KEY POINTS:
Silvio Berlusconi faces the first real test in his new term as Italy's Prime Minister after his demand for a speedy end to Naples' interminable rubbish wars was greeted at the weekend with violent clashes and a call to arms by residents of the areas chosen for new dumps.
Communities targeted by the Government for 10 new rubbish dumps vented their anger when the list was released. They fear they will pay a high price in environmental damage for the solution of the region's refuse problem.
Riot police and protesters clashed near the Neapolitan suburb of Chiaiano after police tried to remove a bus that had been laid as a barricade across the road leading to the new dump.
During the violence, a petrol bomb, cans and other objects were hurled at police, three people were arrested and one youth was injured after falling from a wall.
Paolo Ferrero, a national leader of Rifondanzione Comunista, the reformed Communist Party, said the situation in Chiaiano was "becoming hour by hour more intolerable and more unworthy of a civilised and democratic country".
"The violence of the police" and the "militarisation of the territory" were unacceptable, he added.
Guido Bertolaso, the under-secretary in the Prime Minister's office to whom Berlusconi has given the role of rubbish tsar for a second time, said to crack the crisis would require "30 months, much collaboration, much determination and, above all, much humility".
Berlusconi chose the battle. Flying down to Naples for his first Cabinet meeting last week and telling ministers that the rubbish crisis must be addressed, he said, "like an earthquake or a volcanic eruption", the places selected for new dumps should be considered "zones of strategic national interest". After the weekend clashes he said that there was to be "no turning back".
Berlusconi has made no comment on the role of the Naples mafia, the Camorra, in the crisis. After controlling rubbish disposal in the region for years, they are said to be committed to fighting any resolution of the crisis which cuts them out of the business.
- INDEPENDENT
