29 January 2008

Town of Vittoria: no to protection money

I’m publishing two interviews dedicated to the fight against the mafia.
The first interview is with Leoluca Orlando, an Italia dei Valori deputy who for some time has been committed to the fight against the racket and the mafia in Sicily. The second interview is with Giuseppe Nicosia, the mayor of Vittoria in the province of Ragusa, who has decided to give exemptions and facilitation to those who denounce the pizzo { protection money} and the racket.
In the past, I have talked about certain measures (The pizzo and the Confindustria) with a measure of perplexity. That is not to say that the action of these people doesn’t represent a breaking point with the old system of connivance between organised criminality and politics.

"For the fourth time, in the Sicilian reality, the police and the security forces, with an action that deserves praise, have discovered those who were paying the pizzo: the list of economic and commercial businesses obliged to pay the pizzo to the mafia people. It is the conformation that the mafia has not stopped but is continuing, the confirmation that there’s need to continue in this action of repression, being carried out by the magistracy and the security forces, but also that it is necessary to bring in measures that will help this work of the security forces.

In a land like ours, in which the President of a Region, convicted and sentenced to 5 years with the prohibition of holding public office for having helped mafia bosses, has the arrogance to want to stay put and celebrate with little pasties, there’s also a Confindustria Sicilia that says: “those entrepreneurs who have any relationship with the mafia cannot be part of our organisation”

There’s a civil society that tries to rebel, there’s Addiopizzo, there are business people who courageously publish names, there are citizens who declare that they will shop only with entrepreneurs who declare themselves to be against protection money and who collaborate with the police to uncover the extortionists.”

Read the whole text.

Posted by Antonio Di Pietro in Justice