Thousands marched against racism in Florence on Saturday after a far-right activist killed two Senegalese vendors in a shooting spree that shocked Italy and ignited a row over immigration.
"We want today to be the dawn of a new hope so that our brothers did not die in vain," said Pape Diaw, a spokesman for the Senegalese community. "We really have to work for peaceful coexistence and respect of people but it has to be a real struggle, not just a facade," he told reporters.
Around 10,000 people took part in the demonstration, according to police, while organisers put the number at some 12,000. Participants carried Senegalese flags and placards including one that read: "Racism? Not in my name."
"Our brothers were martyred. Obviously not martyrs of war but martyrs since they were killed while they were working for their daily bread," Florence imam Izzedin Elzir told the crowd in the historic Santa Maria Novella square.
The city is still reeling after Gianluca Casseri, a Holocaust denier and author of fantasy novels, went on the rampage on Tuesday with a Magnum revolver at two local markets including the tourist-heavy San Lorenzo in the centre. Two Senegalese street vendors were killed and another three wounded before the 50-year-old killed himself when police began closing in on him. Senegalese authorities have called for a full inquiry into the killings.
Dozens of Senegalese immigrants and white Florence residents gathered ahead of the protest at the Dalmazia Square market where the spree began, reading passages from the Koran and leaving flowers and messages at a street shrine. A large makeshift sign at the square in honour of the two victims -- Samb Modou, 40, and Diop Mor, 54 -- read simply "Modou and Mor: Two of Us."
After a Muslim rite on Monday, their bodies will be flown back to Senegal the following day.
"There needs to be a strong commitment against racism by everyone and we need to put in place an immigration policy in line with our constitution," said Vannino Chiti, a senator from the centre-left Democratic Party. Chiti, one of several left-wingers at the protest, said Italian law should be changed before the next elections to allow the children of immigrants to obtain citizenship -- echoing a demand made by President Giorgio Napolitano.
Several members of the Senegalese community have also called for the immediate closure of Casa Pound, a national right-wing social group that Casseri belonged to but which has been quick to denounce the violence.
Claudio Morganti, a lawmaker from the anti-immigration Northern League party, said the protest had been "ruined by left-wing politicians who have manipulated it and made it part of their political propaganda."
"The Senegalese have to understand that whoever comes here has to respect the rules and respect the people who are hosting them," he said.
There were several smaller marches in other major Italian cities too. At one in Milan, some immigrants shouted "Racists!" and "Murderers!" at police officers. Bologna, Genoa, Naples, Padua also saw protests.
Many street vendors in Italian cities, who sell everything from African sculptures to tourist trinkets to fake designer accessories, are Senegalese. Their makeshift stalls are popular but they are often selling without official licences and are forced to run off whenever police approach.
In an interview on Saturday, International Cooperation and Integration Minister Andrea Riccardi warned attacks like the one in Florence and an arson attack on a Roma camp in Turin last Saturday were "a warning bell".
"We can't dismiss these as one-off events. They are a risk for the integration and the solidarity of our country. And they show that the crisis is not just economic but much deeper," he told La Stampa daily.
Responding to criticism from the Northern League, Riccardi -- the founder of the pro-integration Catholic community group Sant'Egidio -- was scathing.
"Contempt has been preached for too long, ethnic minority groups have been spoken about harshly for too long. There has to be security for all Italians, for all immigrants and for all those who work in Italy. This is the first thing I told the Senegalese community in Florence: 'There needs to be security for you too.'".
Yahoo
Thanks to Zaahid for the heads-up
Showing posts with label Northern League. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Northern League. Show all posts
December 18, 2011
December 02, 2009
BNP backs call for vote on minarets
The BNP and other far-right parties across Europe have called for referendums on minarets after the Swiss banned the construction of the Muslim symbol
Anti-immigration movements in Belgium, Denmark, Italy and The Netherlands have also urged their governments to debate similar measures. But the UN and human rights groups condemned the move as illegal and claimed it was the equivalent to banning spires on churches.
The BNP said it was ‘very pleased’ with the Swiss vote.
‘These sort of referendums should be allowed to take place on issues such as the death penalty for child murderers, minarets and mass immigration,’ said a spokesman.
