DAVID LEASK ON THE WORLD: The strange case of Sicily’s exploding coffins

Workers transferred remains to metal caskets in temperatures of more than 40 degrees. They have done this before. Just not usually in June.

“This is already something which happens a lot,” said Nicola Presti, who works for the body responsible for maintaining local authority buildings, parks and graveyards.

“We have asked to be supplied with zinc coffins to avoid future distress. We are now at the limits of what is acceptable and we do not know how to ask the council administration for more.”

Nobody likes discussing the gruesome reality of global warming – including its effect on cadavers. 

Last August – when the mercury also topped 40 – Rotoli’s director Leonardo Cristofaro euphemistically declared that the dead were “percolating copiously”. It was, he told local reporters, potentially a serious public health risk. 

The problem in Palermo is not just the heat: it is a shortage of graves. When Cristofaro was speaking last year there were about 1,000 coffins stored at Rotoli waiting to be interred. The caskets – often with photocopied pictures of the dead pinned to them – were lined up in administrative corridors or warehoused in a former plant nursery. 

The air around these makeshift storage facilities, Sicilian journalists have reported, is now unbreathable. Workers wear masks.

Things have been getting worse. A computer hack on Palermo city council this week meant mortuaries were unable to process remains. 

There are squabbles and rows over funding for cemeteries. Rotoli has been described in the local press as being in a state of “endless emergency”.

As is so often the case, climate change is exacerbating this graveyard crisis.
Scorching summers are not uncommon in Sicily, one of Europe’s southernmost tips. Palermo is closer to Tunis than to Rome. 

But average temperatures are creeping up. Last year, across the island in Siracusa, a European all-time-high of just under 49 degrees Celsius was recorded. That is nearly 120 Fahrenheit.

Summer concern
AN August-level heatwave in June has got locals worried, for the living more than the dead. Prolonged exposure to high temperatures, after all, can have fatal consequences. 

Experts have been particularly concerned about what they call “tropical nights”, when the temperature does not drop below 20. The early summer heat wave these last few weeks has spread right across the continent and into England. But it has hit hardest in southern Italy and Spain.

Forecasters have predicted more African heat for Sicily this weekend.  Metereologists have been naming the subtropical anticyclones bringing heat across the Med after ancient generals. The first, in late May, was called Hannibal. 

The current onslaught is Scipio Africanus, the Roman general who defeated the Carthaginian of elephant-over-the-Alps fame. The language makes the weather feel like a military-level threat. It is. Italian environmentalist website GreenMe last week warned: “Exceptional climate events like these could become the norm.”

There was more grim weather news for Sicily last week. The Italian body representing water companies warned that 70 per cent of the island was at medium or high risk of desertification. Winters, scientists say, are getting colder and summers hotter as Sicily’s climate becomes more continental. This will hit key crops, such as the island’s emblematic lemons.

Farmers are worried. Antonino Pirrè, the president of industry lobby Confagricoltura in the historic city of Ragusa, told regional paper Giornale di Sicilia that authorities had been “impressively” slow in dealing with climate change. 

“We have to manage this emergency, clarifying the terms of declaring a state of natural disaster and kickstarting every possible measure to protect agricultural output.”

The head of the Sicilian branch of Coldiretti, which also represents Italian farmers, was even blunter. “The situation in the Silician agricultural sector is tragic, as every summer,” said Francesco Ferreri, according to business daily Quotidiano di Sicilia. 

His group estimates drought losses of €200 million in Sicily this year. 

As Saharan heat keeps expanding over the Med, officials are going to have to find different ways of managing everything from their dead to their water supplies.

Ferreri stressed rising fuel costs are also making it hard for farmers to afford irrigation pumps – and feed to replace grass that does not grow. But scarce fresh water is still being flushed into the sea because of inefficient systems. “We have had enough commiserations,” he said, demanding action.

Many Sicilians, meanwhile, still see the country as a place to escape torrid urban environments.

Italian public broadcaster RAI this week interviewed pensioners paddling in the sea at Mondello, the low-key 19th-century resort just along the coast from Rotoli. 
One elderly woman, desperately trying to cool off, had a simple piece of advice: avoid Palermo itself in the heat. “I never go into the city,” she said.

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Crimea

War is not far from the beaches

THEY are gearing up for summer in Crimea.  The stunning Black Sea peninsula, seized by Vladimir Putin eight years ago as he began his long, land-grabbing war on Ukraine, has long been a holiday hotspot.

This year, even officials admit they are not sure how many visitors to expect. 
The local tourism minister Vadim Volchenko – or at least the man appointed to the post by the internationally unrecognised local government – on Thursday declared prices for package tours to be “dynamic”.

The Russian internet remains full of talk of deals – not least when foreign breaks have been hit by sanctions and travel restrictions. 

There are no flights from Russia to Crimea, until the end of the month at least. On Friday, a train left Moscow for Crimea. 

On Thursday, Russian tour operator KPM Group said it was offering rail tours to the peninsula, which it insisted was “quiet and calm”.

Crimean officials last week announced that some people from parts of southern Ukraine newly occupied by Putin’s armies were heading to their beaches. 
There is no way to verify such claims: independent journalists struggle to operate in Crimea. What the region is getting for sure is refugees. 

The local edition of Russian weekly AiF last week claimed that since February, 200,000 people fleeing war had come through checkpoints on the isthmus which connects the peninsula to the Ukrainian mainland. Of these, 25,000, it said, were children. 

