Six Nobel laureates slam mafia threats against writer
Six Nobel prizewinners yesterday voiced outrage over death threats hounding the author of hard-hitting mafia expose "Gomorrah," urging the Italian government to assume its "responsibility" to protect him.
"It is intolerable that all this can happen in Europe, and in 2008," the six, including Nobel peace laureates Mikhail Gorbachev and Desmond Tutu, wrote in the Italian daily La Repubblica.
"With our signatures ... we call the state to its responsibilities," they wrote, days after Roberto Saviano announced plans to flee Italy after learning that the southern Camorra mafia want him dead by the end of the year.
"The state must make every effort possible to protect him and defeat the Camorra," said the letter, also signed by Nobel literature prizewinners Orhan Pamuk of Turkey, German author Guenter Grass and Italian playwright Dario Fo.
The sixth signatory is Italian Nobel medicine laureate Rita Levi Montalcini, now a senator for life in Italy.
Some 1.2 million copies of 28-year-old Saviano's book have sold in Italy, while the screen version of "Gomorrah" won second prize at the 2008 Cannes film festival and is now in the running for an Oscar.
The film directed by Matteo Garrone, shot in flat realist style, follows a web of characters from teenaged gunmen to a Camorra cashier to a wealthy businessman behind illegal toxic waste-dumping schemes.
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