WORLD WORLDWIDE ITALY News Journal Update - (en) Italy, Sicilia Libertaria 2023 June: STOP POLYGONI More and more depopulated but militarized (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 A logistic hub for firing and long-range exercises with cannons, howitzers,

armored vehicles and tanks complete with ammunition depots and war vehicles,
barracks and accommodation for the soldiers of the Italian Army and - predictably
- of NATO partner countries. According to the Ministry of Defence, it will have
to be built in the heart of Sicily, in an agricultural and wooded area of over
3,350 hectares in the municipalities of Gangi (Palermo), Sperlinga and Nicosia
(Enna). ---- On May 8, 2023, a collaboration agreement was signed in Sperlinga to
build the megapolygon by General Maurizio Angelo Scardino (commander of the Army
in Sicily) and by the mayors of the three towns, Giuseppe Ferrarello (Gangi),
Luigi Bonelli (Nicosia) and Giuseppe Cuccì (Sperlinga). "The Army General Staff
has expressed the need to establish a hub in the highlighted territories for
carrying out logistical activities and military tactical exercises", reads the
preamble to the Agreement. "The Army needs to identify new training areas,
compared to the already existing and operational ones, for the storage of its
vehicles (light, medium and heavy tactical vehicles) and the carrying out of
black and fire exercises, which allow an appropriate and effective development of
the activities relating to the preparation and maintenance of the operational
efficiency of the units".

"The presence of soldiers in the area, in addition to ensuring an improvement in
economic conditions, in favor of the Municipalities concerned, will ensure
greater control of the territory, increasing the safety and protection of both
the users who populate it and the environment and fauna existing, for the
prevention of fires, abandonment of toxic waste and any other activity that
endangers the environment and the population", still reports the incredible
Municipal-Defence pact. "The mayors have expressed the urgent need to count on
the constant presence of troops in training, in order to improve the economic and
financial conditions of the administered territories and ensure a greater
presence of the State in the aforementioned territories; for this they undertake
to make the properties and portions of the territory identified available, with
the most advantageous formula for both parties, offering maximum collaboration to
the Armed Forces and interceding, where necessary, with the resident population,
companies and private owners for facilitate and make possible logistic and
training activities". The mayors also declare themselves ready to "intercede with
the companies that manage the power lines, to request their possible relocation,
should these represent an obstacle to the creation of the shooting range and to
request and obtain, where necessary, the required clearance from the Region
Siciliana and any other body having jurisdiction over the identified area, to
accelerate and facilitate the establishment of the logistics-training hub".

The commitments undertaken by the Defense are much more nuanced. "All activities
in the areas identified and made available by the Municipalities will be carried
out in full compliance with current environmental and safety legislation",
promise the generals who ignore the socio-environmental crimes generated by the
exercises in Sardinia, Friuli Venezia Giulia, Lazio and Puglia and the
reclamations denied. (...) Article 6 of the Sperlinga Pact then prefigures the
imposition of suffocating easements and the expropriation of extensive real
estate properties (...): "specific contracts will be stipulated, in the
appropriate offices, in the event of the permanent sale of the real estate".

Meanwhile, it is possible to deduce from the maps attached to the memorandum that
the polygon being established will have the shape of a scalene trapezium of
approximately 33.5 km2, with the perimeter only one kilometer away from the town
of Sperlinga and approximately 4 km away from Gangi and Nicosia . Area 2, the
largest, will be used for firing exercises (there are numerous farmhouses and
farms inside it), while the shots from the howitzers and cannons will be
concentrated in a maxi-rectangle whose base has been traced alongside the wind
farm there. Area 1 will house the military quarters (presumably around a hundred
permanent ones and up to 800 who will take turns for war games), arms and
ammunition depots and shelters for tanks, armored vehicles and means of war
transport. The infrastructures will all be built within an area of 112,000 square
meters in the Calamaio district, today destined to be an "artisan center" and
owned in part by the Municipality of Sperlinga and for the rest by private
individuals. The administration of Enna will also hand over to the military the
former Town Hall and the former day center which currently houses some classes of
the second educational circle of Nicosia (overall the buildings cover an area of
6,500 square meters). (...)

