I trekked back home along North and Great Junction Streets, past the stern gaze of Andrew Bell, whose blackened statue adorns the front of the church next to Leith Victoria swimming baths. Bell had travelled the world and returned to the UK with a pioneering method of education to improve the lot of the poor and destitute. Now in Leith he glares down etnerally on bookies and video rental shops.

Back home and fortified with a cuppa, I made the call. Soon I was on the line to an advisor anwering what seemed to be an endless series of questions aimed at discovering whether I was eligible for income-based or contributions-based Jobseekers’ Allowance. (never mind that I didn’t know what the difference was between the two of them) When she asked me ‘are you male?’ I realised I should probably be doing the whole thing online. From the tone of her voice she clearly thought so too. As the questions rattled on I began to feel that I was trapped in an abusive relationship, and that perhaps if I just said ‘no’ to everything, no one would ever check anyway. On the other hand, I’d heard about the lie detector software installed on the phone lines that might be out to get me. Better play it safe. Too bad then that the phone line cut out suddenly half way through question 213… 

…Ten minutes later I made it through again, but not to Miss Gestapo Trainee. This advisor had a reassuring tone and even told me she was located in Poole in Dorset. (say the word, Poole, it has a very reassuring sound) A short time later I had my appointment for an interview at the Job Centre and they had my bank details.

The conclusion: what a difference a voice makes.

Dumb ole’ me. If I’d been less paranoid I could have saved myself a fifteen minute walk to the Job Centre to sign on. Saved myself pulling on a locked door and peering into a darkened entrance lobby while a young man with a very red face jabbered incoherently at my side. ‘I think it’s a public holiday’, I said to him, belatedly passing on the wisdom that Murray in his helpfulness had tried to convey to the nation’s ’sans boulot’. The information didn’t seem to register with my friend. I had the feeling he might have been there for several hours, waiting to see if something happened. Perhaps I was it.

By day they roamed the town on the bare rock that was their prison. By night they huddled in makeshift shelters against the cold air breezing in off the Mediterranean.

“An indelible, unforgettable shame” is how Giuseppina Nicolini, her voice harsh with emotion, describes the six week period in February and March when the number of Tunisian migrants on Lampedusa grew to exceed the resident population. “I could show you photos I took” she says, “but to be honest it’s the ones I couldn’t bring myself to take that I’ll remember forever.” Nicolini manages the Lampedusa office of Legambiente, an environmental body active across Italy. The scenes she recalls to me are no secret. The international media was there in force to record them. But Nicolini is convinced that even months on from its end, the truth about the invasion of Lampedusa has still not been told.

To the mainstream media the immigration crisis was an unfortunate by-product of events in North Africa which caught the Italians, like most governments, unawares. As a result – so the accepted narrative goes – Italy had no space in any of its immigration detention facilities on the mainland, meaning the destitute Tunisians had to be kept on Lampedusa in such unprecedentedly large numbers that they could not be contained in the holding facility and instead spilled out among the local population. After seven weeks, with a state of emergency officially declared, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi arrived to announce that “within forty eight to sixty hours Lampedusa will be inhabited by no one but Lampedusans”. Following a further five day delay while the details of a repatriation deal with Tunisia’s interim government were hammered out, he delivered. Now most of the boats that continue to arrive on Lampedusa carry people coming from Libya – carefully defined as refugees – rather than Tunisians, who are defined without exception as ‘economic migrants’. As soon as the boats dock at the quayside the refugees are loaded into buses and taken to a holding centre where they are housed until their transfer to one of Italy’s mainland facilities, typically within forty eight hours. Today a visitor to Lampedusa would find a tranquil island scarcely disturbed by the continued arrivals from Africa. The point is an important one. In the last two decades Lampedusa’s economy has come to depend heavily on tourism. And while in reality the crisis may be over, locals are angry that the message is not getting through to potential visitors. They feel they are being made to pay twice: once with the trauma of the emergency itself, and now again with a summer of economic failure. In the minds of many the blame for this lies with the media who perpetuate a false image of an island unsuitable for tourism.

