Maureen Barnes : Down the tube
Last week, in what was the most riveting programme to date, Special Assignment dealt with the extraordinary affair of Vito Palazzolo, the man who seems to have enjoyed special consideration not only from the Nats, but from the present establishment.
The team did a neat investigation of the background of the man named this week as one of the top seven most important Mafiosi, travelling to Italy to do so. While Palazzolo lives in luxury in the Cape, seemingly at will to call on his supporters in the South African legal, business and political spheres, the United States and Italy call for his extradition.
While he was illegally allowed into this country – as far as I know convicted felons are not usually granted residence permits, unless, of course, they are rich convicted felons – the authorities seem to suddenly discover a respect for the law which prevents them from permitting his extradition.
It is not, they say, illegal to belong to the Mafia. It is not, presumably, illegal to be a Grand Dragon in the Ku Klux Klan, but such a person would hardly constitute a desirable immigrant.
One wonders, however, if it is necessary to extradite a man who, if he were a penniless refugee with a prison record – as Palazzolo has – would be smartly deported.
Max du Preez promised us more on this matter and, given the number of tantalising questions which remain unanswered, I can’t wait. Who are the people in the previous and present governments who have permitted this man to stay here? What status do his adult sons have, and are they considered desirable immigrants? What connection, as was suggested on the programme, exists between Mafia drug- running and the gang wars in the Western Cape?
A minor criticism of this interesting Special Assignment is the inclusion of shots from The Godfather movies, presumably to pander to viewers with short attention spans. Real life is, unfortunately, exotic enough without this sort of trivia being included.
As one of the Italian state officials dedicated to bringing Palazzolo to justice said, people think of the Mafia as it is portrayed in the movies, but it isn’t.
Given the number of brave Italian officials who have been assassinated by this brutal organisation in recent years, the Mafia is far worse than anything dreamed up by Hollywood.
In any event, investigations by some American journalists have indicated that the tentacles of Mafia business interests extend to Hollywood, and that no film about the organisation is made without its approval.
Sunday’s SABC news bulletin carried the Netherlands Institute for Southern Africa (Niza) assessment of the state of Southern Africa’s press freedom, delivered at a conference last week in Vienna. While freedom of speech in South Africa is nowhere near as bad as in Zambia, Zimbabwe, Namibia and Angola – where journalists have been murdered – it has no cause for complacency.
The report found that accusations of racism are often made against journalists who write critically of the government, and that other journalists are practising a form of self-censorship whereby they decline to fully report.
SABC got Joel Netshitenzhe, chief of the new Government Communications Information Service, to reply. First of all he dragged in our new Constitution which, he reckoned, would protect free speech.
Then he continued, rather ominously in my opinion: “I think we should be careful not to attribute to organisations in foreign countries the wisdom to lecture to us about what kind of a system we should have … We should base our system about [sic] freedom of speech in South Africa on the basis of our own experience.”
Now I have two comments to make to Netshitenzhe. The first is that Niza, the so-called “organisation in a foreign country”, is a developmental and research body formed from three merged former anti- apartheid movements. These movements served the African National Congress long and well in the past and therefore deserve more respect from a government represetative. Secondly, Netshitenzhe should understand that freedom of speech is simply just that – free. You either have it unfettered, warts and all, or you cannot claim to have it at all. If South Africa’s freedom of speech is to be tempered by the government’s “experience”, whatever that means, it will be anything but free.