The Ustica Tragedy in 1980 Italy: War in the Mediterranean?

Abstract

On June 27 1980, during the night, a civil airplane (DC-9 Itavia) flying from Bologna to Palermo in Italy blew up and disappeared into the Mediterranean Sea next to Ustica island. All 81 passengers on board died. The most complete inquiry conducted by Judge Rosario Priore concluded in 1999 that the DC-9 accident “occurred following military interception activity”. It did not, however, identify any guilty party. In 2007 Francesco Cossiga, who was Prime Minister in 1980, declared that the DC-9 was mistakenly shot down by a French missile, so leading to the reopening of the case with new international information requests. More recently Giuliano Amato, a PSI leader and Prime Minister in 1992, partially confirmed Cossiga’s words, speaking about a NATO covert action aimed to strike a Libyan aircraft (because of the alleged presence of Qadhafi on board) which was hiding itself under the Italian civil airplane. More than forty years after the events, however, we still do not know exactly what the reasons underlying the tragedy were and which countries were guilty and the Ustica tragedy is still one of the biggest unsolved mysteries of Italy. The aim of the present paper is not, of course, that to reach a complete conclusion as to who is directly to blame for the tragedy. As an international historian, the aim of the author is instead to turn back to the events of that time trying to put together the many pieces of the puzzle and to provide a plausible international framework for the tragedy. It is not possible, in fact, to isolate what happened in Italy on June 27 1980 from the patchwork of international tension of that time (from Afghanistan and Iran to Middle East, North Africa and Malta just to mention the main arc of crisis) as well as from the traditional dual track of Italy’s foreign policy, the Atlantic one and the Mediterranean one. Keywords: Ustica, Italy, Libya, War, Cold War