The Mysterious Death of Ilaria Alpi Part II
	There are many details about his daughter's death that four years later continue to keep Georgio Alpi awake at night. There is the fact that no investigation was ever done at the crime scene. And then there was the Italian military's refusal to rush medical assistance to Ilaria after she was shot. And it breaks his heart that incompetent forensic work has required that her body be exhumed, twice. But the thing that angers him most is that he and his wife Luciana never really said goodbye to Ilaria. When her body arrived back in Rome the family was told that during the ambush she had been raked with automatic weapons fire. They decided they didn't want to see her like that. So they never viewed the body of their only child, never had the chance for that important rite of closure. It was only after she was buried that they learned the truth, learned that there was only a single, neat bullet hole in the back of Ilaria's head. Ilaria and Miram days before they were killed. Photo by A.Raffaele Ciriello Why, her parents want to know, did the Italian government lie to them? There is no satisfactory answer for them other than the obvious one: The government and the military are covering up the real reasons for their daughter's death. Georgio and Luciana sit side by side on the couch in their apartment on the outskirts of Rome. They hold hands, and smoke cigarettes. Georgio is a small, wiry 74 year-old with thick bushy eyebrows jet black hair and an intense chiseled face. His lower lip quivers uncontrollably when he starts telling stories about Ilaria. Luciana, 65, has short blonde hair and a solid robust looking about her. Her voice is deep and gravelly. Georgio and Luciana live in the apartment where Ilaria grew up. Her room is more or less as she left it, even though she'd moved out, gone to college, lived in Egypt for two and a half years and then gotten her own apartment in with a friend in Rome after being hired by RAI, the Italian state broadcasting corporation. There are photos of her everywhere. Several show her wearing a red, hooded jacket, her blonde hair tied in a pony tail. She clutches a microphone and peers into the camera. The reports she sent back were saved on videotapes stacked beside the Alpis' television. Her parents admit that they may have been overprotective of Ilaria, who as a child was quiet and fragile. They speculate that Ilaria set out for remote areas of the world in part to get away from their influcence, to proclaim her independence. Georgio tells about how young Ilaria was too shy to even ask for what she wanted in Rome's coffee bars. "Papa, tell them I want a glass of water," she would say. When she was 13, Ilaria worked on her school newspaper and decided she wanted to be a journalist. Georgio bought her a present, a small tape recorder. As he tells this story he begins to sob uncontrollably. Luciana's eyes turn red, and she comforts her husband. Shy Ilaria took the tape recorder and went out into the neighborhood interviewing news vendors about their business. It was a pattern that seemed to hold in her adult life. She struck those who met her as sweet and reserved. But as soon as she had a microphone and camera with her she was aggressive, professional, and self assured. "So self assured that she didn't have to be a bitch," was how one senior military official compared her to other female reporters. While many television reporters saw themselves as the stars of their shows, Ilaria once complained to her editor in Rome that she wanted to spend less time on camera. "Why should the viewers be looking at me when I could be showing them another ten seconds of Somalia?" Her parents and I watch some video of Ilaria, particularly her last interview with a clan leader named Boqor (King) Musa. Ilaria is interviewing Musa in the town of Bosasso, a relatively peaceful port 1,500 miles north of Mogadishu on the Gulf of Aden. Musa has a thick gray beard and a lazy eye. Everyone knows him affectionately by his nickname, King Kong. Georgio Alpi turns to me and asks if I know King Kong, and if so, what I think of him. I tell him that the King is a decent fellow who spends his days at a hotel in Bosasso watching CNN. In these days of warlords he doesn't wield a lot of power, but he knows what's going on. Ilaria's discussion with King Kong is fairly mundane. They're talking about development projects and the like. Then she brings up the subject of arms trafficking. King Kong hesitates, and Ilaria tells Miran to shut the camera off. With the camera pointing away, but the sound still rolling you can hear King Kong speak about things that "came from Rome, Brescia, or Torino." Brescia is the arms manufacturing center of Italy. Then you can hear the final words on the tape, from King Kong: "those people have much power, contacts". Georgio thinks the answer to his daughter's death is in that interview. The one and only time I met Ilaria, she had wanted to talk to me about Bosasso, and about King Kong. Something had disturbed her that day. What was she after? What