Mafia 'strangle Italy prospects'
By Florence Casa,WNS Rome Correspondent
ROME - The mafia are the biggest threat to southern Italy's economic prospects, Prime Minister Romano Prodi has told a conference against organised crime. "Lawlessness is the greatest obstacle to economic growth in southern Italy," he told the three-day forum in Rome. Mr Prodi was briefly heckled by an audience member who said parliament must first purge itself of corrupt MPs. Some 2,500 people have died in violence blamed on Italy's three main mafia groups in the last 10 years.
According to the organisers of the anti-mafia forum in Rome, politicians have failed to tackle the problem. Top politicians, senior judges, police and security officials and civil society groups were expected to be among the 2,500 participants at the conference. An escalating turf war between mafia gangs in the Italian city of Naples has led to recent calls for the army to be deployed. "No-one talks about the mafia except in emergencies, as in Naples recently," Lorenzo Frigerio of the anti-mafia group Libera told the AFP news agency. "You forget that it is a permanent presence in the country and that it has not missed the train of globalisation," Mr Frigerio said. He added that the issue had been hardly mentioned during the election campaign earlier this year.
posted by wnsworld @ 6:32 PM
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