Italian cabinet minister and ally of Silvio Berlusconi, Roberto Calderoli, of the xenophobic Northern League, yesterday said the country should confirm its Roman Catholic roots and hold a vote as soon as possible. The Swiss decision was a triumphant ‘yes to bell towers and no to minarets’, he added.
Amnesty International said it was ‘deeply worrying if Europe’s far-right parties seized upon’ the Swiss result. A spokesman for the Islamic Human Rights Commission said calls in more countries for referendums ‘could give more voice’ to anti-Muslim sentiment.
Metro
Anti-immigration movements in Belgium, Denmark, Italy and The Netherlands have also urged their governments to debate similar measures. But the UN and human rights groups condemned the move as illegal and claimed it was the equivalent to banning spires on churches.
The BNP said it was ‘very pleased’ with the Swiss vote.
‘These sort of referendums should be allowed to take place on issues such as the death penalty for child murderers, minarets and mass immigration,’ said a spokesman.
Italian cabinet minister and ally of Silvio Berlusconi, Roberto Calderoli, of the xenophobic Northern League, yesterday said the country should confirm its Roman Catholic roots and hold a vote as soon as possible. The Swiss decision was a triumphant ‘yes to bell towers and no to minarets’, he added.
Amnesty International said it was ‘deeply worrying if Europe’s far-right parties seized upon’ the Swiss result. A spokesman for the Islamic Human Rights Commission said calls in more countries for referendums ‘could give more voice’ to anti-Muslim sentiment.
Metro
July 20, 2009
If you can't beat 'em...Europe's new tactics in the battle against the far right
Ruling parties forced into ever-closer allegiances to contain rise of extremists
A brace of baronesses, sundry patrician Tories, Labour party staffers, journalists and eurocrats quaffed the bubbly and nibbled at the cream cheese on brown bread.
On the fourth floor of the grandiose cylinder that is the European Parliament building in Strasbourg last Wednesday evening, the main topics were Brits in Brussels, the UK in Europe. And nosepegs were metaphorically applied when the gossip turned to the two new MEPs from the north of England who had just taken their seats in the chamber below.
Nick Griffin and Andrew Brons of the British National party were the only ones of Britain's 72 MEPs not invited to the champagne reception hosted by the government.
That is one way of dealing with the extreme right — exclude them from polite company and hope they will fade away. That strategy might work in Britain, where the BNP is seen by the political class as a disturbing, but not threatening phenomenon thanks to the first-past-the-post system. In the rest of Europe, where proportional representation and coalition government are the rule, the extreme right – whether racist, neo-fascist, xenophobic, or just plain populist — is not being so easily dismissed or contained.
In Italy, the far right is in government and occupies leading parliament posts. In Austria it governs part of the country. In The Netherlands it has soared to become the second most popular party. In Poland it has been co-opted into the main opposition party and, as in Slovakia, has served or is serving in government.
The far right has seldom had it so good. Its success represents a dilemma for the mainstream political parties of Europe. But their responses to the rise of extremism differ widely.
"There is no systemic pan-European answer to the extreme right," said Anton Pelinka, an Austrian political scientist at the Central European University in Budapest. "In Belgium or in France, the mainstream parties won't touch the extreme right, while Berlusconi in Italy is a rightwing populist who has absorbed it."
The fundamental quandary for mainstream parties, in government or opposition, is whether to accept or to ostracise the extreme right.
When the new European Parliament convened this week, its ranks included Hungarian gypsy-haters, French Holocaust deniers, Dutch Islam-baiters, Austrian antisemites, Italian racists, and Flemish separatists, as well as Griffin, for whom Islam is a cancer and who wants boats of illegal immigrants sunk at sea. The parliament bigwigs promptly moved to marginalise them, conspiring to keep the extremists out of the key posts and committees. But in the countries of Europe, the picture is much more varied. Take Italy.
"Berlusconi has tried very hard to form the big tent party," said James Walston, a politics professor at the American University in Rome.
He has absorbed the "post-fascist" National Alliance and given the interior ministry to Robert Maroni of the separatist and anti-Muslim Northern League.
"There are a lot of racist elements," said Walston. "The Northern League certainly has a lot of people not afraid to be explicitly racist."
