Is Italy succumbing to a wave of racism and xenophobia under its new
centre-right Government? To Senada Salkanovic it looks that way: as she
cuddles her daughter Brenda, 7, on the step of her shack at a Gypsy camp on
Via Casilina, on the eastern outskirts of Rome, she wonders where she and
her six children will go when the bulldozers arrive.
The rubbish-strewn camp, consisting of wood and corrugated-iron cabins and
dilapidated caravans, sits next to a disused airfield and is due for
demolition as part of a new crackdown on illegal immigration and crime.
Already nearly 40 huts have been dismantled, and 150 of the camp's 800
inhabitants have left.
“Where are we supposed to go?” asks Senada, who came to Italy from the former
Yugoslavia 20 years ago. Her makeshift home, equipped with cupboards, a sink
and a stove, is neat and well kept, in contrast to the dusty squalor
outside. “They say we are all thieves, but I work as a cleaner.”
“This Government is stoking up fear,” says Najo Adzovic, her husband. “Most
people in this camp are refugees from crises in the Balkans. We are used as
scapegoats when what we need are jobs, housing and status. We need to find
our voice.”
Across town, at another Roma camp made of converted containers next to a bus
depot in the southwestern suburb of Magliana, I find Riccardo Di Segni, the
Chief Rabbi of Rome, talking to Hanifa Rustic, an elderly Bosnian who tells
him that she came to Italy at the age of 13, fleeing pro-Nazi Croatian
Fascists in an earlier era of intolerance.
“There are alarming signs of racism in Italy today,” says Di Segni, who is
visiting the camp to express Jewish solidarity. Jews and Gypsies both ended
up in Hitler's concentration camps, he points out. “We have to be on the
alert, not only because of what is happening but because of what could
happen. First one group is singled out, then another. This must be stopped
now.”
“We are treated like criminals even though most Roma people are honest,” says
Mioara Miclescu, a Romanian at the Magliana camp who runs a laundry
employing Roma women. “We are living in fear.”
Many illegal immigrants are not the muggers and pickpockets of popular
nightmare but badanti - cleaners and carers for the elderly who cannot
obtain residence permits because of bureaucratic obstacles.
The plight of Italy's Roma population made headlines two weeks ago when youths
on motorcycles and scooters hurled Molotov cocktails into a nomad camp at
Ponticelli, outside Naples, a city brought to its knees by the unresolved
problem of how to dispose of its rubbish. Smoke from the burning camp joined
that already rising from mountains of rubbish set on fire by desperate
locals.
The Naples arson attacks - apparently co-ordinated by clans of the Camorra,
the Naples Mafia, which is also behind the rubbish problem - were sparked by
an alleged attempt by a teenage Roma girl to abduct a baby from a flat near
the camp. When the new Cabinet of Silvio Berlusconi, who won a sweeping
election victory last month, met in Naples last week, one of the provisions
in its emergency decree on crime and immigration was the arrest of Gypsies
who use children to steal or beg.
The Berlusconi coalition combines his Forza Italia with the anti-immigrant
Northern League and the “post-Fascist” Alleanza Nazionale. All agree with
Berlusconi that “Italians have the right not to live in fear” - which means
targeting those who make Italians afraid.
Illegal immigration is about to become a crime for the first time, punishable
by up to four years in prison, with new detention centres to hold
clandestini prior to their expulsion. Another measure, aimed at the
thousands of Romanians who have poured into Italy since Romania joined the
EU, states that EU citizens will be expelled if they cannot show that they
have the “economic resources” to stay for longer than three months.
Vigilante “neighbourhood patrols” have sprung up in many Italian towns, and
mayors are being given special powers to “ensure public safety”.
In Rome, where the election of Gianni Alemanno of Alleanza Nazionale a month
ago was greeted by Fascist salutes from some supporters and cries of “Duce,
Duce”, there were clashes on Tuesday between extreme Left and extreme Right
supporters at Rome University. Last weekend masked youths went on the
rampage in the hitherto peaceful and trendy multiracial quarter of Pigneto,
smashing the windows of Asian businesses and beating up Indian and
Bangladeshi shopkeepers. The pretext was an allegation that one of the
shopkeepers was harbouring a North African who had stolen a purse, but
witnesses had no doubt that this was a racist attack.
Kabir Humayun, a Bangladeshi shopkeeper, said; “I'm terrified that it will
happen again. I'm worried for my wife and children.”
“Where will this all end?” asked Islam Serajul, whose launderette-cum-phone
centre was trashed. “And why now? I have been here six years with no
problems.”
