«With an order dated July 18, the Prefecture of Cagliari sanctioned the precautionary closure of the areas of the Capo Teulada Polygon not exclusively for military use (granted for agricultural and pastoral activities)».

The reason is "a risk situation due to exceeding the threshold concentrations of soil contamination".

For decades, the antimilitarist collective A Foras comments, "we've been denouncing the obvious environmental devastation that accompanies military activities in Sardinian firing ranges. It doesn't take a genius to understand that decades of military maneuvers and bombings with all sorts of explosive devices lead to pollution and destruction."

It was "through the struggle and organization of these decades that we finally managed to force the military to comply with environmental regulations, beginning to carry out the necessary monitoring, and starting this January to subject their activities to environmental assessment procedures."

Of course, A Foras says, "we shouldn't celebrate victory too soon; monitoring continues to be conducted in a context of total lack of transparency. As also emerges from the latest Prefecture document, it is the Army Command that manages the measurement of environmental contamination, issuing a specific call for tenders to companies in the sector, and it is they who provide the data on contamination thresholds being exceeded. The controller and the controlled are the same entity."

Officially, it's not even known what thresholds have been exceeded. Although hypotheses about thallium and cadmium are leaking out. " For the purposes of restoring the territories and a scientific assessment of the damage," say the anti-militarists, "it is essential that environmental monitoring be conducted by entities completely independent of the military hierarchy, with maximum transparency and data sharing. Until such a condition exists, the range monitoring system cannot be trusted, even when it seems to confirm what we've been saying for decades. We acknowledge, however, that the military can no longer cover up the damage caused by their actions, and that they can no longer act as absolute masters of our territory."

(Unioneonline)

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