Berlusconi's strategy of co-opting elements of the extreme right, benefiting from their support and adopting some of their policies, is replicated in Poland, where the rightwing opposition Law and Justice party of the twin Kaczynski brothers, Jaroslaw and Lech, has destroyed two extreme antisemitic, anti-German, and ultra-Catholic parties on the fringes of Polish politics by appealing to their voters and opening up to leading members.
This approach contrasts with France or the Flanders half of Belgium where the mainstream right and left collude where necessary to keep the far right out of power.
Most famously, the French left voted for the Gaullist Jacques Chirac in 2002 to keep the National Front leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, out of the Elysee Palace. A fortnight ago the same scenario was enacted in a mayoral contest in northern France, where the National Front won more than 47% of the vote but was still beaten by a right-left alliance. "The exclusion strategy has worked in France. Le Pen is almost finished," said Pelinka.
And in Flanders, the rise of the secessionist Flemish Interest party has been stymied by a "cordon sanitaire" agreed by the other parties to keep the separatists in opposition.
Pekinka said that, too, has been successful, but many disagree.
"That's the wrong way to deal with parties like that," said Martijn van Dam, a Dutch Labour MP. "The Flemish Interest just got stronger because of the cordon sanitaire."
In his country the far right has soared this year, with the anti-Islam maverick Geert Wilders and his Freedom party coming second with 17% of the vote in the European elections in The Netherlands. Any party getting 15-20% of the vote in a coalition system has the right to take part in government negotiations.
But the establishment is split. The Labour party says it won't go into coalition with Wilders, but Van Dam said: "We're not saying never. I don't believe all these voters are extremely rightwing. It's just that the traditional parties are not trusted any more. It's impossible to imagine a coalition government with Wilders because of his ideas. But we are very careful always not to exclude his voters."
The Christian Democrats of the prime minister, Jan-Peter Balkenende, however, are divided over Wilders and have not quite ruled out governing with a man who describes Islam as fascism and faces trial for racial incitement and hate speech.
The strategy of exclusion can only work if the centre-right and the centre-left agree to maintain it. The centre-right Austrian chancellor, Wolfgang Schüssel, broke that tacit bargain when he brought the late Jörg Haider into government in 1999. It did not last long and supporters of that option say that the best way to weaken the extreme right is to give them power and watch them self-destruct.
Mainstream leaders such as Berlusconi, the traditional parties in Austria or Holland, and Nicolas Sarkozy in France have blunted the far right by copying policies and rhetoric on immigration, law and order, nationalism, and Euroscepticism.
In Hungary, the black-shirted militants of the Jobbik movement, anti-Gypsy and overtly antisemitic, are currently the third biggest party. The centre-right Fidesz party is expected to win a landslide at elections next year. Pelinka in Budapest said that liberals who would never vote for Fidesz will do so next year to ensure an absolute majority lest it is tempted to form a coalition with the extremists.
Guardian
A brace of baronesses, sundry patrician Tories, Labour party staffers, journalists and eurocrats quaffed the bubbly and nibbled at the cream cheese on brown bread.
On the fourth floor of the grandiose cylinder that is the European Parliament building in Strasbourg last Wednesday evening, the main topics were Brits in Brussels, the UK in Europe. And nosepegs were metaphorically applied when the gossip turned to the two new MEPs from the north of England who had just taken their seats in the chamber below.
Nick Griffin and Andrew Brons of the British National party were the only ones of Britain's 72 MEPs not invited to the champagne reception hosted by the government.
That is one way of dealing with the extreme right — exclude them from polite company and hope they will fade away. That strategy might work in Britain, where the BNP is seen by the political class as a disturbing, but not threatening phenomenon thanks to the first-past-the-post system. In the rest of Europe, where proportional representation and coalition government are the rule, the extreme right – whether racist, neo-fascist, xenophobic, or just plain populist — is not being so easily dismissed or contained.
In Italy, the far right is in government and occupies leading parliament posts. In Austria it governs part of the country. In The Netherlands it has soared to become the second most popular party. In Poland it has been co-opted into the main opposition party and, as in Slovakia, has served or is serving in government.
The far right has seldom had it so good. Its success represents a dilemma for the mainstream political parties of Europe. But their responses to the rise of extremism differ widely.