Not so in Nicolini’s eyes. For her and others the debate about Lampedusa’s current woe is skewed by a basic misconception. As she sees it, the ‘invasion’ can only be seriously discussed when it is accepted not as an inevitable effect of the Arab Spring, but as the result of a deliberate policy by the Italian government.

“At a certain point migrants kept arriving but they didn’t leave any more. If instead of taking them away you let them build up and build up it’s obvious that you’ll get to seven thousand.”

Nicolini rubbishes government claims that the scale of influx meant that immigration centres on the mainland reached full capacity.

“From spring to autumn 2008 migrants arrived at a comparable rate. Did anyone talk about a biblical emergency then? The government were quite explicit that they wanted to keep the Tunisians here until repatriation. When it was found out that the regions had space for 50,000 and there were 12,000 Tunisians – at that point 5,000 of them here – a Government senator was asked what they were waiting for to take those 5,000 off the island. And he replied ‘But the 50,000 places are for refugees. They’re Tunisians, they’re not refugees. They have to be repatriated. And so we’ll keep them on Lampedusa because from there they can’t escape.’”

Nicolini points out that 2011’s spike in arrivals is a result of the breakdown of deals Italy made in 2009 with the dictatorships in Libya and Tunisia. Berlusconi’s government agreed to pay Tunisia’s Ben Ali to immediately repatriate Tunisians arriving in Italy, while a joint policing deal with Gaddafi involved migrant boats being turned back to Libya on the high seas before they could make an asylum claim, a policy known as respingimenti, which violated Italy’s obligations under the Geneva Convention on Refugees. Rather than creating an unprecedented immigration emergency, the Arab Spring merely meant a sudden and exaggerated return to the conditions prior to these agreements. The key difference was that instead of migrants being kept in the detention centre and frequently transferred to the Italian mainland, transfers ceased and the separation from locals ensured by the Welcome Centre model was abandoned. For Nicolini this situation, and the hostility and indignity it caused, could not have happened without the acquiescence of Lampedusa’s mayor, Bernardino De Rubeis.

I interview the bearlike De Rubeis in his office in the town hall, asking him first if he is satisfied with the government’s response to the crisis. His response is surprising:

“I have to tell you, with great peace of mind, that the people of Lampedusa gave themselves to this humanitarian crisis, collaborating with central government, in order that this emergency could bring forth out of Lampedusa, but above all out of Italy, a strong message that all the member states of the European Union should absolutely be taking on board.

“If Lampedusa had not allowed itself to be invaded for about two months the problem would definitely not have got out. If you have 6,300 immigrants in a territory like that of Lampedusa, with a resident population of 5,800, it is very different from sending those 6,300 immigrants to Italy where nobody notices because Italy is big, and so, almost deliberately, a tragic moment was created so that Europe would wake up to the problem. I am convinced of this and I take responsibility for it, because the government, as it is doing today, and as it did after fifty eight days of the crisis, could have easily and quickly resolved the problem by transferring the immigrants to the various centres in Italy. Many are full, but they could have created more.” 

In other words De Rubeis agrees with Nicolini that the emergency was artificially created, and that he collaborated in it: somewhat surprising for the mayor of an island which depends on tourism, given that Lampedusa’s image in the eyes of potential visitors was always likely to be ruined by the crisis. But De Rubeis argues that it was a necessary piece of propaganda to force the European Union to help Italy cope with immigration. And he is sure that Lampedusans will be recognised and rewarded for their sacrifice. “I’ll go to Rome to try to meet Berlusconi because what do the people here need? Or rather what does the tourism sector need? They need serious answers… a ten year run of credit, which can be given by the Sicilian region… and on the national level a block on taxes for at least six to seven months.”

Whether one agrees with this policy or not, at least it would appear that De Rubeis is being honest. However Nicolini disputes not only the ethics and wisdom of his decision. She, along with a number of other Lampedusans, believes that De Rubeis no longer has a will of his own – that he is nothing more than a puppet whose strings are held by dark forces at the opposite end of the long boot of Italy’s mainland.

