Let's start with Roberto Saviano's answer to the question: What would you say to those people in Europe who view the Camorra as a distant, essentially Italian, phenomenon?

"There is truly nothing more international than criminal organisations, especially the Neapolitan and Calabrian mafia. There is a simple reason for this - they are part of the economic and financial avant-garde. I am sorry that people only seem to realise this when people are murdered, like in the events in Duisburg, which opened Germany's eyes, and also Europe's. After Duisburg, organised crime can be defined as a European problem - not just an Italian one." (Interview by Café Babel)


Now, to continue with the subject, "Did you Know that the European Nuclear Industry Dumps its Radioactive Waste in Somalia?", this is what the EURATOM people recently said in connection with the "Euradwaste '08" conference in Luxemburg 20-23 October

"While decisions on the use of nuclear energy are the responsibility of
individual Member States, the safe management of resulting nuclear waste
is a matter of concern for all European Union citizens." (Innovations Report)

Here we make a pause, together with the poet who wrote:

"La politique est l'art d'empêcher les gens de se mêler de ce qui les regarde." *
– Valéry, Régards sur le monde actuel

Did you ever stumble upon this story about the dumping of the radioactive waste in Africa? As for myself, I read something in a local (Finland-Swedish) newspaper a year ago, about the mafia shipping radioactive waste and plutonium to Somalia from an Italian research center A typical small news item, which one tends to forget the next day...

However, now I have also read the article "From cocaine to plutonium: mafia clan accused of trafficking nuclear waste", by Tom Kington, Guardian, Tuesday October 9, 2007. Quotation:

"An Enea manager is said to have paid the clan to get rid of 600 drums of toxic and radioactive waste from Italy, Switzerland, France, Germany, and the US, the turncoat claimed, with Somalia as the destination lined up by the traffickers." (link added -mb)

The Italian website "Zona nucleare" contains more information, mostly in Italian. The site is described as follows in English, by its creator:

"The subject here is to provide analogies and facts on the argument regarding the choice of a nuclear waste deposit in Italy and dealing in particular with the Government decision of November 13th 2003 choosing the town of Scanzano Ionico in Basilicata as the only possible site."

"Zona nucleare" has a dossier on the illegal maritime traffic of toxic wastes, including the radioactive waste. The dossier contains, e.g., excerpts from the report by the italian weekly L'Espresso from 9 June 2005, including testimony from an ex-boss of 'ndrangheta, the Calabrian variety of mafia. "Parla un boss - Così lo Stato pagava la 'ndrangheta per smaltire i rifiuti tossici" - "A Boss speaks - How the State paid 'ndrangheta to get rid of the toxic waste". A magistrate, Francesco Basentini, started to investigate the affair. (This was also reported by Newsweek on October 22, 2007, but the follow-up articles are lacking.)

Another piece from L'Espresso (20 January 2005) tells about the italian journalist Ilaria Alpi, who was murdered in Mogadishu on 20 March 1994, while she was working on a story about... Everybody knows what she was investigating.

Everybody knows, that's how it goes.
– Leonard Cohen

Roberto Saviano's comment:

[...] the criminals' power is always based on the diffuse nature of information, as everybody knows, and at the same time it is based on the impossibility of proving or even talking about something. When you break this strange equilibrium, you create a real danger. And the fact that that can happen in Europe demonstrates that it is now possible to stand up to these criminal powers. I say 'powers' because now the Italian mafia is forming links with the Albanian and Nigerian mafia. Testament to this is that they even go so far as to intermarry (Interview by Café Babel)

We are back at Vladislav Marjanovic's question regarding the silence in the UNEP's report on the consequences of the tsunami 26 December 2004:

"why did one close one's eyes before the fact that, already in the 1980s, numerous industrial states had offered the governments of poor countries huge sums of money for the stockpiling of their radwaste?"

by Mikael Böök

for www.lovisamovement.eu

* Politics is the art of preventing people from sticking their noses in things that are properly their business. [from Tel Quel, 1943] (source of translation)