Alemanno, a former neo-Fascist youth leader who - like the rest of Alleanza
Nazionale - has rejected the legacy of Mussolini, insists that he was as
horrified as anyone. He met the targeted shopkeepers, shook their hands and
offered them compensation from public funds. He accepted a bag of nuts as a
present, and blamed the previous left-of-centre Rome administration for
creating intolerance by being soft on crime. But shortly after he left, a
poster went up on one of the smashed shopfronts that read: “We oppose the
hypocrisy of those who feed racism and xenophobia”. Vladimir Luxuria, a
transsexual and former parliamentary deputy who lives in Pigneto, says: “The
thugs who attacked the Asians don't just feel legitimised by Alemanno, they
feel sponsored by him.”
Next month, a new opera about a shanty town by the composer Giorgio
Battistelli, Miracolo a Milano, has its Rome premiere. Inspired by the
anti-immigrant panic that followed the murder at a suburban railway station
last October of Giovanna Reggiani, the wife of a naval officer, allegedly by
a Romanian vagrant, it is “a parable about alienated people, whether those
living next to railway lines and under bridges in Italy, or Italians as a
whole,” Battistelli says.
Walter Veltroni, the former centre-left mayor of Rome, claimed at the time of
the murder that Roma were responsible for 75 per cent of the city's crime.
It is this kind of remark that has led MEPs and the European Commission to
give warning of Italian xenophobia, joined yesterday by Amnesty
International, which referred to a “witch-hunt”.
Last week the European Roma Rights Centre, funded by George Soros, the
Hungarian-born US financial speculator and political activist, wrote to
Berlusconi demanding “urgent intervention by Italian authorities to protect
Roma from further acts of racist aggression”.
Some Italians see all this alarm about intolerance as misplaced, and dismiss
warnings of a return to 1930s-style Fascism as hysterical. “We have simply
reached a tipping point” says Guglielmo, my neighbour. “I usually vote for
the Centre Left but, like many others who switched to the Right this time, I
am fed up to the back teeth with robberies, pickpockets, tramps, and the
sight of hundreds of immigrants selling counterfeit handbags and sunglasses
on our streets with impunity. Enough is enough.”
There has been casual racism for years on Italy's football terraces, with
insults routinely hurled at black players by far-right “ultras”. Skinhead
violence is not directed only at foreigners, though - gays, anyone with long
hair, anyone “different”, is also a target. This month a 29-year-old
industrial designer died in Verona after being beaten into a coma by ultras
for refusing one of them a cigarette. But foreigners stand out, and
geography makes the Italians feel vulnerable. “We are closer to both the
Balkans and North Africa than anyone in Europe, and our peninsular coastline
is impossible to defend,” one Italian friend tells me. “We bear the brunt.”
North African Muslims are the most visible objects of suspicion - especially
in northern Italy, where the Northern League is strong - and there is a
tendency to lump Roma gypsies and Romanians together. Of the three million
legal immigrants in Italy - 5 per cent of the population - Romanians are the
most numerous, closely followed by Albanians and Moroccans. According to
police statistics, a third of all thefts, rapes and murders are committed by
“foreigners”.
There are an estimated 600,000 illegal immigrants in Italy, and hundreds more
arrive every week at Lampedusa, a tiny Italian island near the North African
coast. Some are sent back but most make their way to the mainland. In 2006,
of 124,383 immigrants “detained for illegal entry” and ordered to be
expelled, only 13,397 were actually “accompanied to the frontier” to make
sure that they left. The rest were served with expulsion orders but then
absconded to live rough.
Marco Brazzoduro, a professor of social policy at Rome University who has
taken up the Roma cause, argues that Italians are not racist. “This is more
about poverty than race,” he says. “The poor are always to blame. It is
undeniable that Roma people beg and steal, but so do other immigrants - and
Italians.” Professor Brazzoduro, who began by doing research on the Roma
people and was drawn into helping them, has set up a dressmaking workshop
for seven Roma women, with “a waiting list of 40 more”.
Many Italians feel that their way of life is threatened by a combination of
immigration and globalisation. In an economy of near-zero growth, the family
businesses that are the backbone of Italy are struggling. In Pigneto,
residents tell you that trouble has been brewing for some time, with the gap
between rich and poor threatening social harmony. “On the one hand house
prices have rocketed as the wealthy move in, while on other the area is
flooded with illegal street traders, criminals and drug dealers,” one says.
