Problems in the land of the midday sun

Press, 25 January 1989, Page 18

Problems in the land of the midday sun

ROBIN ROBILLIARD

>, in this article in her series on Italy, finds that the

south holds huge contrasts with the north. The State props up southern Italians with subsidies in what is a massive problem area. Political corruption is intense, and heroism is needed to combat the criminal

gangs.

THE TRAIN trundled into Naples, happy hunting ground of the Mafia’s sister society, the Camorra. I was nervous.

"Dirty and dangerous, don’t go there,” I’d been told. "In fact, don’t go anywhere south of Rome.”

That would mean ignoring the second Italy, the South. It is called "the Mezzogiomo,” meaning "land of the midday sun.” “Which Italians are you studying?” I am frequently asked. "There are two kinds, active Northerners and lazy Southerners.” Northerners, who like to be thought close to the Europe beyond the Alps, are embarrassed by Southern casualness and crime.

A racist joke refers to the Northerners’ wish that an earthquake would upturn southern Italy, with another earthquake four days later. “So all the Southerners in the North would go back to see what has happened to their relatives, and get the same treatment.”

Northerners forget that without southern workers for their industries, they would not have achieved prosperity. Now, with increased use of robots, 90 per cent of Italy’s unemployed are Southerners.

With shaking knees I emerge from Naples Station. Within minutes, a youth, noticing I’ve grazed my hand, produces a bandaid.

A woman gestured not to wear my watch. The bus driver leaves his bus, mid-traffic, to find out if the funicular is working to take me on up the hill. “Oh don’t do that,” says my 75-year-old hostess, to a man at the foot of her building about to break into a doctor’s surgery. “Okay,” he says amicably. “I’ll take a parked car instead.” Naples is an extraordinary place. “It’s where I dream of retiring,” says a diplomat who was born here. “Being able to express myself, to be immediately understood, is only possible in the imaginative Neapolitan dialect.”

The Camorra shoot the kneecaps of rival gang members, or kill them. The police estimate that 50,000 shopkeepers, at one time or another, have paid protection money to the Camorra.

“One or two men enter a shop, pretending to sell matches, pens or cigarette lighters. They insist on a purchase, usually at a price of several million lire, depending on the victim’s ability to pay.”

A New Zealand woman, married to a Neapolitan, says shops on each side of their apartment have been bombed

because their owners refused to pay. “The risk for ordinary people is from drug addicts, who are from the higher classes, not the poor. It’s important not to look fearful. Americans from the N.A.T.O. base dare not enter the city.” ° There is also humanity. “I trust Neapolitans,” says a French insurance agent. “When I arrive with my car, I ask a boy to look after it and give him the key. Other delinquents won’t touch it, not wanting to take the boy’s job.” Underlying northern irritation with the Mezzogiorno is guilt, “the realisation,” says a financial editor, "that the North is twice as well off, and that it has maladministered and neglected the South. The better things get for Italy as a whole, the more the gap widens between North and South ... creating a social time bomb.” Traditional solutions have not worked. In the 1950 s and 19605, the government tried industrialisation. Big steel, auto and chemical plants were built in the South, most of which are now in deep crisis. The Mafia controls

construction, with a lot of money re-routed into politicians’ pockets, to stop them making things difficult. “Neapolitans cannot depend on authorities,” says Giovanni Starace, a psychologist. “That’s why they look after themselves.” Naples, with no registered glove factory, exports five million pairs of gloves annually. At least 20,000 tons of contraband cigarettes are sold annually on its streets, depriving the state of billions of lire in revenue but providing employment. “Mental depression is common,” the psychologist says. But given the chance, the vitality explodes. Giovanni’s little car darts though Naples streets as he shows me the city celebrating its national soccer win. Neapolitans trail streamers, dance and sing without a wine bottle or beer can in sight. At Castellamare Di Stabia, a shabby town south of the city, a shopkeeper points to two young men on the pavement. “Local Camorra,” he says. The local shipyards, the main employer, have closed, yet very expensive cars jam the narrow streets. “The Mafia and Camorra recruit their members from the unemployed. You will be offered 5000 lire to shoot a certain person in the legs, as a test. Once a member, you can earn big money. The Camorra and Mafia run vast financial enterprises.” I go to Calabria, Italy’s poorest region (in its toe). At the evening passeggiata where the young stroll round the piazza, neither sex talk to the other, just looking. The young press so hard against me I can hardly breathe. Foreigners are rarely seen in this region. “There is scant hope of a job,” I am told, “unless our father is in politics, or knows someone powerful.” “In the 19705," says an economics professor at Cosenza University, “there was a decision to build a steel works on Calabria’s only fertile strip of land. A huge accompanying port was built, the several hundred lorries needed for earth moving and construction purchased by the State for a Mafia-run company. And then, with the world slump in steel and having uprooted prosperous mar-.

ket gardens, the works were never built.”

Trillions of lire have poured into the South over the last 30 years, providing new roads, hospitals, electricity and schools. But if legitimate contractors try to compete with the Mafia for government construction contracts, the Mafia threatens to blow up their work. “Crime and corruption are institutionalised,” says an economics researcher at Catanzaro, Calabria’s capital. "You can’t get anything done unless you are part of it. The Mafioso are very rich, and ordinary people are timid with them. It’s the Mafia, often stronger than local govern-

ments, who decide who works or not.”