"There is no systemic pan-European answer to the extreme right," said Anton Pelinka, an Austrian political scientist at the Central European University in Budapest. "In Belgium or in France, the mainstream parties won't touch the extreme right, while Berlusconi in Italy is a rightwing populist who has absorbed it."
The fundamental quandary for mainstream parties, in government or opposition, is whether to accept or to ostracise the extreme right.
When the new European Parliament convened this week, its ranks included Hungarian gypsy-haters, French Holocaust deniers, Dutch Islam-baiters, Austrian antisemites, Italian racists, and Flemish separatists, as well as Griffin, for whom Islam is a cancer and who wants boats of illegal immigrants sunk at sea. The parliament bigwigs promptly moved to marginalise them, conspiring to keep the extremists out of the key posts and committees. But in the countries of Europe, the picture is much more varied. Take Italy.
"Berlusconi has tried very hard to form the big tent party," said James Walston, a politics professor at the American University in Rome.
He has absorbed the "post-fascist" National Alliance and given the interior ministry to Robert Maroni of the separatist and anti-Muslim Northern League.
"There are a lot of racist elements," said Walston. "The Northern League certainly has a lot of people not afraid to be explicitly racist."
Berlusconi's strategy of co-opting elements of the extreme right, benefiting from their support and adopting some of their policies, is replicated in Poland, where the rightwing opposition Law and Justice party of the twin Kaczynski brothers, Jaroslaw and Lech, has destroyed two extreme antisemitic, anti-German, and ultra-Catholic parties on the fringes of Polish politics by appealing to their voters and opening up to leading members.
This approach contrasts with France or the Flanders half of Belgium where the mainstream right and left collude where necessary to keep the far right out of power.
Most famously, the French left voted for the Gaullist Jacques Chirac in 2002 to keep the National Front leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, out of the Elysee Palace. A fortnight ago the same scenario was enacted in a mayoral contest in northern France, where the National Front won more than 47% of the vote but was still beaten by a right-left alliance. "The exclusion strategy has worked in France. Le Pen is almost finished," said Pelinka.
And in Flanders, the rise of the secessionist Flemish Interest party has been stymied by a "cordon sanitaire" agreed by the other parties to keep the separatists in opposition.
Pekinka said that, too, has been successful, but many disagree.
"That's the wrong way to deal with parties like that," said Martijn van Dam, a Dutch Labour MP. "The Flemish Interest just got stronger because of the cordon sanitaire."
In his country the far right has soared this year, with the anti-Islam maverick Geert Wilders and his Freedom party coming second with 17% of the vote in the European elections in The Netherlands. Any party getting 15-20% of the vote in a coalition system has the right to take part in government negotiations.
But the establishment is split. The Labour party says it won't go into coalition with Wilders, but Van Dam said: "We're not saying never. I don't believe all these voters are extremely rightwing. It's just that the traditional parties are not trusted any more. It's impossible to imagine a coalition government with Wilders because of his ideas. But we are very careful always not to exclude his voters."
The Christian Democrats of the prime minister, Jan-Peter Balkenende, however, are divided over Wilders and have not quite ruled out governing with a man who describes Islam as fascism and faces trial for racial incitement and hate speech.
The strategy of exclusion can only work if the centre-right and the centre-left agree to maintain it. The centre-right Austrian chancellor, Wolfgang Schüssel, broke that tacit bargain when he brought the late Jörg Haider into government in 1999. It did not last long and supporters of that option say that the best way to weaken the extreme right is to give them power and watch them self-destruct.
Mainstream leaders such as Berlusconi, the traditional parties in Austria or Holland, and Nicolas Sarkozy in France have blunted the far right by copying policies and rhetoric on immigration, law and order, nationalism, and Euroscepticism.
In Hungary, the black-shirted militants of the Jobbik movement, anti-Gypsy and overtly antisemitic, are currently the third biggest party. The centre-right Fidesz party is expected to win a landslide at elections next year. Pelinka in Budapest said that liberals who would never vote for Fidesz will do so next year to ensure an absolute majority lest it is tempted to form a coalition with the extremists.