did she want to know? The truth is, had I talked to Ilaria that night at The Sahafi Hotel, there wouldn't have been much I could tell her. But I might have found it curious that an Italian journalist in Mogadishu to cover the departure of Italian troops would have found an important reason to travel to Bosasso where there weren't any Italians. Ilaria was on her fifth trip to Somalia. Miran was there for the first time. The two of them caught a UN flight to Bosasso, and apparently didn't tell anybody they were going. Several days after they left, Italian journalists began asking the staff of the Sahafi hotel where she was. Even the Italian ambassador to Somalia showed up at the Sahafi wearing a flak jacket and helmet with an armed escort inquiring about her whereabouts. The owner of the Sahafi, Mohamed Jirdeh Hussein, found it curious that the ambassador would risk being in the streets at that time at all. The hotel staff informed the ambassador that Ilaria had gone to Bosasso. She was due to arrive back in Mogadishu on Saturday, March 20. The Italian military actually sent a few men to meet her plane and escort her from the airfield. They were going to advise her to spend the night on the Italian naval vessel, the Garibaldi, which was anchored off of Mogadishu. (I smiled when I first heard this. In a million years, even if we were under bombardment, the U.S. military would never send an escort for a journalist. And most U.S. journalists wouldn't have accepted one. We kept our distance from the military, maintained our independence. But the Italians felt they were all in it together.) Her plane arrived a day late, on Sunday at about 12:30. Though her escorts could easily have found out that the flight had been rescheduled, no one was there to meet her. So she and Miran caught a lift to the Sahafi where they checked in and had lunch. It was just after lunch when she and I spoke. Ilaria then phoned RAI in Rome and asked for some satellite time at around 7:00 p.m. so she could feed some video back. She said she had some good footage. "We can speak about the story of the day later." The producer remembers that Ilaria had something she really wanted to do. "I'm in a hurry," she said. She then phoned her mother one last time. At about 2:45 Ilaria and Miran left the Sahafi, heading across the Green Line into North Mogadishu to the Amana Hotel where some Italian journalists sometimes stayed. During the peacekeeping operation a feud had opened up between the Italian contingent on one side and the U.S. and UN on the other. In short, the Italians felt that they had been dissed in Somalia. This was, after all, their former colony. They had a 100-year relationship with the place. But Operation Restore Hope was at its core an American show. The top UN official was a former U.S. Navy Admiral. The UN headquarters was located in the former U.S. embassy compound south of the Green Line in territory that was controlled by warlord Mohamed Farah Aidid. The Italians sequestered themselves north of the Green Line in the area where the former Italian Embassy was and which was controlled by warlord Ali Mahdi Mohamed. There they pouted and sulked and took more than a little delight in the problems that the Americans later encountered in the ill-fated hunt for Aidid. The Italian peacekeeping strategy in Somalia - as it had been in Lebanon before -was to make friends with everyone and stay out of the line of fire. I recall standing with some Italian soldiers one day by the Green Line, surrounded by rubble and barbed wire. The Italian commander warned me to move on because, he said, there had been a sniper in one of the buildings who was shooting at people. Why aren't you afraid, I asked him. We have an arrangement with him, the commander said. So the Italians made their separate peace with the forces that controlled the North. Part of that dynamic involved the man everyone knew as Giancarlo. Giancarlo Marocchino, an Italian citizen and 50-something trucking magnate from Genoa who had made his home in Mogadishu since 1984 when he went into exile after being indicted for tax evasion. He married a Somali woman from the clan that now controls north Mogadishu, and settled in. If Giancarlo were to set foot in Italy today he would be arrested, but in north Mogadishu he became a good friend to, and important source of intelligence for, the Italian military. The U.S. military, on the other hand, once, briefly, had him thrown out of Somalia. U.S. intelligence was sure that Giancarlo was getting rich selling guns to the warlords. At one point an American intelligence officer suspected that weapons confiscated by the Italian military were sold to Giancarlo who then reconditioned them and sold them back on the streets. During the 1980s, Italy's socialists under Prime Minister Bettino Craxi seemingly turned their entire government apparatus into a huge money laundering operation - and their former colony of Somalia played a huge role in that corruption. Trillions of lire were sent to the impoverished country as "aid" and recycled back into the pockets of