The other bitter discovery among the documents attached to the Sperlinga Pact is
that a good portion of Area 1 will affect within the Special Conservation Zone
(ZSC) of the Sperlinga Wood, Alto Salso, a site protected for its environmental
significance and landscape with resolution of 21 December 2015 of the Ministry of
the Environment and the protection of the territory and the sea. Classified with
the code ITA060009, the Bosco di Sperlinga (mainly oak woods) covers an area of
1,781 hectares on a ridge set between the Erei mountains to the south, the
Madonie to the west and the Nebrodi to the north-east.

However, the population did not believe at all in the miraculous promises of
socio-economic development and environmental protection heralded by local
administrators and army leaders and rejected the ignoble military project to the
sender. Immediate mobilization No shooting range: online and door-to-door
petitions were launched with thousands of subscribers in a few hours, appeals and
heavy anti-mayoral censures were published on social media, public meetings were
called and municipal councils open to interventions by citizens and associations,
organized information broadcasts by radio, local TV stations and by the Germinal
Controvoce masthead. Documents and warnings were circulated by majority and
opposition municipal councilors, political and social forces, the NoMUOS,
Legambiente, Arci Sicilia, Antudo and even by the Pastoral Council of the Diocese
of Nicosia. Thus, probably at the suggestion of the armed forces and the
prefecture, a few hours after a blitz by the mayors in Palermo to meet the army
leaders and a few hours before a city council in Nicosia in which dozens of
citizens and associations registered to participate , on May 25 the
administrations of Gangi and Nicosia expressed their intention to revoke the
agreement. On the other hand, the mayor of Sperlinga has decided to continue,
alone, in the process of converting the territory into a war-strategic center for
the "Aosta" mechanized brigade, an elite unit of the NATO emergency response
forces, and its international partners.

Meanwhile, there are questions about the legitimacy of an agreement that does not
appear to comply with the regulations in force for the identification of areas to
be subjected to military exercises. Since 24 December 1976 the law n. 898 which
regulates military easements and the rules have been integrated into the
legislative decree n. 66 of 15 March 2010 relating to the new Code of the
military system. Specifically, in art. 322 of the decree states that "in each
region a joint joint committee of mutual consultation is set up for the
examination, also with alternative proposals from the region and the military
authority, of the problems connected with the harmonization between the
territorial and economic and social development of the region and sub-regional
areas and the programs of military installations and the consequent limitations".

The members of the Joint Joint Committee are 5 representatives of the Ministry of
Defence, 2 representatives of the Ministry of Economy and 7 of the region. "The
Committee is consulted every six months on all departmental or unit fire drill
programs, for the definition of localities, regional air and sea spaces, timing
and methods of execution, as well as on the use of firing ranges in the region" ,
reports the legislative decree. "Each Committee, having consulted the local
authorities and other interested bodies, defines the areas suitable for the
concentration of shooting exercises in the region for the establishment of
shooting ranges, using as a priority, where possible, state-owned areas. Once
these military areas have been established, the shooting exercises must generally
take place within the areas themselves. For training areas, land, sea and air,
both temporary and permanent, regulations for use are stipulated between the
military authority and the region concerned". Therefore, no decision-making power
of Municipalities and the Army and the obligation to follow procedural procedures
that are completely different from what was agreed instead in Sperlinga.

(...) The logistic-training hub increasingly takes on the appearance of the
project that more than forty years ago the Ministry of Defense envisaged in an
immense area straddling three provinces (Messina, Palermo and Enna), but firmly
rejected by an extraordinary mobilization of citizens, breeders, farmers and
local and regional administrators. In November 1979, the Joint Joint Committee
for military servitude expressed its opinion in favor of the creation of a
shooting range of over 23,000 hectares on the Nebrodi mountains. The unanimous
consent of the civilian members of the Committee was obtained on a report by the
Army Command according to which "the area was preferable due to the lack of
permanent housing, the very scarce presence of seasonally inhabited rural
buildings, the conditions of economic backwardness ( about 1,000 head of cattle
and only small plots of cultivated land)". The minutes of the meeting of the
Joint Committee also emphasized "the ease with which expropriations can be
achieved due to the limited number of owners and the consent of the populations
which have not given rise to protests".

