As rubbish once again burns in violent protests on the streets of Naples, even the Midas touch of Silvio Berlusconi cannot solve a crisis created by inefficient local government and a flourishing organised-crime syndicate
IT HAS been called the Neapolitan intifada. Hundreds of angry people, young and old, have taken nightly to the streets of Terzigno, a small village at the foot of Mount Vesuvius, close to Naples. Every now and then the anger explodes: stones are thrown at police; rubbish lorries are commandeered and burned; the Italian tricolor is burned; homemade Molotov cocktails fly through the night air.
The sinister atmosphere is such that the Italian minister of the interior, Roberto Maroni, has threatened to use a heavier police hand, calling on protesters to back off. As they say in these parts, they had better be careful or, sooner or later, scappa il morto(someone will get killed).
So what is going on? Why is the rubbish burning in the streets of Naples again? Did Silvio Berlusconi, the prime minister, not solve that problem two years ago, just weeks after winning the 2008 general election? For much of his third period in office, Berlusconi has pointed to his government’s resolution of the Naples rubbish crisis in 2008 as evidence of his can-do, entrepreneurial skills. Yet, even as he was proclaiming a miracle resolution to the crisis two years ago, commentators suggested that, rather than resolve the rubbish emergenza, his government had merely done a cosmetic clean-up job.
The temptation to make political capital out of the crisis was too strong. Ever since the previous Christmas, Naples had made international headlines for all the wrong reasons. Images of piles of putrefying, rodent-infested rubbish lying uncollected in the streets of central Naples flashed around the world, just as they are flashing around the world this week.
Was it possible that a major city in western Europe was about to be swamped by its own rubbish? The image struck a serious blow at the credibility of Romano Prodi’s centre-left government, which, sure enough, fell shortly afterwards (for many reasons, but the Naples rubbish crisis did not help).
Although the short-term emergency of the rubbish in the streets of the city centre had been solved, not much was done to confront the long-term implications of 20 years of rubbish mismanagement, not to mention the illegal duming of toxic waste. This is, at least, one problem for which Berlusconi cannot be blamed – but it remains one he did not resolve.
The violent protests of the past two weeks were prompted by the health concerns of communities close to Vesuvius, alarmed by the opening of a new dump at Terzigno. (Worse still, these dumps are situated in the Vesuvius national park.) They argue that an existing dump has been mishandled to the point where it represents a health hazard, producing poisonous gases and an unusually high proportion of disease, ranging from skin infections to asthma to cancer.
“Living here is impossible . . . We can’t breathe any more. We have to defend our children from the horrible side effects of the tip,” said local teacher Nazarena Gargiulo, one of the “Vulcanic Mothers” of Terzigno, who for weeks have been campaigning vigorously but peacefully, trying both to stop trucks unloading at the existing dump and blocking plans to open a new one.
Concern is understandable in a region where the combination of inefficient local government and a flourishing organised-crime syndicate, the Camorra, may well have created an ecological disaster of mammoth proportions. Anyone with doubts about the problem would have done well to listen to the evidence of Gaetano Vassallo, a Camorristaturned state's witness, who two years ago began to collaborate. "They told us that the stuff we were to dump would be all right for the cultivation of fruit and vegetables, but I never saw anything grow on the land where we disposed that refuse. Indeed, the liquid waste was so thoroughly toxic that when we poured it into ground it immediately killed off all the rats," Vassallo told investigators.
For 18 years, from 1987 to 2005, Vassallo had been the so-called minister of rubbish on behalf of the Bidognetti Camorra family.
Along with Francesco "Sandokan" Schiavone, of the Casalesi family (which features large in the film Gomorrah), Vassallo was responsible for the illegal dumping in Campania, the area around Naples, of tons and tons of toxic, industrial waste. His evidence confirmed what Mafia investigators and environmentalists had long suspected: organised crime makes big money from the illegal dumping of industrial waste (mainly from northern Italy) in the agricultural hinterland of Campania, a land once called Campania Felix because it was so fertile.
The full horror of the Campania pollution story is that no one knows how much of what poison is buried where. Last year a group of concerned environmentalists, the CoReRi, or Comitati Regionale Rifiuti, invited the media on a tour of the Campania area. At one point we stopped at the Centro Commerciale Campania shopping centre, a place that seems normal enough except that it is (probably) built over a large, illegal toxic-waste dump. At times the smell that comes up from below is so bad shopkeepers employ people to stand outside their shops spraying the area with eau de cologne.
At another point on our tour we stopped alongside the Asse Mediano, a busy traffic artery close to Naples. All along the highway embankment are piles of illegally dumped rubbish – a tribute to the fact that Neapolitan bad habits die hard. Yet some of these small dumps have been burned to make way for more illegal, probably toxic dumping. The Camorra burns so many of these illegal dumps that an area close to Naples is cheerfully known as La Terra DeiFuochi (the Land of Fires). A potentially even bigger problem, though, is that the foundations of the Asse Mediano, according to the evidence of Vassallo, the Camorrista, are full of toxic waste.
Then, too, there is the problem of how the Berlusconi government dealt with the crisis two years ago. CoReRi and other environmental groups say the government delegated the clean-up to a company, FIBE (part of the Impreglio group), that, rather than insist on a waste-management system that separates the recyclable from the non-recyclable and the organic from plastic, paper and other materials, lumps the whole lot together in huge ecoballe.
Guido Bertolaso, the man who led the clean-up as Commissario Straordinario (he filled the same role in relation to last year’s earthquake in L’Aquila and to earlier volcanic eruptions in Sicily), concedes that short cuts have been taken. He likens himself to a samaritan who, finding someone injured by the roadside, rushes him off to hospital, breaking a few red lights along the way.
Bertolaso has been called in again this time, once more facing a difficult situation in which he is not helped by the fact that Naples recycles only 19 per cent of its annual production of almost 600,000 tons of rubbish. (By comparison, Bologna recycles 36 per cent, Venice 35 per cent and Turin 41 per cent.) Italians will tell you that Naples is not much helped by a low civic sense on the part of (some) Neapolitans, who simply produce too much rubbish. Be that as it may, Naples is fast running out of landfill sites, and environmentalists point out the area’s one incinerator, at Acerra, does not work properly.
Many uncomfortable questions remain, for example: what to make of the alarmist theory of Francesca Menna, veterinary professor at the University of Naples, who claims migratory birds passing through Campania will carry with them various poisons north and east across Europe and south to Africa? Then, too, there is the consideration that two years ago the US navy and marine corps moved 38 families out of the Casal Di Principe area, close to Naples, after finding unacceptably high levels of a potential carcinogen called tetrachloroethene, or PCE, in the tap water. Does this mean the entire water table in the area is contaminated? Little wonder the EU’s environment commissioner, Janez Potocnik, last week threatened Italy with huge fines for its inadequate rubbish management in and around Naples.
Whatever else, the Naples rubbish crisis is certainly not over.
