Faced with the “mafia drifts” that plague Corsica, the local autonomist political power is preparing to reveal, this Thursday, 30 measures intended to fight against this scourge. However, the main legal reforms envisaged to stem organized crime have been dismissed, a decision that caused the amazement of anti -fas island collectives.
The 81 -page report, written by the autonomist president of the Executive Council, Gilles Simeoni, and consulted by AFP, will be officially presented during a special session of the Corsican Assembly devoted to “mafia drifts”. This meeting, which will assist the Minister of Justice Gérald Darmanin, will take place the day after a work meeting with the island's judicial authorities.
The former mayor of Palermo, Leoluca Orlando, known for his commitment against the Mafia in Sicily, will also testify to his experience and share his fight against organized crime.
This meeting takes place in a particularly heavy climate, marked by two recent assassinations: that of a young firefighter in Ajaccio before Christmas, followed by the murder of an 18-year-old student, probably the victim of a tragic error, on February 15 in Ponte-Leccia (Haute-Corse). With a homicide rate relating to the highest population in mainland France, the island is faced with an alarming situation.
A controversial political response
Fruit of two years of consultation with associations and collectives, the proposals of autonomist elected officials include the creation of a “specific advisory body to the fight against mafia drifts” and an initiative aimed at “fighting the positive clichés associated with the mafia”.
However, beyond the measures announced, the document constitutes above all a plea in favor of the autonomy of Corsica. Gilles Simeoni, former penalty lawyer who notably defended Yvan Colonna, sentenced to life for the assassination of the prefect Érignac in 1998, expressed his “disagreement” with several measures inspired by Italian law and integrated into the bill against narcotrafic recently adopted unanimously by the Senate.
Among these measures, however claimed insistently by antimafia collectives, are the creation of a “mafia association” as well as the establishment of an organized national anti-crime parquet (Pnaco).
Simeoni also opposes the abolition of the popular jury in organized crime affairs, a reform which, according to him, would risk “opening the door to arbitrariness”. He maintains that “most of the behaviors incriminated by Italian law are also provided and repressed by French law”, thus justifying his refusal of the exceptional courts.
“You have to wake up”
The persons of russation, “Les Br Br Bras in St. Brig Of The Afst Léo, Confed To The The Theater not, life utes” mafi no mafia.
“There is almost no one who thinks like this in Corsica, where even the greatest humanists have understood that the most liberticide, it is the mafia who kill, who racket and who threaten,” he deplores.
Former executive of the Corsican National Liberation Front (FLNC), sentenced in 1979 to nine years in prison for an attempted attack, he believes that this refusal of criminal reforms is “Pavlovian reflexes of lawyer” and an “old Corsican nationalist nationalist reflex of distrust of exceptional courts”. “We are in the 21st century, we have to wake up,” he insists.
A feeling of “undeniable disappointment and misunderstanding” is also expressed by the Massimu Susini collective, which regrets “the refusal to consider the measures proposed by associations and collectives concerning waste, town planning and the various sectors subject to the mafia grip”.
Lisandru Laban-Giuliani, member of the collective and 24-year-old parliamentary assistant, recognizes “minimal advances” on certain aspects, in particular awareness of mafia logics in schools. However, he denounces “declines” on criminal reforms, recalling that they had however been “defended and voted by the autonomist senator Paul-Toussaint Parigi”, himself from the party of Gilles Simeoni.
Even more serious, he considers “shameful” that this report seeks to prevent the application in Corsica from certain measures voted in Paris aimed at strengthening the fight against the mafia.
“We walk completely on our heads,” he said. “We are looking for is the good of Corsica in the face of mafia appetites. People here are desperate. (…) And there, political commitment is far from being filled.”
(With AFP)
