What is the true essence of the mafias?
To explain it better, we will borrow the words of Judge Paolo Borsellino to the students of a high school in Bassano del Grappa, on January 26th, 1989:
“If my neighbor, [who has caused damage to my house], does not pay me, I must be in a position to turn to a judge who condemns him to pay. When this system does not work,it’s when this climate of mutual trust between citizens and the state is not assured, if there is a criminal organization capable of ensuring a surrogate for this trust it (the citizen) will benefit from it, because the criminal organization of the mafia type is able to ensure it by substituting this trust. It (the mafia) presents itself as something that ensures citizens those services that an unprepared and inefficient state cannot provide.
Of course, it cannot present these services to everyone because in order to give to one it must take away from the other.
While the trust that the state should guarantee to all citizens is given impartially, the trust that criminal organizations distribute is a zero-sum trust because criminal organizations must necessarily disadvantage some to benefit others. “
[Extract from a transcript of a speech given by Paolo Borsellino to the students of a high school in Bassano del Grappa, January 26, 1989]
Together with the ESC volunteers of Apice – Agenzia di Promozione Integrata per i cittadini in Europa who live in our hostel Il Paguro in the past months, we have organized a serie of training meetings on the subject of legality. At the end of these meetings we decided to create a social campaign to present the knowledge we gain. So we made the campaign both in English and in Turkish, to spread our message to all the people around the world.
Click here for the Turkish version
