When we found Nello Scavo at his hotel at the beginning of November, he told us he was ” fairly quiet “. In the morning, three police officers were waiting for him at Termini station in Rome, when he got off his train from Milan. Since 2019, this 51-year-old Sicilian journalist has lived under police escort for having received death threats after publication in the daily l‘Avvenire of its investigations into migrant smuggling.
That year, he revealed that a Libyan delegation came to Italy discreetly, in 2017. One of the men is called Abd al-Rahman Salem Ibrahim al-Milad, alias al-Bija, head of the “guards -coasts” of Zaouïa, east of Tripoli. Its militia runs detention camps where migrants suffer the worst torture. However, it is to him that the country will provide ships in order to push back migrants to the Libyan side. Nello Scavo details the meeting. The scoop quickly went around the country, without any major reactions from the authorities.
In January 2023, however, the Minister of Justice, Carlo Nordio, responding to a question from a parliamentarian, spoke of “Libyan mafia”. Almost a slip of the tongue. Or the involuntary recognition of Scavo’s work. This is in fact the first time that a member of the government has used this expression. The investigator describes the scene in The mani on the Guardia costiera (“Hands on the Coast Guard”, Chiarelettere, untranslated).
In this book published in October, the journalist denounces the compromises of Italian politics (right and left) with migrant trafficking networks. He expresses his incomprehension at the Italian authorities who are signing agreements with a Libya handed over to the militias, while the UN Security Council has included al-Bija on its sanctions list and his name appears in one of the mandates of judgment launched by the International Criminal Court concerning crimes committed in Libya against migrants.
Social Catholicism against the Mafia
Throughout his investigations, Nello Scavo became one of the most respected writers in Italy. Born in Catania, in the east of Sicily, he spent his childhood in Scordia, a village known for its orange fields, with Etna as its horizon. It was at the age of 19 that he made his debut at the local daily newspaper. Sicilia. “My training is not very academic, I learned everything on the ground”, he says while sipping green tea.
Sicily in the 1990s is a land of blood and tears. In three months, Cosa Nostra, the Sicilian Mafia, murdered seventy people in Catania alone. “It was a real trial by fire,” he remembers. Like many adolescents of the time, Nello Scavo grew up in this network of parishes and youth associations which are the strength of Italian social Catholicism, structures very committed to the fight against the Mafia.
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