https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mafia_state
In politics, a mafia state is state system where the government is tied with organized crime, including when government officials, police, and/or military take part in illicit enterprises. The term mafia is a reference to any organized crime groups strongly connected with the authorities.
According to the critics of the mafia state concept, the term "has now been so used and abused in popularized descriptions of organized criminal activity that it has lost much of its analytic value".
According to US diplomats, defector Alexander Litvinenko coined the phrase "mafia state."
In politics, a mafia state is state system where the government is tied with organized crime, including when government officials, police, and/or military take part in illicit enterprises. The term mafia is a reference to any organized crime groups strongly connected with the authorities.
According to the critics of the mafia state concept, the term "has now been so used and abused in popularized descriptions of organized criminal activity that it has lost much of its analytic value".
According to US diplomats, defector Alexander Litvinenko coined the phrase "mafia state."
Particular applications of the concept
Mafia in Italy and Yakuza in Japan
Giulio Andreotti, seven-time Prime Minister of Italy, was charged with having links to the Mafia
In a critical review of Moisés Naím's essay in Foreign Affairs, Peter Andreas pointed to the long existence of Italian mafia and Japanese Yakuza, writing that there were close relationships between those illicit organisations and respective governments. According to Andreas, these examples speak against incidences of mafia states as a historically new threat.
In Italy, there are three main mafia organisations that originated in the 19th century: the Cosa Nostra originating from the region of Sicily, the Camorra originating from the region of Campania, and the 'Ndrangheta originating from the region of Calabria.
Former Prime Minister of Italy, Giulio Andreotti, had legal action against him, with a trial for mafia association on 27 March 1993 in the city of Palermo.
The prosecution accused the former prime minister of "[making]
available to the mafia association named Cosa Nostra for the defense of
its interests and attainment of its criminal goals, the influence and
power coming from his position as the leader of a political faction". Prosecutors said in return for electoral support of Salvo Lima
and assassination of Andreotti's enemies, he had agreed to protect the
Mafia, which had expected him to fix the Maxi Trial. Andreotti's defense
was predicated on character attacks against the prosecution's key
witnesses who were themselves involved with the mafia. Andreotti was eventually acquitted on 23 October 1999. However, together with the greater series of corruption cases of Mani pulite, Andreotti's trials marked the purging and renewal of Italy's political system.
The Camorra Casalesi clan
rose in the 1980s, gaining control of large areas of the local economy
"partly by manipulating politicians and intimidating judges". The clan was heavily involved in the Naples waste management crisis
that dumped toxic waste around Campania in the 1990s and 2000s; the
boss of the clan, Gaetano Vassallo, admitted to systematically working
for 20 years to bribe local politicians and officials to gain their
acquiescence to dumping toxic waste.
Countries described as Mafia states
Republics and territories of the former Yugoslavia
_(cropped).jpg)
Montenegro's president Milo Đukanović is often described as having strong links to Montenegrin mafia.
Kosovo, a partially recognised independent state formerly part of Serbia, was called a "mafia state" by Italian MEP Pino Arlacchi in 2011, and also by Moisés Naím in his 2012 essay "Mafia States" in the Foreign Affairs. Naím pointed out that Prime Minister of Kosovo Hashim Thaçi
is allegedly connected to the heroin trade. Many other crime
allegations have been made, and investigated by several countries,
against Thaçi.
Naím also labeled Montenegro as a "mafia state" in the same essay, describing it as a hub for cigarette smuggling.
Transnistria
Transnistria, an unrecognised break-away state from Moldova, has long been described by journalists, researchers, politicians and diplomats as a quasistate whose economy is dependent on contraband and gunrunning.
For instance, in 2002, Moldova's president, Vladimir Voronin, called Transnistria a "residence of international mafia", "smuggling stronghold" and "outpost of Islamic combatants". The allegations were followed by attempts of customs blockade. Reacting to the allegations, Russian state-run RTR aired an investigative program revealing that Transnistrian firms were conducting industrial-level manufacturing of small arms purposely for subsequent illegal trafficking via the Ukrainian port of Odessa. According to the program, the trade was controlled by and benefited from Transnistria's founder and then-ruler Igor Smirnov.
However, more recent investigations and monitoring missions did not prove continuity in arms trafficking
concerns. According to regular reports of the European Border
Assistance Mission to Moldova and Ukraine (EUBAM), there have been no
signs of significant weapons smuggling from Transnistria.
During the press-conference on 30 November 2006 head of EUBAM Ferenc
Banfi officially stated that organised smuggling of weapons in
Transnistria did not exist. In 2013, Ukrainian Foreign Minister and acting chairman of the OSCE Leonid Kozhara gave an interview to El País
newspaper, commenting on situation in Transnistria and results of work
of the EUBAM mission. According to Kozhara, there have been no cases of
arms traffic found.
Some experts from Russia and Transnistria state that allegations
of Transnistria being a "mafia state", "black hole of Europe", "heaven
for arms trafficking", etc. are a carefully planned defamation campaign
paid by the Moldovan government and aimed at producing negative image of
Transnistria. Officials from the European Union and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE),
say they have no evidence that the Tiraspol regime has ever trafficked
arms or nuclear material. Much of the alarm is attributed to efforts by
the Moldovan government to increase pressure on Transdniester.
Russia
The term has been used by defector Alexander Litvinenko and some Western media to describe the political system in Russia under Vladimir Putin's rule. This characterization came to prominence following the United States diplomatic cables leak, which revealed that US diplomats viewed Russia as "a corrupt, autocratic kleptocracy centred on the leadership of Vladimir Putin, in which officials, oligarchs and organised crime are bound together to create a 'virtual mafia state.'" In his book titled Mafia State, journalist and author Luke Harding argues that Putin has "created a state peopled by ex-KGB and FSB officers, like himself, [who are] bent on making money above all." In the estimation of American diplomats, "the government [of Russia] effectively [is] the mafia."
According to the New Statesman,
"the term had entered the lexicon of expert discussion" several years
before the cables leak, "and not as a frivolous metaphor. Those most
familiar with the country had come to see it as a kleptocracy with
Vladimir Putin in the role of capo di tutti capi, dividing the spoils and preventing turf wars between rival clans of an essentially criminal elite."
In 2008, Stephen Blank noted that Russia under Putin is "a state that
European officials privately call a Mafia state" that "naturally
gravitates toward Mafia-like behavior."
Nikolay Petrov, an analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Centre, said
"it's pretty hard to damage the Russian image in the world because it's
already not very good".
Mexico
The scholar of Law and Economics Edgardo Buscaglia describes the political system of Mexico
as a "Mafiacracy". Buscaglia characterises the condition between the
state, the economy and organized crime in Mexico as a mutual
interweaving, Mexico has also been labeled as a Narco-state
(a country where the political power and the economy it's closely
related and its relies highly on protecting the drug trafficking
mafias).
Malta
Jonathan Benton, the former head of a United Kingdom anti-corruption agency, described Malta
as a “mafia state” where money laundering transactions of hundreds of
millions of euros are made every year without any problem. He made this
statement while speaking on BBC radio following the murder of investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia.
Other
Moisés Naím, the author of Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers, and Copycats Are Hijacking the Global Economy, wrote in an article for the American magazine Foreign Policy: "In mafia states such as Bulgaria, Guinea-Bissau, Montenegro, Myanmar (also called Burma), Ukraine, and Venezuela, the national interest and the interests of organised crime are now inextricably intertwined."
In 2010, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi
had labelled Switzerland as a mafia state, stating that "Switzerland is
behaving like a criminal organisation and it is involved in money
laundering, assassinations and terrorism."
