Auf Sizilien kümmert sich die Mafia um die Schwachen. Oder – „kümmert sich“:
On the island of Sicily, the brother of a mafioso – a member of a mafia group – has been distributing food to the poor in a neighbourhood of Palermo. „People ring me and they cry over the phone,“ he says. „They say their children can’t eat. A young woman has been calling me every single day. She has five kids and doesn’t know how to feed them.“ He wouldn’t confirm that he was part of the mafia himself, but he said that if being a mafioso meant helping people, then he was „proud to be a mafioso“. The coronavirus is new, but distributing food parcels to the needy is an old mafia tactic. „The aim is to gain credibility and to step in as an alternative to the state,“ says Nicola Gratteri, an anti-mafia investigator and head of the prosecutor’s office in Catanzaro, in Calabria. The goal is to strengthen a base of support, he says.
In Indien die maoistische Guerilla:
While this is the modus operandi of the Mafioso in Italy the Maoists’ is no different. They are past masters in reaching out to the people and later using them to their advantage, as a matter of routine even during normal times. This researcher was told during a field visit to Bastar in the central Indian State of Chhattisgarh that the Maoists liberally finance the local poor populace to purchase vehicles. Subsequently, they collected a fixed levy on each vehicle and use them to ferry their ‘goods’. In their strongholds, the rebels organise the tribal populace engaged in tendu leaf plucking and timber felling, bargain on their behalf with contractors, and secure better wages for them. In return, these people contribute to the Maoist coffers, as well as become members of the rebels’ Jan Militia, the Base Force of the Maoists, and participate in attacks launched by the rebels. Also the Maoists ‘park’ their money with trustworthy and sympathetic realtors who faithfully return the same when asked for.
In the Maoist scheme of things there are no ‘free lunches’. The rebels are running an ‘enterprise’; not a ‘charity’.
In Afghanistan:
In late March, the Taliban released an unusual video. Instead of the usual imagery of fighters in formation or training, the footage showed members of the Islamist group in surgical masks as they conducted door-to-door temperature checks and distributed hand sanitizer. A heavily accented voice-over in English promised that the Taliban health commission had the pandemic under control. The narrator claimed that the Taliban had established public health information teams, a dispensary campaign, and even quarantine centers.
This is but one example in a string of videos, announcements, and restrictions the Taliban have undertaken in response to the unfolding global crisis. Several weeks prior, the Taliban announced that returnees from Iran, where the virus was then rapidly spreading, would be forced to quarantine in their homes for two weeks. The Afghan government, by contrast, was facing growing criticism for having taken little action to screen the 15,000 people entering its borders each day.
Oder in Zentral- und Südamerika:
During the coronavirus pandemic, governments have undoubtedly been the lead actors in imposing restrictions on their populations while financially supporting individuals and firms for lost income. But in numerous countries, governments have very limited capacity or have to live with mafia-type organisations. These groups differ from standard criminal operations because they act like a state within a state.
As researchers Gianluca Fiorentini and Sam Pelzman wrote in 1995 of these groups, they “perform inside [their] territory those activities that typically characterise a collective decision-maker’s intervention on the economy: levying of taxes, coercive provision of public goods, and regulation of private agents through non-fiscal tools”. Little has changed since.
Irgendeine bawaffnete Räuberbande, so würde der hl. Augustinus sagen, setzt sich immer auf die Gesellschaft drauf. Was ist das Gegenmittel dazu?
