Mussolini Redux?

international | rights, freedoms and repression | opinion/analysis Friday June 27, 2008 22:27 by candle in the wind

Discrimination against the Roma in Italy

After torching Rom encampments, molotoving homes, stoning and kicking women and children, Rom children are to be fingerprinted "to protect them".

The compulsory fingerprinting of Italy's Gypsy population is the latest example of the country's increasingly repressive attitude towards minorities – and an ominous reminder of the policies of the former Fascist dictator.
Peter Popham reports on independent.co.uk. See also Editorial

The Italian government was doing something tough; something long overdue. Italian Minister of Home Affairs, Roberto Maroni, a leader of the Northern League, explained his next step in his assault on the "emergenza di sicurezza", the "security emergency": fingerprinting all Gypsies, including minors. It was the only way, he told a parliamentary committee for Italy to guarantee "to those who have the right to remain here, the possibility of living in decent conditions." For this purpose the Roma – those with Italian nationality and those without, EU citizens and those from outside the Community – will all have their fingerprints taken. And the rule will even apply to Gypsy children – for reasons that to many of Mr Maroni's supporters must have sounded obvious: "to avoid phenomena," as he put it, "such as begging". The new measures, he said, were indispensable "in order to expel those who do not have the right to stay in Italy". For anybody not swept up in the wave of anti-Roma fury, the campaign has a strong whiff of Mussolini and Hitler about it..
Census in Milan
The task of counting and identifying the residents of Italy, citizens or otherwise, who happen to belong the most despised minority in Europe is, in fact, already under way. A census of nomads whether they are bivouacking or living in legal camps has already started. Name, nationality, details of job and family will be registered so as to identify those who have the right to remain in Italy.
“The census will be extended to the province at a later date because the real emergency is in the city ” explained Gian Valerio Lombardi, Prefect of the city, newly appointed Extraordinary Commissioner for the Rom emergency whose powers extend al lover the Milan area and hinterland.

There are about 8,000 nomads in the Milan area and about half are Italian citizens. “The have the right to stay here” said the Prefect “even though we have space for only 2,000 in the authorized camps”.
Asked whether they might be moved to other provinces of Italy he replied” Not at present. Rationalization does not necessarily mean re-settlement” . A few days ago Mr Lombardi had said “I know some hundreds are leaving of their own free will. Some are even going to Romania”.
Maurizio Pagani, Vice-president of the Opera Nomadi Organization confirmed the exodus. “They are leaving because they are afraid they will be forced to leave. They are looking for some place where they are less visible” Opera Nomadi says there are about 25,000 nomads in the whole area of Milan and province. “At least 10,000 risk deportation because they are here illegally or because,, even though they are EU citizens, they have no job or income”
“In Milan we also have about 1,000 Yugoslavian Roms. Half of them are stateless. Where can they be deported to – given the war in the Balcans?” repubblica.it 03/06/08
Rom in one small camp on the furthest southern outskirts of Milan where the count had already taken place told Giovanna Boursier, an Italian journalist with Il Manifesto, that the police arrived at dawn, woke everybody up, surrounded the camp and flooded it with lights and then went from home to home, demanding identity documents and photographing them. All the residents were Italian citizens. It made no difference. "This wasn't a census," protested a Roma called Giorgio. "This was an ethnic register."
Thomas Hammerberg, European commissioner for human rights, visited a big Roma camp in Rome earlier this month. "I visited Casalino 900 camp, where 650 or so Roma live," he said. "There was no electricity, no water. It was a very bad slum."
And the fear of the "ethnic register" was already rampant, he said, "due to what happened to them in the past in Germany and elsewhere. They also raised the question, why us? Why not others? Many of those in the camp I visited had been in Italy for 40 years; they came over from Yugoslavia, some of them still have problems with identity papers, squeezed between the old and the new country. If you've been in a country for 40 years, are you still a foreigner? This talk about fingerprints was another reminder that their status has never been settled.
This official stigmatizing of the Roma appears to have unleashed popular furies. Appalling examples of racism are not hard to find. Rom camps were set on fire in Naples. Molotovs were thrown into Rom homes in Pavia. Sinta mother and daughter were stoned in Brescia. Early in June of this year, while a 16-year old Rom woman who was 6 months pregnant was begging along the Rimini seaboard,a 40 year-old Italian male got up from the bar table where he was sitting and started insulting and kicking her. Passers-by and other drinkers did nothing to stop him. http://www.annesdoor.com/club.html
One week later, on Tuesday June 17th, the Covaciu family, Romanians of the Roma ethnic group, who were already the victims of endless wandering around Italy due to abuse, threats and camp clearances, were leaving the tent they have been living in a micro-settlement in the Gianbellino area of Milan, when they were brutally attacked by two Italians aged between 35 and 40. Rebecca, aged 12, (known in Italy for having been awarded the 2008 Unicef – Caffè Shakerato prize for her artistic gifts applied to intercultural topics) and her brother Ioni, aged 14, were first pushed around and then beaten. Their parents ( father Stelian Covaciu, is a minister of the Pentecostal Church) and Rebecca’s older brother rushed to defend the children and were showered with racist insults, threatened, told to leave Italy, and then beaten. At that point the Covacius fled towards San Cristoforo station, in Piazza Tirana, and realising they were still being followed, turned to passers-by for help. But no one lifted a finger. As the family made their way to the nearby park, Mrs Covaciu, who suffers from a heart problem, was taken ill. http://www.everyonegroup.com/EveryOne/MainPage/Entries/....html
Reactions:
Last month, the European Parliament censured Italy for its treatment of foreign nationals.

