. They called him “nigger”. He was stabbed, twice, and died there.
Information poured in to police but no arrests were made until the South African leader Nelson Mandela visited the family several weeks later, embarrassing the force into action.
But a catalogue of police errors – later attributed by a government-appointed inquiry to “institutional racism” within the force – left the case dangling.
A former High Court judge, Sir William Macpherson, later found officers had failed to follow obvious leads and arrest suspects. He also found, explosively, that there was an “unwitting, unintentional and unconscious” racist attitude by police towards people who were not white.
The Met, shaken, radically changed recruitment, training and procedures. Politicians passed the Race Relations (Amendment) Act, forcing public bodies to prioritise tackling racism.
Despite all attempts at social change, being young and black in Britain is still not easy. Today, young black men are 26 times more likely than whites to be stopped and searched by police. About half of blacks under 25 are unemployed, compared with 20 per cent of white counterparts.
Macpherson had more success with his recommendation that the double jeopardy rule should be abolished. It prevented an accused person from being tried twice for the same crime. Two prosecutions against the Lawrence suspects had failed, and if double jeopardy had not been abolished, there could not have been another trial.
Macpherson said the five prime suspects were “infected and invaded by a gross and revolting racism”. One, David Norris, was filmed on surveillance tape saying he would like to take a black person, torture them, skin them alive and set them alight. “I would blow their two arms and legs off and say, ‘Go on, you can swim home now.”‘
On Tuesday an Old Bailey jury found Norris and Gary Dobson guilty after evidence on clothing they had worn that night linked them to the crime. Police said others would be prosecuted if evidence emerged against them.
For Doreen Lawrence, the verdicts were the end of a long road but nothing she could celebrate: “How can I celebrate when my son lies buried? When I cannot see him or speak to him?”
She says she does not forgive her son’s killers because they showed no contrition: “They don’t think they have done anything wrong. They took away Stephen’s life and there is nothing in their behaviour or anything to show they regret [it].”
She planned to go home
and light a candle for her son:
“I will tell him at long last we have justice.”

First published in the Sydney Morning Herald.