The same paper – which is subject to the same political pressures as others Russian media – described Crimea as booming. It said the peninsula’s big port, Sevastopol, was on track to have a million people within a decade-and-a-half thanks to relocating Russians. 

Schools, it added, were under pressure and house prices were rising. “Many people are not registered,” local councillor Mikhail Chaly told the paper. “That puts more strain on services, on electricity and water.”

Ukraine wants Crimea back. The republic voted for Ukrainian independence back in 1991, albeit less emphatically than everywhere else in the country. 

So far, the peninsula has been little touched by war. After his failed attempt to capture Kyiv, Putin has focused his efforts in the eastern Donbas regions. At least one Ukrainian military expert thinks this may leave the peninsula open to be liberated before other parts of the country.

Oleg Zhdanov, however, told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Crimean station that the Ukrainians did not yet have the resources to mount such an operation. But war is not far from the beaches.

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Australia

Will extremist crackdown and swastika ban be enough to weaken the far right?

THERE was a dangerous edge to anti-lockdown rallies in Australia.
A major journalistic investigation by The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald found they had been infiltrated by the far right.

Extremists, including neo-Nazis on government watchlists, were, the newspapers discovered, “seeking not only to attend rallies, but to organise, recruit and radicalise other protesters”.

Concerns culminated in November 2021 when counter-terror police arrested a campaigner accused of encouraging anti-lockdown Australians to arm themselves and execute the premier of Victoria, Daniel Andrews.

This week, Andrews’s state government became the first in the country to ban the Nazi swastika. “Nobody has the right to spread racism, hate or anti-Semitism,” he said. Other parts of the country are expected to follow suit. 

There are exemptions to the law for Hindus and others who use the swastika as a religious symbol, and police will issue warnings before fines. 
But the message from Melbourne was clear: Australia is cracking down on the far right. 

Security officials made formal warnings about a “real threat” right-wing extremism in the country in 2020, a year after an Australian national carried out a gun attack on a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand.  

A new study published last month by a defence think-tank the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) suggested “the current political moment may be conducive to further action and co-ordination in countering right-wing extremism”.

“Governments and technology companies appear to be expressing greater appetite for action and regulation,” said author Diane Liang. “Public pressure, too, may be mounting.”

She added: The pandemic response hasn’t been spared from information manipulation, conspiracies and public demonstrations that seek to undercut the legitimacy of democratic governments and interactions with ideologically motivated violent extremism.”

Ms Liang cited ASIO, Australia’s equivalent of M15, warning that Covid  restrictions were “being exploited by extreme right-wing narratives” and saying the pandemic has “reinforced an extreme right-wing belief in the inevitability of societal collapse and a ‘race war’”.

Liang stressed that the threat was transnational, with hate fomented in online extremism found across the anglophone world. Police Scotland for some years has referred more troubled individuals to counter-terror programmes for far-right extremism than for any other ideology. 

Jewish groups expressed relief at the swastika ban. “As our nation confronts the deep stain of a resurgent white-supremacist movement that peddles a dangerous and dehumanising agenda, this parliament has declared that the symbol of Nazism will never find a safe harbour in our state,” Dvir Abramovich, of the Anti Defamation Commission, told ABC.

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Belarus

Lukashenko’s crackdown on online ‘dissent’ continues

BELARUS has ramped up its war on online dissent.
A court on Friday imposed a whole series of restrictions on one of the country’s best-known Wikipedia editors.

Blogger Mark Bernstein – one of the most prolific contributors to the Russian-language version of the internet encyclopaedia – faces three years’ probation after being found guilty of “organising and preparing activities which disrupt the social order”.

His crime is understood to have been to update the Wikipedia page on Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine. This, however, has never been officially acknowledged. Bernstein – whose name is sometimes transliterated as Bernshteyn – was arrested back in March and initially sentenced to 15 days in jail.

His run-in with police came after a pro-Putin account on the social media platform Telegram published a picture of Bernstein and said he had “distributed fake anti-Russian materials”.

Some link the account – called “Mrakoborets” or dirt-fighter – to troll farms close to the Kremlin. 

Russia’s media watchdog Roskomnadzor had threatened to block Wikipedia over the article on the Ukraine invasion edited by Bernstein. 

This warning had the effect of driving more traffic to the entry, which failed to use the official Kremlin euphemism for the conflict: “special military operation”. 
Belarus – and its self-declared president Alexander Lukashenko – remains close to the Putin regime.  Some Russian forces invaded Ukraine in February from Belarus mustering points. 

However, Belarusian authorities do not just target activists and journalists who criticise the Kremlin. 

The police force which arrested Bernstein is called GUBOPiK. Officially a counter-corruption squad, it has become a political weapon, especially since the crackdown on mass protests against what many Belarusians think was Lukashenko’s fraudulent 2020 re-election.

In April, another Wikipedia editor, Pavel Pernika, sometimes transliterated as Pernikov, was jailed for two years for “discrediting the Republic of Belarus”. Pernika had posted or edited entries about extrajudicial killings in the country’s detention centres after the protests.

Independent news sources, such as Mediazona, have tried to catalogue the oppression of Wikipedia editors in Belarus and Russia.

Bernstein, who is 52, has a long history of support for democratic causes. As far back as 1990, he supported the independence of Lithuania at a protest in its capital Vilnius, according to Mediazona.

A year later -–as the collapse of the August coup augured the end of the Soviet Union – he was pictured in Minsk with a coffin bearing the name 
of the Communist party.