22 March 2006

Licence to Kill

In Calabria, they’ve killed a 28-year-old man, Enzo Cotroneo. They killed him so that he couldn’t testify in the Fortugno case. While they killed him he was talking to his fiancée on the phone. They planned to get married in May and he said to her “They are murdering me”.
They killed him with nine shots from a rifle and a pistol. Enzo is one of 28 other people from Calabria killed in the Locride in the last eighteen months.
And today two men were killed in Scampia, Naples.
And still today many Italian cities have celebrated the day against the mafia.

In the comments to the article called “Impudent Media” on this site, the names of those who have died because of the mafia, have been listed by some readers.
When I read them, one by one, it is a torment as I knew and valued many of them personally.
A consistent part of our country can be compared to the Far West, to a zone controlled by the mafias with whom a Minister of this Government says we need to live with.

For five years we have been shouting about the Islamic wolf, about the war between religions and civilisations, and as far as I am aware, without a single murder in Italy happening as a result of Muslim extremists.
At the same time, in a complicit silence, records show hundreds of crimes committed by the groups of organised criminality.
In these five years parliamentarians have been convicted in the first degree for mafia. But though they have been on trial for mafia, they have received the solidarity of State positions like Pierferdinando Casini after being convicted for mafia.
The economy of our South has been strangled by the mafia, a situation that everyone can witness.
The magistrates and the police forces who risk their lives every day, must be helped by new means and with a true and strong political support. This today is completely absent.

Posted by Antonio Di Pietro in Society