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The Italian mafia is an emergency? Unlike what is commonly believed the total number of crimes is not significantly greater in the South than in the North. And the media and politics lately seem much more prone to consider an emergency immigration, even if it is not true at all that the increase of immigrants has increased crime. But the mafias are an emergency, a serious democratic emergency, because the mafias do what they want.

Mafias have devoured whole parts of Italian society and have seized a significant piece of the country. They have seized a significant piece of the economy. They have devoured a too big piece of our civil conscience. We are used to mafias like a normal thing. In Italy indignation is, rightly, for many types of crimes. If a police officer kills an innocent soccer fan. If an English girl is killed in her italian house. People are indignant for many crimes, but the mafia murders fall into silence.

From the beginning of 2009 in Campania have been committed 50 murders, 37 unresolved and nearly all attributed to the Camorra, but the case has made more noise in the media is that of an old man killed by two young Romanians, even if after it was discovered that one of the killer was a victim of pedophilia on the part of the man. And today, about 20 days after the fact, came on a few national newspapers the story of another Romanian. A story that impresses with its sadness and for what it reveals about Italy. Petru Birladeandu had 33 years, a wife and two children of 10 and 6 years. He earned his living playing the accordion in the subway of Naples. He was killed "by mistake" by unknown Camorra killers on May 26 in the station of Montesanto. Most people who were there, while his wife cryied and called for help, didn't even stop. The ambulance arrived 30 minutes late. The indifference of the people was motivated by racism, fear, egoism, or all these things together? Whatever the reason, it is intolerable. 
It's intolerable Petru's death, in the late afternoon, in the center of one of the largest cities in Italy. It's intolerable that an innocent person could die in this way. It's intolerable that Naples, Italy aren't protesting against this crime. It's intolerable that the Camorra in particular think they can kill anyone, anywhere, when they want, without triggering any civilian reaction. It's intolerable that a crime like that could be considered normal by our conscience. It's intolerable the death of so many other people in Campania of which Italy is not worried as if we already gave for granted, without even asking, that they are just "mobsters who kill one another." But we do not know if Charles Borrelli, 39 years old entrepreneurs, married with two children, killed by 5 shots and then burned, identified thanks to the ring with the name of his wife, was in business with the Camorra, or was an innocent man who had rebelled to the Camorra. We know for sure that is another victim of the Camorra. Like Cosimo Nizza, a disabled man of 48 years killed in Benevento on his wheelchair. Intolerable, as the death of Luigi Tommasino. 

It is not much better the situation in Calabria, 29 murders since the beginning of the year,  18 unresolved and most likely attributable to N'drangheta. Among them the death of Inna Abramova, of Ukrainian origin, the mother of 4 children. Killed near Catanzaro with his partner Giuliano Cortese after they had accompanied their two smaller daughters at the day nursery. He attempted to flee and died in front of his mother. 
In Sicilia 27 murders this year, 16 unresolved, and who knows how many of which fall within the Mafia. Because will we ever know why died Giuseppe Petruso, 49 years old truck driver with no criminal record, shooted on the door of his house in front of his mother and his two children? The Mafia recentrly has killed a lot less than Camorra and N'drangheta, but continues to do so. 
In Puglia 25 murders, 12 unresolved and many probably due to the Sacra Corona Unita. Like that of Andrea Barbarino, who lived on a wheelchair for a previous attempt to kill him in 2003 and was shooted at 9 am in a street of Manfredonia. No witnesses. Or the boss Savino Cellamare, killed in a barber shop in Cerignola with 11 bullets. 
Each of these stories is intolerable, and there is not enough space to list them all. It's intolerable that innocent people are killed and it is intolerable even if people with a criminal record are killed, because there is no death penalty in Italy and no one has the right to apply it. It's intolerable that criminals act as an independent power, stronger than the state. It's intolerable that these stories do not have much space on the media and in the civil conscience of the nation. It's intolerable that most of the unsolved murders of Italy are concentrated in these four regions of the South It's intolerable that we are not outraged at all for these murders, that media don't follow each case until the culprits are arrested. 
It's intolerable a country where people cry in front of the television for the ridiculous sentimental stories of the participants in reality shows without paying a tear for the innocent men and women killed by the mafia with extraordinary ferocity and extraordinary arrogance. 
The police and the judiciary fight the mafias, making important arrests, but the truth is that they cannot win without the consistent and strong support of the local population and the whole country. It's not enough to just read an article by Saviano occasionally. The Mafia must be isolated, must feel the hostility of the whole nation, the resolve of anyone to fight the, the civil response. Because the mafias are a small minority of cowards bandits who live and thrive thanks to the silence of many. 

And it is this silence that's intolerable. 

Francesco Defferrari 

 

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