Guardian
June 18, 2009
BNP fails to find support among European far-right parties
The British National Party’s first foray into Brussels ended in failure yesterday after it was unable find enough allies on the far-Right to form an official group in the European Parliament.Nick Griffin, the party leader and one of its two newly elected MEPs, has agreed instead to work informally with a loose group of five ultra-nationalist parties, notably the Front National of the veteran French racist Jean-Marie le Pen.
Mr Griffin had pinned his hopes on persuading the nine MEPs of Italy’s Northern League to ally themselves with the smaller far-right parties, but was shunned by the party, led by Umberto Bossi and part of Silvio Berlusconi’s ruling coalition.
The failure to meet the threshold of 25 MEPs from at least seven countries to form a parliamentary group means the loss of up to a million euros a year for the far-right parties which could have been spent on staff, offices and publications in Brussels, Strasbourg and their home countries.
“It appears at present we are below the threshold,” said Mr Griffin, after talks at the European Parliament in Brussels with its key allies from France. He spent two days there with fellow Andrew Brons, his fellow party MEP. “We have to see how the other political groups get on with their negotiations and if they cannot do a deal whether they will deal with us.”
Mr Griffin said that he had had a friendly response from other MEPs and added: “Virtually everyone is here to do the best by their constituents and on that basis we will work with anybody.”
The ultra-nationalist parties interested in working together informally included Jobbik — the Movement for a Better Hungary — Vlaams Belang from Belgium (the Flemish Interest) and Attack from Bulgaria, he said. But despite the increased number of MEPs elected this month from the far-right end of the political spectrum, the BNP grouping could attract only 12.
Besides the Northern League’s nine MEPs, the putative group was also shunned by the anti-Islamic Dutch Freedom Party of Geert Wilders, which won four seats. Although banned from Britain for his outspoken views, Mr Wilders has also expressed his dislike of the Front National and Flemish Interest as he attempts to appeal to mainstream voters in Holland.
Similarly, the anti-immigrant Danish People’s Party, regarded as right-wing nationalist, will not sit with the BNP or Mr Le Pen, who repeated his denial of the Holocaust in the last parliamentary session. The DPP, which has two MEPs, regards itself as more centrist and has been a coalition partner in the Danish Government.
Nobody, however, seems prepared to touch the Greater Romania Party, whose MEPs were involved in the break-up of the far-right Identity, Tradition, Sovereignty group in the last Parliament. They broke up the group after only 11 months in a row with Alessandro Mussolini, the daughter of Il Duce, after she called all Romanians criminals.
The Northern League has been vetoed by David Cameron from joining the new anti-federalist group being formed by the Conservatives with Czech and Polish MEPs. The Italian party may now link with the UK Independence Party as it tries to find at least six allies to meet the threshold for a formal group.
Parties are expected to declare their groupings in time for the European Parliament’s inaugural sitting on July 14.
Times Online
July 10, 2008
This persecution of Gypsies is now the shame of Europe
Italy's campaign against the Roma has ominous echoes of its fascist past, and the silence of our leaders is deafening
At the heart of Europe, police have begun fingerprinting children on the basis of their race - with barely a murmur of protest from European governments. Last week, Silvio Berlusconi's new rightwing Italian administration announced plans to carry out a national registration of all the country's estimated 150,000 Gypsies - Roma and Sinti people - whether Italian-born or migrants. Interior minister and leading light of the xenophobic Northern League, Roberto Maroni, insisted that taking fingerprints of all Roma, including children, was needed to "prevent begging" and, if necessary, remove the children from their parents.
The ethnic fingerprinting drive is part of a broader crackdown on Italy's three-and-a-half million migrants, most of them legal, carried out in an atmosphere of increasingly hysterical rhetoric about crime and security. But the reviled Roma, some of whose families have been in Italy since the middle ages, are taking the brunt of it. The aim is to close 700 Roma squatter camps and force their inhabitants out of the cities or the country. In the same week as Maroni was defending his racial registration plans in parliament, Italy's highest appeal court ruled that it was acceptable to discriminate against Roma on the grounds that "all Gypsies were thieves", rather than because of their "Gypsy nature".