The Mafia originated in Sicily in the nineteenth century, to protect people from foreign rulers. Squeezed all the time, people used to apply to certain bosses for protection, giving in turn their allegiance. There is the omerta, the vow of silence. A son, asked by police to identify his father, will say he has never seen him.

“Social problems are increasing,” says an anthropologist. “There is no more opportunity for emigration. Second, the new generation has lost its culture, including religion and artisan memory. So they lack roots. Third, the Welfare State, the system by which central government pours money to subsidise Southerners’ existence rather than plan logical development, is not a productive answer.” Calabria has 19 per cent unemployment, yet people don’t look poor. Shops are overflowing, and traffic is just as congested as in the prosperous North. “If you don’t have a job,” the anthropologist says, “you apply for an invalid’s pension — 60 per cent of Calabria’s population receive an invalid’s pension. “You apply through political party filters. The Christian Democrats, who habitually offer favours in return for votes, have helped many fit people get pensions. That is why, up till recently, they have been the dominant political power in this region.”

“We have created consumers, not producers,” an official admits at the state’s Southern Development Fund office, in Cosenza. “In Italy’s North-east, the economy is based on small firms who prepare some piece for big industry. Southerners don’t have this opportunity.” “He is making excuses,” says the economist at Catanzaro. “The South is close to Middle East and African markets. What the state should be developing is fruit and vegetable preserving and canning.”

But would the region’s farmers be interested? Only 7 per cent of the farmers are young, and they are affected by urban patterns. “People would rather have a 400,000 lire-a-month stipend than risk something for a 1.5 million

lire salary,” says a communist village mayor. “Southern mentality has been ruined by State handouts.”

The State recently passed a law to train 5000 young Calabrians for village administration. They did the year’s training, but three to four years later are still unemployed, although on full salary.

Communists now administer most Calabrian villages, and since recent elections also city and regional governments in coalitions with Socialists. "It’s not automatic,” says Giovanni Latorre, a professor of Sociology, “that communists will change and improve the region, but Italy’s Left parties have traditionally succeeded in administrating without habitual clientelism. In the United States, Italians have trouble explaining we have not been invaded by Russia!”

Many of the region’s Christian Democrat politicians are under special investigation for links with organised crime. With the Mafia controlling the drug trade, central government no longer considering them benign. Strong attempts are being made to bring them to justice, a risky business. A judge, a prosecuting counsel and a police chief involved in the trials have been murdered.

To encourage Northerners to develop the South, the State offers up to 86 per cent of a new company’s start-up costs. Anthonio, with a new factory outside Cosenza, is processing quickfreeze tomatoes and zucchinis (courgettes) for export. “But operating here has big handicaps. A phone service, electricity, and export certificates take months to achieve. Not to mention pressure the Mafia may exert for protection money.” Other Northerners, to exploit the financial incentives, have set up southern industries, then moved their machinery back north. Or they have established factories just below Rome, as close to southern chaos as they want to get. Renate Siebert, a German sociology lecturer, originally hated southern disorder. “Punctuality doesn’t exist, but the idea that Southerners are relaxed is wrong. They have a lot of worries because nothing is clear in the public service. She spent three exhausting weeks seeking people to influence Cosenza’s mayor to have the school bus come another two kilometres. Meanwhile, her two children had told the bus driver: “We love so much your beautiful bus. Why don’t you take us ail the way home?”

Unkown to the mayor, the driver has done so ever since.

A priest must be brave to combat corruption. One, in a Calabrian village, has been fighting the Mafia since 1973 “by creating dressmaking co-opera-tives for women, to free them from economic dependence on the Mafia. “The Mafia shoots at his house and car.”

Another priest, Peitro Amato, gave up a career in the Vatican “because the Church’s role, in my view, should be with human problems, not doctrine.” He runs an orphanage in Catanzaro and speaks out on regional problems. The Church hierarchy banned Peitro from saying Mass for five months for what they called his “leftist views.”

At Acerra, a dreary town near Naples, I talk to Bishop Ribaldi. In 1982, when there had been 300 deaths as a result of civil war between the Camorra clans, he decided something must be done. At afesta, he denounced the Camorra. Everyone was stunned by the bishop’s boldness. “We are the masters of the country,” he announced. He denounced everyone for accepting their own slavery. Ribaldi is talking in schools and cinemas throughout Italy about the stranglehold the Mafia and its sister societies have on the country, about their infiltration of politics and finance. The Camorra have sent him a warning.

“I hear New Zealand is green and peaceful,” says the bishop. “I dream of going there. I’m so tired.”

Many economists see tourism as Southern Italy’s best hope. , “True,” says a financial editor, "beaches have been polluted by the steel and chemical industries, the mountains have been de- ; forested by uncontrolled burning ■ and goats, but think of all the : jobs that could be created by building and staffing museums, hotels and restaurants.” New laws for the Mezzogiorno shift responsibility for development to regional bodies. But Calabria’s academics doubt local bureaucrats have the skill to appraise projects. “At best, they are ineffective; at worst, they are corrupt.” “What is the city administration doing to help,” I asked the communist mayor of Petilia, a Calabrian town, in one of its few finished buildings. “Well," he says, “we’ve had five administrations in five years. We are always having crises, so we almost never get the time to deal with these problems.”