*

The current Italian government is a coalition between Silvio Berlusconi’s People of Freedom Party and the Lega Nord, a northern separatist movement who used to campaign on a mainly anti-southern platform but are now trying to spread their mix of xenophobia and federalism across the country. At the height of the 2011 crisis Lega leader, Umberto Bossi, came out with the soundbite immigrati fora dai ball, a northern dialect phrase which roughly translates as ‘Immigrants get the f*** out’. Berlusconi’s government depends on Lega support to pass legislation. In return the Lega has been able to exert a strong influence and obtain ministerial positions, including Interior Minister Roberto Maroni, and Minister for Simplification Roberto Calderoli, whose view on immigrants is that: “the door is always open for them to go back to the desert and talk to camels, to the jungle to talk to monkeys.” For Nicolini the desire to turn Lampedusa into an open prison came from the Lega. Its aim was not just to attract European help in dealing with immigration, but also to stir xenophobia across Italy.

“The Lega needed to show their voters in the north this monster of Lampedusa. It was a well-designed plan and from their point of view it worked perfectly. On an island it’s easy. It’s a sealed environment. You can truly do whatever you want.”

And yet two years earlier the Lega met fierce resistance when they tried to do the same thing. In 2009 the island was threatened by a similar crisis to the one that unfolded in 2011. Agreements with the dictators Ben Ali and Gaddafi had yet to be sealed. Lega pressure on Berlusconi to halt the flow of immigrants onto mainland Italy reached a head. On January 23 2009 Interior Minister Maroni announced that the ‘Welcome Centre’ on Lampedusa would henceforth operate alongside a ‘Centre for Identification and Expulsion’ (CIE). The Lega’s intentions were clear: they wanted to redefine Lampedusa not as a stepping stone but as a place where migrants could be kept until being sent back. With the Libya deal yet to be ratified by the Italian parliament and negotiations over a new agreement with Tunisia at a critical stage, there was an obvious benefit to creating a situation on Lampedusa that would sting previously reluctant hands into action. The pace of transfers off the island slowed and numbers in the Centre swelled far beyond its eight hundred capacity. On January 24 more than one thousand broke out of the gates and made their way peacefully to the town hall where a crowd of locals protesting against the planned CIE greeted them with cheers. It was a moment of solidarity; locals and migrants united in their refusal to allow Lampedusa to be turned into a prison island, and Bernardino De Rubeis was with them: “Lampedusa is not for sale. We find ourselves confronted with an all-powerful state that wants to impose its own choices and transform this island into a prison under the open sky.” He became the target for attacks from Lega Nord politicians including Minister Calderoli who accused him of deliberately seeking the spotlight and “throwing petrol on the fire”. When, in February 2009 Tunisians rioted and the Centre was almost destroyed in a fire that sent toxic fumes across to the nearby town, De Rubeis still reserved his ire for the government and the Lega’s influence within it: “They have turned the Centre into a concentration camp. The immigrants are at the end of their tether.”

But Maroni and Calderoli were not without allies on Lampedusa. One of the stranger features of the island’s recent history is that the Lega, with its northern separatist agenda, has successfully managed to implant itself there, on Italy’s southernmost point. Two of its candidates won council seats in the last local elections in 2007. One of them, Angela Maraventano, became De Rubeis’ deputy in a ‘centre-right’ coalition. De Rubeis himself was affiliated to the Movement for Autonomy – a southern-based party which campaigns for greater federalism but without the Lega’s intrinsic racism. The following year, still holding the post of deputy mayor, Maraventano was put forward in a northern seat for elections to the Senate, the second chamber of the Italian Parliament. Her successful election capped a speedy rise onto the national political stage. In return, the Lega expected her to take the battle to Lampedusa. To a backdrop of public abuse she spoke in defence of the government at the same January 2009 protest where De Rubeis delivered his message of defiance. The schism between mayor and deputy deepened in March when the government hurriedly converted a former NATO radar post into a Centre for Identification and Expulsion. Claiming Maraventano had gone behind his back, De Rubeis sacked her. Two months later the CIE was dismantled after the mayor led arguments that it had been constructed illegally. At this point there could be no doubt that if the Lega – and by extension the government – wanted to use Lampedusa as Italy’s immigration Alcatraz, they would find in Bernardino De Rubeis a genuine block of resistance.

