Berizzi: The police escort enables me to work

24 April 2019

The testimony of the journalist from Bergamo at the Vienna conference with the participation of dozens of reporters under attack in various countries.

NGOs from all over the world took part in the meeting on “Journalists under attack, a threat to press freedom” promoted by OSCE and hosted at the Hofburg in Vienna (ASP

“>read here) From Italy, there was Ossigeno and over 30 journalists from the 57 OSCE countries. The reporters, in dialogue with each other, described the threats they suffered and the problems that they cannot cope with.

For Italy, the journalist Paolo Berizzi, who has been under police escort since February 2019 (like 20 other Italian colleagues) took the floor. The reporter from Bergamo started his  speech by citing the monitoring data of Ossigeno per l’Informazionewith its list of 3770 journalists and bloggers who have been intimidated in Italy from 2006 to 2018. He then described the neo-Fascist threats that he suffered from when he began to report in the newspaper “La Repubblica”, in a documented way, the irrefutable recurrence of reactionary, neo-Fascist and neo-Nazi movements.

In Italy, he said, journalists are going through a difficult time, their work is less and less tolerated, there are attacks that de-legitimize them, some members of the government have depicted them as jackals, molesters of which one would gladly do without. Living under police guard, he added, is a burden, “it forces us to reorganize our life, both private and working life. But– he concluded – this is the price to pay to continue to say what happens. A journalist cannot be silent in the face of facts, he cannot conform to the pressures of those who would like to silence him. In front of the threats he must raise his voice to keep the light on the new manifestations of that phenomenon that Umberto Eco defined as “the eternal fascism “.ASP