Giorgia Meloni’s was perhaps the shortest and most unexpected visit an Italian head of government has ever made to the United States of America. The PM’s stay in Florida, specifically at President Donald Trump’s private residence in Mar-a-Lago, lasted just five hours, and it is understandable how the number one at Palazzo Chigi spent more time on the plane, between the outward journey and the immediate return, than in the Sunshine State. But it was an important five hours, occupied by the confrontation between Rome and Washington on sensitive and topical issues such as Ukraine, the Middle East and the tariffs intended to regulate transatlantic trade. What’s more, as many newspapers, both American and Italian, rightly reported, PM Meloni chose the blitz in the USA, anticipating a face-to-face meeting with Trump without waiting to meet the president until 20 January, the date of his official inauguration at the White House, to discuss and resolve the affair of the Italian journalist Cecilia Sala, arrested in Iran and now detained at Evin Prison, Tehran.
The Sala case is intertwined with that of Mohammad Abedini Najafabadi, a 38-year-old Iranian engineer who was detained and arrested at Malpensa airport at the request of the US justice system. Abedini, along with an accomplice arrested in the same hours in the US, is accused by Boston Federal Court prosecutors of conspiracy and of sending electronic components from the US to Iran in violation of US export control laws and sanctions applied by Washington to the Islamic Republic. Abedini is also accused of supplying illicit material to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, the notorious Iranian Pasdaran considered a terrorist organisation by the US authorities. Basically, the charge of conspiracy to commit terrorism hangs over this Iranian citizen, who is now confined in Milan’s Opera prison, and the United States is demanding his extradition. The Teheran engineer is held responsible for a drone attack on a US base in Jordan in which three US military personnel lost their lives. Cecilia Sala’s imprisonment in Iran is judged as blackmail inflicted on Italy, guilty of stopping Mohammad Abedini Najafabadi at Malpensa airport.
The journalist used as a bargaining chip to try to intimidate Italy into releasing Abedini, even though the Islamic Republic’s leadership denies this reconstruction. The Italian government and those who lead it are not allowing the Ayatollahs to dictate the agenda in Rome, and at the same time they are doing the impossible to bring Cecilia Sala home, who is undoubtedly spending dramatic days in a prison like the one in Evin where political opponents of the Iranian theocracy are imprisoned and often tortured, and of this there is full awareness at Palazzo Chigi. It is no coincidence that Giorgia Meloni rushed to Florida to see Donald Trump, if only for a brief meeting, because there is no time to lose.
Prime Minister Meloni, who represents the best foreign policy that Italy can have in this historical period, wanted direct contact with the US president, given the American implications and the Abedini case, linked to Cecilia Sala’s arrest in Iran, to try to unravel the tangle first of all with a friend and ally such as Trump, without letting herself be conditioned by Iranian blackmail and without underestimating the extent of the international threats from the religious dictatorship in Tehran and its men scattered around the world with very unpeaceful intentions. The balance is certainly a delicate one, and Giorgia Meloni is moving in the direction of getting the journalist to return to her homeland while avoiding dangerous caving in to fundamentalist barbs.
Others, in the place of this prime minister, and let us think, for example, of an overtly anti-Westerner like Giuseppe Conte, would not have cared about the danger of giving, more or less indirectly, a hand to the Pasdaran, who are delinquent outside Iranian borders on behalf of the Ayatollahs, and would have already freed Abedini just to propagandise their false and hypocritical bravura usefulness to get our compatriots detained abroad back in. Everything must be done, especially when faced with detention in a country like Iran, but one cannot genuflect before the jailers.