ACCUSATIONS TO NGOS TRACE BACK TO AN IDEOLOGICAL STRUCTURE
The atmosphere is heavy. A few days ago, a campaign of criminalization of solidarity, smoldering for months like embers under the ashes in the papers of some prosecutors, has restarted.
We are not new to this. Over the years there have been several investigations that have concerned NGOs, accused each time of the worst atrocities, each time different, but all attributable to a very specific ideological structure, as repeatedly testified by the statements to the press by Sicilian prosecutors like the ones of Catania or Ragusa. The result has always been the same: no ground to proceed. The lack of evidence and the imaginative theses of prosecutors, who are clearly hostile to solidarity, have never held up in the Courts that have in fact always closed the investigations, without ever getting to the actual trial.
And it will go in the same way also in this second wave of judicial attacks, in which the same three prosecutors, those of Trapani, Catania and Ragusa, who in 2017 started the criminalization campaign of NGOs, return today with a coordinated action that arouses more than a few suspicions. It will and like that for the accusations made by the prosecutors of Trapani against the activists of Doctors without Borders, Save The Children and Jugend Rettet. It will end like that for the investigation hinged by the Ragusa prosecutor against Mediterranea, and I am sure that it will be clearly demonstrated in the trial that MSF has nothing to see with the accusations stated by the Catania prosecutor's office.
It will end like that because saving lives can never be considered a crime under current law. And because it is now clear that this defamatory approach is functional to an explicit political design: to deform reality, confuse and polarize. Because the problems of the real country are not migrations or people who desperately try to escape from Libyan concentration camps, but they are health care, the escape from the pandemic, the economy to restart, employment that does not exist, the inequalities that they divide and tear our society apart.
The Ragusa investigation is exceptionally odd, because it began with an act with which investigations usually end: a press release. A modus operandi that tells us the prosecutor's priorities: first we are concerned with giving visibility to the investigation, then we ascertain the facts. It is no coincidence that in the communications of the prosecutor's office there are no facts nor evidence, to date only inferences that are not very useful in the process but excellent for serving on a silver platter the umpteenth possibility of speculation to hate professionals and, this time again more subtly, to political propaganda, and to those who at this moment need to reposition themselves in the new context of government.
And so while time and energy are spent in investigations, wiretapping, infiltrated agents in search of crimes that do not exist, we turn our heads the other way in the face of the most blatant of crimes: that of not helping people who risk their lives, to do it too late, to entrust the security of the central Mediterranean to the so-called Libyan coast guard. All crimes carried out by Italy and the European Union.
It is strange that none of those prosecutors have ever opened an investigation into the failures to rescue that have caused the deaths of hundreds of people in the central Mediterranean over all these years.
Time will take care of indicating who was on the right side of history. In the meantime, as always, we are resisting this criminalization by supporting and defending those who work every day to carry out the most natural and noblest of gestures: to save the lives of those in danger.
Original article from: Il Fatto Quotidiano
by Erasmo Palazzotto
Erasmo is an Italian politician who has been elected for the first time to be a MP of the Italian Chamber of Deputies in the seventeenth legislation (2013). He is a member of the Commission for Foreign Affairs and EU.