“I don't see why Alemanno had to apologise,” says the barman at a café near
one of the smashed shops. “Attacking people is out of order, but it is
beoming impossible to live here - noise all night, drugs, drunkards. I'm not
a racist, it's just that our neighbourhood is being destroyed.”
According to Opera Nomadi, an organisation set up to represent Roma
immigrants, Roma gypsies began coming to Italy in the late Middle Ages, and
half of Italy's 150,000 Roma are Italian citizens. Many of them make a
living by dealing in scrap metal and second-hand goods, and many Roma
children attend Italian schools.
“Not all Roma are Romanians, and not all Romanians are Roma,” says Ilvo
Diamanti, a leading sociologist. He agrees with Professor Brazzoduro that
Italians are not racist, “but they are xenophobic, in the sense that
foreigners arouse fear. But then that is true throughout Europe. To say that
this is a phenomenon that has exploded because Berlusconi is back in power
is surreal.”
Giuliano Ferrara, formerly Berlusconi's spokesman and now a prominent editor
and television pundit, agrees. “It was entirely predictable that once
Berlusconi returned to power a Greek chorus would appear to warn us all that
Italian democracy is in danger, that Italy is introducing mass deportations
and concentration camps,” he says. In reality, he adds, violence against
immigrants and gypsies has been “limited”.
The true problem, Ferrara says, is that Italy has had to cope with an influx
of immigrants who end up living in poverty on the edges of cities - the very
margins in which Italy's own poorest people live.
“There is no ethnic persecution in Italy,” he insists. “To draw comparisons
with what happened to the Jews, who were exterminated, is irresponsible.”
Roberto Maroni, the Interior Minister and deputy leader of the Northern
League, points out that making illegal entry into Italy a crime merely
brings the nation into line with Britain, France and Germany. As for
vigilante attacks on immigrants, “that is what happens when gypsies steal
babies, or when Romanians commit sexual violence”. The Right was elected, he
says, to do something about it. “The whole point of our security package is
to reassure citizens, precisely so that they don't take the law into their
own hands. It is the job of the state to guarantee public safety.”
Italy remains a tolerant country, partly thanks to Roman Catholic traditions
of hospitality and charity. But if a doctor were to take Italy's temperature
at the moment, he might conclude that it was in a feverish and troubled
state of mind. Italians, the writer Claudio Magris observes, seem to have
forgotten that just half a century ago they, too, were a nation of poor
emigrants to America. “We, above all, should know what it is like to be
strangers in a strange land,” he says.
The danger is that the more Italians feel threatened and hard done by, the
more xenophobia will take hold, according to Marco Lodoli, a Rome
journalist. Italy is a tolerant mixture of traditions - a macedonia (fruit
salad) - he says, but “the fruit is turning sour. The air is electric, it
will take only a flash of lightning to cause the next explosion. Today it is
Naples or Pigneto. Tomorrow, who knows?”
Yes, it could happen here
Italians riot against Gypsies in their midst; South Africans riot against
Zimbabweans and other immigrants. In troubled times, the foreigner is always
hated.
Mass immigration usually takes place without the consent, and even against the
wishes, of the receiving population, who are then inclined to bitterness at
the disregarding of their wishes. We in Britain should not be too quick to
congratulate ourselves that there have not yet been many outbreaks of
violent xenophobia, even though we have far more immigrants, from many more
countries, than Italy. I remember how, in the early 1960s, we used to laugh
at the absurdity of Italian football hooliganism, only to become world
leaders in it ourselves shortly afterwards.
Our nervousness in this respect is demonstrated every time a young member of
an ethnic minority is murdered. Was he killed by racists? If he was, will
there be further outbreaks of violence? We breathe a sigh of relief when it
turns out, as seems to have been the case with the young man killed recently
in Dewsbury, that the act was non-racist.
It seems that, in exhibiting some of the worst characteristics of contemporary
British culture, immigrant groups are adjusting to the ways of their adopted
country. In Britain, ethnic and cultural tensions are not necessarily
between native Britons and others. There are plenty of tensions between
different minorities. For example, Sikhs and Muslims do not see eye to eye,
and I have met many patients with horror stories to tell of clashes between
them, especially over matters matrimonial. The “communities” sometimes even
set up vigilante groups to police their borders.
The real danger comes not when people of different origins intermingle but
when they segregate themselves into virtual ghettoes. Resentment leads men
to do the worst things, and is rarely absent from the human heart. It is at
its most dangerous when it has an easy target.
Dr Theodore Dalrymple