Italian government officials and their cronies. (Some of this corruption came to light in 1989 when Mohamed Farah Aidid - not yet a world famous warlord - sued Craxi for 50 million lire that he says he was promised as part of a kickback scheme.) The biggest scam aid projects in Somalia were in the northeast, near Bosasso. One of those projects involved the construction a first-rate highway built through the desert linking Bosasso to Somalia's main road. One of the main beneficiaries of that road, and of the slush fund around the project, was the man who was very active in the area's trucking business, Giancarlo Marocchino. During Operation Restore Hope, Giancarlo became a good friend to the Italian journalists, many of whom stayed in his home and paid for his protection. Giancarlo provided them with meals, cars, drivers, and bodyguards. Several of the Italian journalists, however, refused to stay with him. One of those journalists was Ilaria Alpi. She thought he was a gun-running sleaze bag. So Ilaria and Miran headed north over the Green Line in their white pickup truck. Their driver was named Ali and their bodyguard was a young kid named Mahamoud. In retrospect, it clearly wasn't advisable to be traveling around Mogadishu with only one gunman. At that time I was traveling with two, some days with more. I rode in a sedan and had a pickup truck full of gunners following me. Other journalists did likewise. We realized that the pullout of the Western troops was making Somalis nervous. While the public in Europe and the U.S. saw Operation Restore Hope as a grand charitable gesture, the Somalis saw the thing in terms of money. The UN, the charities and the press were pumping hundreds of thousands of dollars a day, cash, American dollars, into the Mogadishu economy. The foreigners living in Somalia had hired guards and drivers and rented houses and cars for astronomical amounts of money. Each journalist had an entire crew on his payroll. In addition, the presence of the peacekeeping troops meant that Somali businessmen could continue to operate. Somalia under the protection of the UN, but without governmental authority, had become a haven for smugglers. Cigarettes, for example were imported tax free (who was going to collect?) and sent across the borders to Kenya and Ethiopia. And foreign boats came to fish Somalia's waters. Sometimes warlords were able to extract tribute from them. Sometimes they just seized the ships. At the time Ilaria was in Bosasso, the local militia had hijacked several fishing ships that were being held for ransom just off the coast. One ship in particular had attracted some attention at that time. It was a ship that had been donated as Italian aid to the Somalis. It had an Italian captain, two Italian officers and a Somali crew. Kidnapping and hijacking were business as usual in Somalia. With the peacekeepers pulling out Somalis were aware that everything could change. And we were aware that the end of the gravy train might be the beginning of trouble. People who knew Ilaria well said that she might have become too comfortable in Mogadishu. She was well known and popular among the Somali people, especially the women who she spent time with and whose causes she championed. They had given her a nickname (everyone in Somalia had a nickname), which translated to "little smile." One of those causes was female genital mutilation. Somali girls when they reach puberty undergo the rite of infibulation. Their labia are sliced off and their vaginas are sewn up until their wedding night when their husbands will crack the seal that guarantees he's getting a virgin. As horrible as this is, few members of the highly cynical Africa journalists corps thought it worth reporting on. The custom is common enough in Africa and it's not news. It was news to Ilaria, who was outraged and was naive enough, or idealistic enough, to think that journalism could somehow make life better. At about 3 p.m. Ilaria and Miran arrived at the Amana hotel where the correspondent for the Italian news agency (ANSA) was staying even though she knew he wouldn't be there. The Amana is located on a hillside on a quiet street near the former Italian embassy. Ali and Mohamoud turned the truck around so it was pointing back down the hill where they had come from. Across the street from the hotel was tea stall, which was just a few benches in the shade where a woman boiled tea on an open fire. A group of men in a blue Land Rover pulled up, parked, and began drinking tea. They never got to finish it. Only minutes after they went in, Ilaria and Miran walked out of the hotel, climbed into their pickup and started down the hill. The seven men from the Land Rover, quickly put their tea down, piled back into their vehicle and overtook the pickup, cutting them off at the bottom of the hill where the street intersected with a main road. Two men jumped out of the Land Cruiser. And the shooting began. That point is where all agreement about what happened ends and where contradictory stories, some from the same witnesses begin.   Next: Part 3, Coverup