Official roundups and forced closures of Roma camps have been punctuated with vigilante attacks. In May, rumours of an abduction of a baby girl by a Gypsy woman in Naples triggered an orgy of racist violence against Roma camps by thugs wielding iron bars, who torched caravans and drove Gypsies from their slum homes in dozens of assaults, orchestrated by the local mafia, the Camorra. The response of Berlusconi's government to the firebombing and ethnic cleansing? "That is what happens when Gypsies steal babies," shrugged Maroni; while fellow minister and Northern League leader Umberto Bossi declared: "The people do what the political class isn't able to do."
This, it should be recalled, is taking place in a state that under Benito Mussolini's fascist dictatorship played a willing part in the Holocaust, during which more than a million Gypsies are estimated to have died as "sub-humans" alongside the Nazi genocide perpetrated against the Jews. The first expulsions of Gypsies by Mussolini took place as early as 1926. Now the dictator's political heirs, the "post-fascist" National Alliance, are coalition partners in Berlusconi's government. In case anyone missed that, when the Alliance's Gianni Alemanno was elected mayor of Rome in April, his supporters gave the fascist salute chanting "Duce" (equivalent to the German "Führer") and Berlusconi enthused: "We are the new Falange" (the Spanish fascist party of General Franco).
So you might have expected that Berlusconi would be taken to task for his vile treatment of the surviving Roma of Europe at the G8 summit in Japan this week by those fearless crusaders for human rights, George Bush and Gordon Brown. Far from it. Instead, Bush's spokesman issued a grovelling apology to the Italian prime minister on Tuesday for a US briefing describing his "good friend" Berlusconi as "one of the most controversial leaders of Italy ... hated by many".
It has been left to others to speak out against this eruption of naked, officially sanctioned racism. Catholic human rights organisations have damned the fingerprinting of Gypsies as "evoking painful memories". The chief rabbi of Rome insisted it "must be stopped now". Roma groups have demonstrated, wearing the black triangles Gypsies were forced to wear in the Nazi concentration camps, and anti-racist campaigners in Rome this week began to bombard the interior ministry with their own fingerprints in protest against the treatment of the Gypsies. But, given that the European establishment has long turned a blind eye to anti-Roma discrimination and violence in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Romania, along with the celebration of SS units that took part in the Holocaust in the Baltic states, perhaps it's no surprise that they ignore the outrages now taking place in Italy.
The rest of us cannot. There are particular reasons why Italy has been especially vulnerable in recent years to xenophobic and racist campaigns - even while crime is actually lower than it was in the 1990s (and below the level of Britain). The scale of recent immigration from the Balkans and Africa, an insecure and stagnant job market and the collapse of what was previously a powerful progressive and anti-fascist culture have all combined to create a particularly fearful and individualistic atmosphere, the leftwing Italian veteran Luciana Castellina argues.
But the same phenomena can be seen to varying degrees all over Europe, where racist and Islamophobic parties are on the march: take the far right Swiss People's party, which on Tuesday succeeded in collecting enough signatures to force a referendum on banning minarets throughout the country. In Britain, as Peter Oborne's Channel 4 film on Islamophobia this week underlined, a mendacious media and political campaign has fed anti-Muslim hostility and violence since the 2005 London bombings - just as hostility to asylum seekers was whipped up in the 1990s. The social and democratic degeneration now reached by Italy can happen anywhere in the current climate.
Italy has a further lesson for Britain and the rest of Europe. Berlusconi's election victory in April was built on the collapse of confidence in the centre-left government of Romano Prodi, which stuck to a narrow neoliberal programme and miserably failed to deliver to its own voters. Meanwhile, centre-left politicians such as Walter Veltroni, the former mayor of Rome, pandered to, rather than challenged, the xenophobic agenda of the rightwing parties - tearing down Gypsy camps himself and absurdly claiming last year that 75% of all crime was committed by Romanians (often confused with Roma in Italy).
What was needed instead, as in the case of other countries experiencing large-scale immigration, was public action to provide decent housing and jobs, clamp down on exploitation of migrant workers and support economic development in Europe's neighbours. That opportunity has now been lost, as Italy is gripped by an ominous and retrograde spasm. The persecution of Gypsies is Italy's shame - and a warning to us all.
