Anyone in Italy today who criticises the Government or the Prime Minister knows what to expect in return — not a contrary opinion, but a campaign aimed at discrediting him.

He knows that the price for continuing to ask questions and expressing opinions will be paid with his own skin. Anyone who takes a critical stand knows to expect retaliation. For this reason in Italy today press freedom means the freedom not to have your life destroyed; the freedom not to have your career cut short.

Italy appears more and more to be a country in which politics has been reduced to personal attacks. The editor of L’Avvenire, a newspaper close to the Vatican, was accused of being a closet homosexual when he criticised the Government. La Repubblica is being sued for asking questions. Tomorrow a large demonstration promoted by the Italian National Press Federation is being held in Rome — a strange protest for a democratic state. Never before has the press had to demonstrate to safeguard its own freedom in Europe. Italy looks more and more like an anomaly in the heart of Western Europe.

Obviously, Italy cannot be compared with China, Cuba, Burma or Iran. For us to demonstrate in defence of freedom of expression means to demand to be allowed to carry out one’s work without being personally attacked. It means denouncing an all-encompassing climate of menace.

A citizen who is just doing his job of asking questions must not be exposed to the blackmail of seeing his private life dragged through the mud. And someone who questions the head of government must not be silenced or incriminated just for having posed legitimate questions.

So we ask is this what centre-right voters really want? Do they think it right for ministers not only to refuse to answer questions but to smear the questioners? Can they feel at ease when, day after day, attacks against political adversaries are based on raking through private lives? Can they not see that the struggle between those who want to publish often only mildly critical news and those who try to muzzle it is unequal? Can centre-right voters really be indifferent to the avalanche bearing down on the machinery of democracy? Do they not feel we are losing something, that the country is going bad?

It’s not a question of morals. A politician does not have to answer to his country for his private life. But when a politician holds office, he is at risk of blackmail. And it is on this level — of whether his actions are undertaken in the interests of the country alone — that anyone holding public office has to be held to account for the way he lives. Moreover, aspects of Italy make it more fragile than other Western democratic nations. In 2003 Senator John Kerry presented to the US Congress a document entitled The New War. In it he estimated that the three Italian Mafias — Cosa Nostra, Camorra and ’Ndrangheta — generate $110 billion each year.

Italy is second only to Colombia in the number of people needing police protection. And it holds a European record: in the past three years 200 journalists have been intimidated or threatened, and many have ended up under police protection.

I share the same fate as these people, most of whom are unknown or ignored by the public. And I share the experience of those who know how dangerous defamation and blackmail can be. The head of the Cali cartel, Rodríguez Orejuela, once said, someone is your ally only if you are blackmailing them. A democracy cannot be founded on the power of those who use blackmail.

In the past Italy has proved able to overcome enormous tribulations. My own city, Naples, was the most heavily bombed in the Mediterranean in the Second World War. From poverty, destruction and civil war — from all of this — postwar Italy raised itself up again as a free and democratic nation to become one of the foremost economic powers in the world.

And if it is true that Italy has never been without its shadows, never immune from corruption, then it is also true that Italy has always retained the necessary respect for the democratic rules in struggles between parties and politicians, a respect that — until now — has protected all its citizens.

Those, like me, who have seen how the world works when power is unlimited know that if certain barriers are breached there is no guarantee that the flood waters of arbitrary power will not overwhelm everything. But I believe, or rather I hope, that we will overcome our differences and demonstrate that we can give our best when common interests and shared principles are at stake. I want everyone on October 3 to remember what the value of press freedom is. It must no longer be the case that expressing yourself means paying with your soul, your body, your blood. That is freedom of the press.

The writer is the author of Gomorrah: Italy’s Other Mafia © Roberto Saviano 2009 Published by arrangement with Roberto Santachiara Literary Agency

Behind the story

Supporters of Silvio Berlusconi point out that there is a variety of comment in the Italian press — much of it hostile to the Prime Minister. How is press freedom threatened when left-of-centre papers such as La Repubblica and L’Unita launch daily assaults on him?

Part of the answer is that 80 per cent of Italians get their information from television. Mr Berlusconi has built his political career on mastery of TV and marketing. He owns Mediaset, which controls Italy’s three main commercial channels, and as Prime Minister has direct influence over appointments and policy at RAI, the public broadcaster. Mediaset stations have glossed over or suppressed Mr Berlusconi’s alleged involvement with escort girls and showgirls that in any other Western country would be top of the news. But so too has RAI, with the partial exception of RAI3, traditionally the most left-wing channel.

Newspapers, too, operate in a climate of intimidation, even menace. Both La Repubblica and L’Unita are being sued by Mr Berlusconi, the former simply for publishing a daily list of ten questions about his conduct, from his unexplained attendance last April at the 18th birthday of an aspiring Naples model to allegations that he spent the night of Barack Obama’s election with a prostitute.

Politics has always pervaded every aspect of Italian life. But dominance of both politics and the media by one man means — as Roberto Saviano points out — that those who dare to ask awkward questions are met not with counter-arguments but personal attacks designed to silence them. In a leading European democracy that is cause for concern.

Richard Owen

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