The Rome section of ANED (The Italian National Association of Concentration Camp Deportees) said “if you fingerprint Rom and Sinti, then fingerprint us too”. In a statement it “strongly disapproved of fingerprinting Rom and Sinti, particularly children, as if they were criminals, claiming the law violated UN International Rights for Children which was promulgated in 1989 and ratified by the Italian Republic in Law No 176 on the 27 May 1991. This latest law recalls to mind Nazi and Fascist Racial Laws of the 1930’s which were designed to identify, marginalize, and eventually deport minority groups and people belonging to different ethnic groups. http://www.deportati.it/roma/rm_rom_260608.html

Vincenzo Spadafora, President of UNICEF Italy, suggested that in order to ensure equality before the law that Minister Maroni should also fingerprint Italian children. He hoped the law would never be enacted. He said Rom children were not any different to any other children and that many of them were Italian citizens. He reminded the Minister that children could not be treated like adults and should be protected, not subjected to discrimination. In a later statement in reply to Mr Maroni’s decision to proceed with fingerprinting Rom children “to protect them from being overrun by rats in their terrible living conditions” Mr Spadafora agreed that living conditions were unacceptably below normal standards but that Rom children could not be “protected” through violations of fundamental human rights. http://www.unicef.it/flex/cm/pages/ServeBLOB.php/L/IT/I.../4646