Guardian
At the heart of Europe, police have begun fingerprinting children on the basis of their race - with barely a murmur of protest from European governments. Last week, Silvio Berlusconi's new rightwing Italian administration announced plans to carry out a national registration of all the country's estimated 150,000 Gypsies - Roma and Sinti people - whether Italian-born or migrants. Interior minister and leading light of the xenophobic Northern League, Roberto Maroni, insisted that taking fingerprints of all Roma, including children, was needed to "prevent begging" and, if necessary, remove the children from their parents.
The ethnic fingerprinting drive is part of a broader crackdown on Italy's three-and-a-half million migrants, most of them legal, carried out in an atmosphere of increasingly hysterical rhetoric about crime and security. But the reviled Roma, some of whose families have been in Italy since the middle ages, are taking the brunt of it. The aim is to close 700 Roma squatter camps and force their inhabitants out of the cities or the country. In the same week as Maroni was defending his racial registration plans in parliament, Italy's highest appeal court ruled that it was acceptable to discriminate against Roma on the grounds that "all Gypsies were thieves", rather than because of their "Gypsy nature".
Official roundups and forced closures of Roma camps have been punctuated with vigilante attacks. In May, rumours of an abduction of a baby girl by a Gypsy woman in Naples triggered an orgy of racist violence against Roma camps by thugs wielding iron bars, who torched caravans and drove Gypsies from their slum homes in dozens of assaults, orchestrated by the local mafia, the Camorra. The response of Berlusconi's government to the firebombing and ethnic cleansing? "That is what happens when Gypsies steal babies," shrugged Maroni; while fellow minister and Northern League leader Umberto Bossi declared: "The people do what the political class isn't able to do."
This, it should be recalled, is taking place in a state that under Benito Mussolini's fascist dictatorship played a willing part in the Holocaust, during which more than a million Gypsies are estimated to have died as "sub-humans" alongside the Nazi genocide perpetrated against the Jews. The first expulsions of Gypsies by Mussolini took place as early as 1926. Now the dictator's political heirs, the "post-fascist" National Alliance, are coalition partners in Berlusconi's government. In case anyone missed that, when the Alliance's Gianni Alemanno was elected mayor of Rome in April, his supporters gave the fascist salute chanting "Duce" (equivalent to the German "Führer") and Berlusconi enthused: "We are the new Falange" (the Spanish fascist party of General Franco).
So you might have expected that Berlusconi would be taken to task for his vile treatment of the surviving Roma of Europe at the G8 summit in Japan this week by those fearless crusaders for human rights, George Bush and Gordon Brown. Far from it. Instead, Bush's spokesman issued a grovelling apology to the Italian prime minister on Tuesday for a US briefing describing his "good friend" Berlusconi as "one of the most controversial leaders of Italy ... hated by many".
It has been left to others to speak out against this eruption of naked, officially sanctioned racism. Catholic human rights organisations have damned the fingerprinting of Gypsies as "evoking painful memories". The chief rabbi of Rome insisted it "must be stopped now". Roma groups have demonstrated, wearing the black triangles Gypsies were forced to wear in the Nazi concentration camps, and anti-racist campaigners in Rome this week began to bombard the interior ministry with their own fingerprints in protest against the treatment of the Gypsies. But, given that the European establishment has long turned a blind eye to anti-Roma discrimination and violence in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Romania, along with the celebration of SS units that took part in the Holocaust in the Baltic states, perhaps it's no surprise that they ignore the outrages now taking place in Italy.
The rest of us cannot. There are particular reasons why Italy has been especially vulnerable in recent years to xenophobic and racist campaigns - even while crime is actually lower than it was in the 1990s (and below the level of Britain). The scale of recent immigration from the Balkans and Africa, an insecure and stagnant job market and the collapse of what was previously a powerful progressive and anti-fascist culture have all combined to create a particularly fearful and individualistic atmosphere, the leftwing Italian veteran Luciana Castellina argues.
But the same phenomena can be seen to varying degrees all over Europe, where racist and Islamophobic parties are on the march: take the far right Swiss People's party, which on Tuesday succeeded in collecting enough signatures to force a referendum on banning minarets throughout the country. In Britain, as Peter Oborne's Channel 4 film on Islamophobia this week underlined, a mendacious media and political campaign has fed anti-Muslim hostility and violence since the 2005 London bombings - just as hostility to asylum seekers was whipped up in the 1990s. The social and democratic degeneration now reached by Italy can happen anywhere in the current climate.
