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Italy's army shifted mountains of rubbish from schools and streets around Naples on Monday to ease a two-week-old garbage crisis that has triggered violent protests by residents.
Locals angered at plans to revive a landfill in their neighbourhood clashed with police while Prime Minister Romano Prodi held emergency
meetings with ministers to decide a plan of action for the area, where waste collection ground to a halt in the run-up to Christmas.
That has left people with no choice but to dump household waste on ever growing piles in the streets. Italian media reported on Monday that some 110,000 tonnes of garbage had accumulated in the Campania region, of which Naples is the capital.
The trash emergency has dogged the southern region for 14 years. Italy has spent 2 billion euros and appointed six successive "trash tzars", but a combination of political incompetence, corruption and organised crime has scuppered efforts to solve the crisis.
Rubbish dumps in the Naples area are full and a massive incinerator which was supposed to open at the end of 2007 is not ready.
Many schools, due to reopen on Monday after the Christmas holidays, remained closed amid public health concerns despite the army bulldozing garbage away from buildings. Hundreds of trash piles have been set alight by residents, prompting fears of high levels of cancer-causing dioxin emissions.
Violence has flared several times in recent days between protesters and police outside a landfill in the suburb of Pianura. One man who climbed onto a bulldozer was dragged off by police and said he was beaten with truncheons.
"I climbed up there as a gesture and they hit me in the head and on the back," said the 30-year-old builder who gave his name as Vincenzo. Protesters are trying to halt the re-opening of the waste dump, closed in 1996.
Part of Naples' problem is that organised crime groups have made illegal waste disposal an industry that was worth 5.8 billion euros in 2006, according to a study by conservation group Legambiente.
The Camorra, the Naples brand of the Italian Mafia, is heavily involved in the transport and disposal of waste. Local authorities say it has benefited from the continuing crisis and may have actively tried to prolong it.
Mafia-controlled waste disposal - by burial or burning - has poisoned the environment so badly that people in some parts of the region are two to three times more likely to get liver cancer than in the rest of the country, according to Italy's National Research Council.
- REUTERS