MARK KURLANSKY
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decision. Priebke was released from house arrest, Italians protested and
sighed with relief, while in Argentina the same people who have been
demanding a reckoning for the Dirty War angrily protested. Then one
day later Priebke was re-arrested. Germany, which had quietly been
preparing its own case, requested extradition.
More time passed with Priebke locked in his house, and finally in
November, the Argentine Supreme Court, which is widely perceived as
having been personally packed by Menem, had to give a long overdue
ruling which was six to three in favor of extradition to Italy. Now it is
in Italy's hands. In December, Priebke's initial hearing in Rome was
enlivened by the relatives of victims shouting "murderer." The court
considered the request of the relatives that they be allowed to attach
their own civil suits to the safe and straightforward military case for
which Priebke had been extradited. The court decided to delay any
further action for at least two months.
Italy is well on its way to being a dysfunctional country mired with
cynicism, possessed of a legal system that no one believes can deliver
justice and a political system from which no one expects leadership. The
nation's fifty years of corruption and instability stems from a conspiracy
to build a modern nation by insisting that the only thing that happened
in Italy between 1922 and the allied conquest or "liberation" of 1944
was the 335 Italians who were shot in a cave by the Germans.
Argentina's new democracy is coming close to recreating the society that
Italy built on Mussolini's ghost. In spite of nominal democracy there is
growing cynicism about leadership, skepticism about the legal system and
a growing inability to articulate a plausible national destiny. It is not by
chance that Moreno Ocampo, having no more work prosecuting the
military, has become Argentina's leading investigator of official corrup–
tion. Having failed in his fight to purge the virus he is now taking on
the disease's symptoms.
Even the passing of generations does not heal unspoken guilt.
The Argentine military, the old SS officers, the ex-KGB agents,
Rwanda's Hutu marauders, and Serb ethnic cleansers, can live with what
they did. But their societies cannot.