What is Italy's "security emergency"?
This strange and distracting phenomenon has been brewing up slowly for the past decade as economic growth slowed to a stop. It intensified dramatically with the admission of Romania and Bulgaria to the EU in January of last year, and now bulks so large that it was the biggest factor in Mr Berlusconi's election victory in April of this year and continues to dominate the media. It led to the decision last week to allow police numbers in the big cities to be augmented by up to 3,000 troops.
The issue is strange and distracting because it does not seem to exist, either statistically or as a fact of personal experience. Crime is not a big deal in Italian cities. There is no epidemic of burglary, mugging, bag-snatching, rape. Italy remains a country where it is pretty safe to walk the streets. Yet the government is behaving as if this were Colombia. And Colombia with a very special difference: that the supposedly soaring rate of crime is the work of one particular ethnic group, known as "nomadi rom."
Gypsies or Roma are visible in Italian cities as in the rest of Europe, and their number has increased. In Rome your subway journey may be made slightly less enjoyable by their accordions and violins and the appeals of their begging. Your eyes may be offended by the sight of them fishing in the waste bins, or hauling stuff home for recycling. Rome is so badly policed that small, utterly miserable squatter camps have sprung up in many places. They are a disgrace – unhygienic, unaesthetic – and have no place in a civilised modern country. But as the source of a "security emergency"?
Giovanni Maria Bellu, a La Repubblica journalist and an expert on Italy's minorities, said the problem was one of misunderstanding. "Most Italians make no distinction between Italian Roma and those who arrived from Yugoslavia during that country's break-up," he said. "And many Italians think that 'Rom' is an abbreviation of 'Romanian' – and since the arrival of Romania in the EU there has been a large influx of Romanians. People conflate these separate things. There have been crimes committed by Romanians – and people confuse these with the Rom, and the Rom end up being blamed for everything.
"Security was the over-riding theme of the general election, which is why this conflated Roma-Romanian theme became so big, and a part of the left is very timid about confronting the problem. The security emergency itself is a myth: there has been no increase in the number of rapes, for example – in fact, the number has declined. But when a single case occurs it is splashed on the front page of certain papers for a double reason: it increases the climate of fear; and it damages the centre-left, which is perceived as being weak on security."
Italy's Roma paranoia spilled on to the world's front pages on 13 May, when a woman in a suburb of Naples called Ponticelli alleged that a Roma girl had tried to steal her baby. The community erupted in fury, and thugs belonging to the Camorra crime syndicates threw petrol bombs into the local gypsy squatter camp, driving out the inhabitants and burning the place to the ground. Suddenly there was no avoiding the fact: the Italian hatred for the Roma had taken a dramatic new turn.
But the origin was an ancient fear, rooted not in fact but legend. Mr Bellu said: "There is nothing in police records to support the idea that Roma have stolen babies. It's just a legend. But one that still has people in its grip."
Marco Nieli, the president of Opera Nomadi, the most important organisation representing Italy's Roma, said: "The first Roma arrived in Italy in 1400 and have been here ever since, and are Italians in every respect. The real problem is one of crass ignorance: if someone says that Roma steal babies, the political parties reflect and amplify this nonsense. This way all the problems are swept under the carpet."
"The basic problem of Roma is widespread in Europe: housing, health, education, employment, political representation... But for a long time in Italy the Roma have been a symbol of something that is unwanted.
"The Nazis and the Fascists used the same methods of singling them out in the 1930s. It's not surprising that they are frightened."
A pocket dictator and the Manifesto of Race
Racism is often seen as intrinsic to fascism, but the inventor of the ideology, Benito Mussolini, was brought around to the Hitler obsession with race late in his career and after a great deal of arm-twisting.
Jews had lived in Italy for centuries without persecution. The community in Rome, though confined to the historic ghetto area for many centuries, has the longest uninterrupted history of any Jewish community in the world. In Mussolini's Italy, upper middle- class Jews continued to live and prosper without persecution – until 1938.
In that year Mussolini introduced his Manifesto of Race, closely modelled on the Nazi Nuremberg laws, which stripped Jews of their Italian citizenship, the right of Jewish children to go to school and of adults to work in the government or the professions.
Traditional Italian tolerance and/or indifference towards Jews meant that many were sheltered during those years, but after the fall of Rome, when Mussolini moved to the town of Salo on Lake Garda and was set up by the Nazis as the pocket dictator of the Republic of Salo, deportations of Jews to the death camps began in earnest.
And what of Italy's Roma during the grim final years of Mussolini's rule? Some 1.6 million Roma died in Germany and elsewhere during the Holocaust, a proportionately greater genocide than that suffered by the Jews.
The history of their treatment under Mussolini is a subject that contemporary Italian historians have been loath to look into, according to Marco Nieli, president of the Italian Roma organisation Opera Nomadi.
"It's a fact that there were concentration camps for Roma in Italy during the Fascist period, and it's also a fact that thousands of Roma died in them of hunger, cold and over work," he claimed. "Studies are now under way to discover the extent of the suffering that took place." independent.co.uk

Sources:
independent.co.uk
www.ilmanifesto.it
http://www.deportati.it/roma/rm_rom_260608.html
http://www.everyonegroup.com
http://www.repubblica.it/
www.corriere.it
http://www.annesdoor.com/club.html
http://www.unicef.it/flex/cm/pages/ServeBLOB.php/L/IT/I.../4646