(...) The popular opposition forced the armed forces to take a first step
backwards: on 4 January 1983 the then head of the Army in Sicily, General
Gualtiero Stefanoni, announced the "downsizing of the training range for
artillery departments" to about 17,000 hectares. "Of these, 10,000 will
constitute the security zone and 7,000 derive from the sum of four smaller areas
which will be used to deploy the guns, cannons and howitzers", explained
Stefanoni. "In one of these areas, some infrastructures will be built to house
warehouses for materials, dormitories to house the departments undergoing
training and service infrastructures, such as shops, canteens, showers,
workshops...". Almost a photocopy of today's Sperlinga-Gangi-Nicosia hub.

In November 1984, the Hon. Vittorio Olcese, at the time Undersecretary of
Defence, responding to a parliamentary question, declared that "the extension of
the range will be 13,717 hectares of which only 525 will be used for the landing
area of the shots". A year later, the Commander of the Military Region, General
Biagio Cacciola, presented a new project to the Sicilian Region which envisaged
the expropriation of 450 hectares of land largely falling within the municipality
of Mistretta, to install the fixed infrastructure of the shooting range and a
barracks capable of "permanently hosting 100 soldiers to whom 250-300 men would
be periodically added for exercises", and of "another 12,000 hectares to be used
on an occasional basis for the period of exercises, from 120 to 200 days a year
for no more than 5 hours a day". The list of weapon systems to be used in the
Nebrodi woods appeared in the Sicilian press: the M60 and M47 "Leopard" tanks,
the "M109" 155 mm self-propelled howitzers, the "Tow" anti-tank missile
launchers, the mechanical towed campaign FH-70 with a maximum range of up to 30
km, etc..

The freezing of the insane militarization project of the Nebrodi was sanctioned
in February 1987 by the agenda voted unanimously by the Senate Defense
Commission, which asserted "the absolute incompatibility of the polygon with the
socio-economic development programs of the area, foreseen by local authorities,
as well as by the EEC". Nonetheless, in February 1989, the successor commander of
the Sicily Military Region, General Natale Dodoli, had the cheek to re-propose
the shooting range as a "valid alternative" to the Natural Park being established
in the Nebrodi. "The training areas that the Army uses in various regions have
remained immune from pollution and building speculation", was the general's
narrative leitmotif.

As late as 1992, Sicilian No War activists expressed fears that the mega-project
could be revived. (...) Bitter prophecy in the light of what is happening these
days. The armed forces has never stopped pursuing the dream of acquiring endless
territories in which to simulate planetary war attacks. "Another area where a
large training space could be obtained, a kind of National Training Center (NTC)
of Fort Irwin, is the Sicilian one of the mining basin, located in the western
part of the province of Caltanissetta", wrote Captain Alfonso in 1999 de Salvo in
an article in Le Servitù militari. Misinformation and Misunderstandings published
in the Army Review, bimonthly of the land force. "It is a territory exposed to an
imminent ecological emergency, caused by the foolishness of the bankruptcy
trustees of the company that managed the mines centered on Bosco S. Cataldo and
which could lead to the appearance of bell towers (or potholes of the giants),
formations funnel-shaped similar to sinkholes, caused in nature by the washout of
saline deposits by groundwater. (...) Creating a training area in this area, as
well as reaffirming the control of the territory by the State, could allow the
monitoring and preventive control of the imminent natural emergency. From a
military point of view, this could compensate for the destruction of the range on
the Nebrodi Mountains. This polygon was originally supposed to occupy an area of
9 square kilometers but, thanks to a series of disinterested sit-ins by farmers
and campers, it was reduced to a postage stamp. Fortunately, the area around S.
Cataldo-Bosco (which, moreover, is already under the control of the Sicily
Region, and therefore of the State) is, yes, expanding, but barren and
potentially dangerous".

Security, development and defense of the environment, the same watchwords to make
the Sperlinga Pact less indigestible twenty-four years later. And in the
background also the ghost of a National Training Center model "Fort Irwin", the
immense area for war games of the US Army in the Mojave desert, California.

Antonio Mazzeo

https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S  N E W S  S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca