Nobel laureates slam mafia threats against writer

Six Nobel prizewinners Monday 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.

Saviano is the latest in a long line of Nobel laureates whose work has inspired death threats from those offended by their literary contributions.

Egyptian Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz and Iranian Nobel Laureate Salman Rushdie both received death threats over the years from Islamic fundamentalists who opposed their writing. Mahfouz, who died in 2006, condemned the death threats and fatwa, or religious ruling, by Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini calling for Rushdie’s death.

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.

Saviano, whose book has been translated into 42 languages, has lived under police protection for two years.

"Saviano's case is not only a police matter,” wrote the Nobel prizewinners. “It's a problem of democracy. Saviano's freedom concerns all of us as citizens."

Saviano wrote in La Repubblica last week: "I want a life, I want a home. I want to fall in love, to drink a beer in public. ... I want to laugh and not talk about myself as if I were a patient with a terminal disease."

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi last week vowed to "eliminate" the mafia from southern Italy with a "tough and merciless fight."

Meanwhile on Monday, 42 members of the N'drangheta mafia based in southern Calabria were to go on trial over a vendetta that led to the August 2007 slayings of six clan members.

It's a problem of democracy. Saviano's freedom concerns all of us as citizens

Nobel prizewinners