That ceased abruptly on July 21 2009, when Italian finance police arrested him and took him by helicopter to prison on Sicily to face charges of bribery and corruption. From the beginning De Rubeis has denied these charges. Initially he claimed his arrest was a political plot by the government to punish him for his opposition. He was kept in jail for a month before being released pending trial. 2009 turned into 2010 and still the trial had not begun. In February 2010 he sent a letter to Interior Minister Maroni – a letter which subsequently became public – congratulating Maroni for the success of the respingimenti policy and offering one of the most humble political apologies that can surely ever have been tendered to a former enemy:

“from a stubborn man, but a man able to understand when the time is right to take one or more steps back, recognising the merit and courage of someone who, with a strong, decisive action, has pulled off a masterplan.”

Simultaneously he posted an official ordinance reinstating Maraventano as his deputy with special responsibility for immigration:

“ …in the hope that she will forgive an old friend guilty of not defending and supporting a woman who was able to foresee the grand political design which has saved our island.”

The sentiments in these letters are supported by the facts: since his prison release at the end of August 2009, De Rubeis’ intransigence on the question of immigration has been replaced by unswaying adherence to the government line.

“Someone easily blackmailable,” is Giuseppina Nicolini’s carefully worded assessment of the mayor. Not that she believes the charges against De Rubeis are trumped up: the Legambiente was one of several interest groups who recently presented a two hundred page dossier to the regional prosecutor detailing his alleged abuses of office. But there is more than a hint of sympathy in her voice when she says “in a way he is both victim and executioner in this affair: executioner of his subjects; victim of his superiors.”

When I ask De Rubeis about his trial, now finally being heard in sessions separated by long intervals in a courthouse on Sicily, he no longer holds the government responsible. On that score too he has changed his mind. The enemies now are closer to home: the bureaucratic classes who, for years, he says, have had their own way on Lampedusa:

“The problems start when someone wants to make changes – when there are monopolies, when it’s the white collars who decide things, and then a mayor comes in – a mayor of the people, the son of a fisherman.”

The ‘blue collar’ workers I speak to do identify with De Rubeis. “We grew up together. He’s not a bad guy. But he’s controlled by others,” fisherman Pasquale tells me. Angelo La Noce, a carpenter, agrees: “The problem is not so much Dino as the people around him.”

While these locals do not analyse as closely as Nicolini, they share her sense that their elected mayor has become a puppet figure.

But perhaps the most revealing piece of evidence comes from De Rubeis himself:

“Very often the people choose a man to govern them, and then this man who should be able to govern peacefully finds himself caught up in situations where he is forced into compromises which mean that he cannot do his duty and honour the faith the people placed in him.”

Is this an admission that his radical U-turn from opposition to support for government policy on Lampedusa is somehow connected to the events surrounding his arrest and trial? Or is it simply a general statement that it is impossible for a local leader to represent the interests of his people when the will of certain influential figures is against him? Either way it seems to summarise the deeper truth of Lampedusa’s woes. Behind a dramatic tableau of immigration crisis lies the faded scenery of local democracy eroded by the cold exercise of power.

He was talking to an Italian journalist on the island after making it ashore on another boat that was just in front of his one. He said most of the others in the water didn’t know how to swim but he was able to stay alive long enough to be hauled to safety. The journalist, Francesco Viviano from La Repubblica, described him as a big man made to seem small by his fear. As he sat on the quayside waiting to be taken to the emergency centre for migrants his clothes were still wet and he was shivering.

The next day a blonde French woman came to the island by plane. She was Marine le Pen, the leader of the National Front in France.  She was accompanied by Mario Borghezio, a politican whose party, the Northern League, openly fight for a Europe that is ‘white and Christian’. The pair were met and escorted on a tour of the island by Bernardino de Rubeis, the mayor. Both Le Pen and Borghezio wanted to tell native Lampedusans that they stood with them against the likes of that large shivering man.

There are currently 2,800 migrants on Lampedusa, awaiting transfer to centres in other parts of mainland Italy where their claims for asylum will be made and assessed.

The vivid sense of place and action is a constant through the book. It takes its form more or less from the trajectory of Orwell’s own six months or so, slumming it with barely a penny to his name in both cities of the title. The narrative drive and tension is provided by his constant need to have enough money to survive. Along the way the characters he meets give it spice and humour. Boris, the Russian waiter, was my favourite. I loved his ability to delude himself and Orwell too about his ability to make a mint without too much trouble at all, when in reality he was absolutely on the skids. The best bit of the book was about the Hotel X. where GO finally got taken on as a plongeur in the staff kitchen. The way he described the hierarachy even at the lowest levels of the vast staff, the filth of the kitchens, the detail of how they addressed each other and what they did in the breaks – it was pure documentary brilliance. And it could only have been written by someone on the inside, as he was, living the story he went on to write.

Penniless as he was and pawning off even his clothes Orwell still stopped short of getting rid of his notebooks. Or if not notebooks then at least something to write on, since there are details like song lyrics that he couldn’t have remembered otherwise. And presumably all the time the ordeal was going on, what kept him going – as well as the companionship he found - was the storing up of material for the narrative he knew was to come. For me the best lesson of this book was understanding the immense gain to the narrative when its writer gets to the very heart of his subject by living it himself.

Just over a week ago a Libyan gunboat fired on some Sicilian fishermen 110km south of Lampedusa.  They apparently mistook the fishermen for refugees.  No one was killed but the boat was riddled with bullet holes.  According to the Repubblica reports, there were Italian ‘Guardia di Finanzia’ men on board the Libyan craft, but they remained below while the Libyans opened fire.  This is the practice that has been agreed, i.e. Berlusconi gets Gaddaffi to do his dirty work for him.

I suppose something good might come out of it.  It might make a few Italians change their minds about the policy when they see the Libyans so trigger happy they don’t wait to find out who they’re shooting at.

The visit was to celebrate the second anniversary of the Italy-Libya friendship treaty signed by Berlusconi and Geddafi.

As usual the Libyan leader was accompanied by his retinue of female bodyguards

30 Berber horses arrived on a later plane.  They would perform an equestrian show for Berlusconi’s entertainment

500 young Italian women, recruited from an agency, were sent to the Libyan Ambassador’s residence (in the grounds of which Geddafi’s tent was pitched).  There they were given  ‘an Islamic lesson’ and presented with ceremonial Korans, following which three on the spot conversions reportedly took place.  However two of the women left early in what were reported to be flustered states, telling reporters ‘we are nobody’.

Geddafi went for a night-time walkabout in some of Rome’s most fashionable streets (followed by a 20 car escort), stopping to eat an ice cream and drink a cappucino, then to talk to two Tunisian stallholders, to whom he later ordered one of his attendants to pay 300 euros for a handful of rings.   Finally he consumed an unspecified beverage in a restaurant before re-entering his own white limousine and driving away.

In a speech he announced that Islam was the future religion of Europe, and also warned that millions of Africans would turn the continent black.  (Italy and Libya have signed an agreement whereby immigrants caught trying to reach Italy by boat are automatically turned back to Libya, where they are held in special internment camps with no access to legal representation)

On the table for discussion are business deals involving Libya becoming substantial part-owners of majors Italian state holdings, while construction work on projects such as a new motorway on the Libyan coast will be given to Italian firms.

(information from La Repubblica website)

Since details remain elusive, the following elements can be no more than speculation: a hurriedly erected platform in the lobby of a gas plant office – the plant itself incongruous in an otherwise insignificant village; a brace of rousing speeches from men in suits on the platform; ripples of applause from plant workers gathered about. Then, at the appointed hour of 11am a lever is pulled.

This was a small chapter in a much wider story. A story hard to pin down but replete with ceremonies, handshakes, levers, and powerful men. The international politics of gas is no arena for women, as Gazprom tried to demonstrate to Yulia Timoshenko, the Ukrainian Prime Minister whose angelic features and plaited hair suggest a blond version of Star Wars’ Princess Leia. It was a year ago in January of 2009, when Gazprom’s shutdown of supply to Russia’s largest neighbour in response to alleged unpaid debts made headlines across Europe. Alarmist talk followed of a new cold war with energy as the principal weapon. Soon, however, the dispute was patched up, while the western media found other, more urgent threats to concentrate on.

Behind the scenes in politics and industry, a story which to the general public seemed to have come and gone was set to shape the year to come. Gazprom’s dispute with Ukraine served to intensify the urgent need for a project conceived almost seven years earlier, on a night at the Vienna Opera House in February 2002. The performance that night was Verdi’s Nabucco, an italianised form of Nebuchadnezzar. Its fours acts tell the story of that Babylonian king’s conquest of Jerusalem and subsequent fall at the hands of his own daughter, Abigaille. The old king returns to power in the end, but only through embracing the religion of the Jews he had initially driven out. Thwarted in her love for the Jewish warrior Ishmael and mad with anger, Abigaille eventually poisons herself. A contemporary German rival slammed Verdi’s work as both bloodthirsty and sentimental, but the drama of pride and tyranny shown the error of its ways has thrilled audiences ever since its La Scala debut in 1842. The moment Nebuchadnezzar belts out ‘non son piu re, son dio’ (I am no longer king, I am God’) and is promptly struck down by a lightning bolt, the current switches irrevocably in favour of the underdog – to devastating effect.

Renato Bruson in the title tenor role

This message appealed to five members of the audience that night, representatives from the major gas companies of Austria, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey. Earlier in the day they had made an agreement to construct a pipeline to bring gas from Turkey, the easternmost, through each country all the way to Austria, the westernmost. They were so impressed by the opera they saw that they decided to name their project after it. And so Nabucco was conceived.

Identifying which real-life oppressor with omnipotent designs the five parties had in mind is not a difficult task. Even back in 2002, Gazprom’s strategy to dominate supply of Eurasian gas resources to the European market was well under way. The Bluestream pipeline crossing the Black seabed south into Turkey was nearing completion. When it came onstream in 2003 it allowed Gazprom direct access to the Turkish market without co-operation from the intermediary countries Ukraine, Romania and Bulgaria. This accomplished, the next step for Gazprom was to access Western Europe’s lucrative market, bypassing as many awkward intermediary countries as possible. The company argued that there was nothing sinister in this design; they were simply following the law of capitalism and seeking to maximise profit for the shareholders. Use of energy supply as a diplomatic weapon is difficult to prove, and even if it could be, is not a crime recognised for practical purposes. The men at the top of the Kremlin’s company are old-fashioned capitalists, ‘red in tooth and claw’. The grip they have taken on the European market equates to the Hungarian footballers who went to Wembley in 1953 and taught the self-professed English masters a lesson at their own game. Nabucco represents the victim’s realisation that the only way to compete with a slick, dynamic opponent is to learn its tactics and how to subvert them.

The Nabucco partners knew their adversary had one weakness. Like Nebuchadnezzar’s daughter, some of the Kremlin’s family had established their own independence. The former Soviet republics bordering the Caspian sea, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, between them hold vast energy resources. If Europe could access these via Turkey without the need to pass through Russia, then Moscow’s hand would be significantly diminished. Nabucco set out to deploy Gazprom’s own tactical blend of politics melded to business, this time to their advantage.

As the project gathered pace the political dimension became increasingly apparent. In 2003 the European Commission agreed to pay 50% of the feasibility study, followed by giving official backing in 2005. Then in July of 2009 Nabucco pulled off what seemed its trickiest coup. At a meeting in Ankara, attended by Commission President Barroso and U.S. Special Envoy for Eurasian Energy Richard Morningstar, the project was officially backed by the Turkish government. Turkey, with its interest in Gazprom’s Bluestream, was always likely to be a stumbling block. Earlier that year, in January, Azerbaijan’s President had confirmed that for the right price, Azeri gas would willingly fill the pipeline. Everything seemed to be falling into place for Nabucco to begin construction.

The Kremlin however, had other ideas. In 2007 Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev went to Rome to shake hands with the boss of Eni, Paolo Scaroni, on a deal which would make the Italian company equal partners with Gazprom on a new pipeline, to be called Southstream. The project’s intended route made clear its intention as a direct challenge to Nabucco. Southstream would take gas from the Caucasus, near Azerbaijan, miss out Turkey altogether by crossing the Black Sea the long way, from east to west, then reach Italy via, among others, Bulgaria and Hungary, two of the partners already committed to Nabucco. The plan seemed audacious, even unrealistic if it was intended to derail Nabucco. Why would the two new E.U. members lessen their support for an alternative source, when they could already buy Russian gas through existing pipelines anyway?

Yet Nabucco has an unavoidable achilles heel. It depends on accessing a resource in the territory of countries a thousand kilometres further east than Moscow. Should the Azeris choose to sell gas north to Russia rather than west to Europe, E.U. law has no sanction to prevent them. Nabucco felt their crutch would be a more powerful one: the law of market economics. By exporting to Europe directly, the Caspian sea states could only push up the price they received. They might also sell to the Russians, but playing by economic rules, they should be only too glad to fill the European pipeline.

Nevertheless, Nabucco’s partners must have felt wary when Medvedev, by that time President, flew into Baku to meet his Azeri counterpart Ilhan Aliyev in June last year. As usual when the Russian premier travels, energy was top of the agenda. The two men signed a deal to restart the flow of Azeri gas to Russia from January 2010. It was that deal, sealed with smiles and handshakes for the camera, which produced the much lower key ceremony in Shirvanovka on New Year’s day. Even before the mammoth task of constructing Nabucco had got under way, Gazprom were showing the speed with which geographical proximity allowed them to move in.

Still, the volume of gas flowing north from Shirvanovka is relatively negligible in larger terms. Had that been the only result of Medvedev’s diplomacy, Nabucco would not be unduly alarmed. Much more worrying were statements made in the aftermath of the June meeting regarding the future of the Shah Deniz field in the Caspian sea. Shah Deniz is the vast reservoir of gas Nabucco was confident would supply the pipeline in its initial years, with Kazakh and Turkmeni sources hopefully to follow. Phase 1 of its extraction had already been in operation since 2006, operated jointly by six companies of which two, BP and Norway’s Statoil, each hold 25.5% stakes. The others, including SOCAR, the Azeri national gas company, hold around 10% each. Shah Deniz Phase 2, which has been approved and is currently in development, would greatly increase the field’s total production capacity. Nabucco’s economic model relies heavily on this increase, due to come on stream in 2013. The prospect of a £7 billion pipeline snaking across South central Europe with no gas to fill it is the worst nightmare of all involved in the project. Yet this is what Gazprom chief Alexei Miller hinted at when he claimed after the June talks that Gazprom would have first option on Shah Deniz Phase 2. Bluff and bravado perhaps, but when the Azeri government did not issue an official rebuttal, Nabucco backers began privately questioning the assurances they had received from Baku. After all, it would hardly be unusual in the history of energy exploitation for politicians to line their own pockets while selling their country down the river.

The future of Shah Deniz 2 remains in the air, but one thing is certain: 2010 will be a year of truth for Nabucco. The Europeans will have to decide whether to call the Kremlin’s bluff and rely on the independent will of the Caspian states prevailing. However, yet another obstacle assails them closer to home. Europe is by no means unified in support for Nabucco. E.U. giants Germany and above all Silvio Berlusconi’s Italy have carefully nurtured diplomatic and energy alliances with Moscow. In 2010 it may be a countryman of Giuseppe Verdi’s trying hardest to ensure an early curtain falls on the project to which his opera lent its name.