Italy has a further lesson for Britain and the rest of Europe. Berlusconi's election victory in April was built on the collapse of confidence in the centre-left government of Romano Prodi, which stuck to a narrow neoliberal programme and miserably failed to deliver to its own voters. Meanwhile, centre-left politicians such as Walter Veltroni, the former mayor of Rome, pandered to, rather than challenged, the xenophobic agenda of the rightwing parties - tearing down Gypsy camps himself and absurdly claiming last year that 75% of all crime was committed by Romanians (often confused with Roma in Italy).
What was needed instead, as in the case of other countries experiencing large-scale immigration, was public action to provide decent housing and jobs, clamp down on exploitation of migrant workers and support economic development in Europe's neighbours. That opportunity has now been lost, as Italy is gripped by an ominous and retrograde spasm. The persecution of Gypsies is Italy's shame - and a warning to us all.
Guardian
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Silvio Berlusconi,
Sinti
June 28, 2008
Plight of the Roma: echoes of Mussolini
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.
Fingerprint the lot of them: the idea had the satisfying smack of firm government. Now the Italian government was doing something tough; something long overdue.
The Interior Minister, Roberto Maroni, a leader of the rabble-rousing Northern League – close allies of Silvio Berlusconi on the government benches – has explained his next step in his assault on the "emergenza di sicurezza", the "security emergency": fingerprinting all Gypsies.
It was the only way, he told a parliamentary committee on Wednesday, 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.
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.
Giovanna Boursier, an Italian journalist, found one small camp where the count had already taken place on the furthest southern outskirts of Milan. "There is not even a bar where one could ask the way," she wrote in Il Manifesto, "but once you scramble up a hill you see the roofs of the huts. There are about 10 of them, along with the caravans, dotted around the outskirts, under flyovers and high-tension wires. Around 40 Roma lived here."
They told her 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."
Fingerprinting was the detail they omitted – lacking, at that point, the power to do it. But Mr Maroni has now set about remedying that.
Italy's "security emergency" is a strange and distracting phenomenon which 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 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."
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.
"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
Fingerprint the lot of them: the idea had the satisfying smack of firm government. Now the Italian government was doing something tough; something long overdue.
The Interior Minister, Roberto Maroni, a leader of the rabble-rousing Northern League – close allies of Silvio Berlusconi on the government benches – has explained his next step in his assault on the "emergenza di sicurezza", the "security emergency": fingerprinting all Gypsies.
It was the only way, he told a parliamentary committee on Wednesday, 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.
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.
Giovanna Boursier, an Italian journalist, found one small camp where the count had already taken place on the furthest southern outskirts of Milan. "There is not even a bar where one could ask the way," she wrote in Il Manifesto, "but once you scramble up a hill you see the roofs of the huts. There are about 10 of them, along with the caravans, dotted around the outskirts, under flyovers and high-tension wires. Around 40 Roma lived here."
They told her 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."
Fingerprinting was the detail they omitted – lacking, at that point, the power to do it. But Mr Maroni has now set about remedying that.
Italy's "security emergency" is a strange and distracting phenomenon which 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 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."
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.
"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
Labels:
Gypsy,
Mussolini,
Northern League,
Roma
May 06, 2008
Neo-Nazi killing puts spotlight on Italian militants
The death on Monday of a man attacked by neo-Nazis threw the spotlight on political militancy in Italy, prompting the opposition to ask if a right-wing sweep at an April election had fed a climate of intolerance.
The victim, 29-year-old Nicola Tommasoli, finally succumbed to his injuries and died on Monday after being beaten into coma on May 1 by a group of youths identified by police as neo-Nazi soccer hooligans. The beating, in the northern city of Verona, was condemned across the political spectrum; police have so far ruled out any political motive for what appears to be an isolated act of violence.
Still, Italy's centre-left portrayed it as a sign a growing intolerance in a country where fears about crime -- particularly by immigrants -- contributed to their resounding defeat by the right in last month's national and municipal elections. The incident has put right-wingers on the defensive over the suggestion that support by militants helped them to win the April elections, including the mayorship of Rome.
"The responsibility lies with right-wing populists," said Paolo Ferrero, a leftist minister in the caretaker government expected to step down later this week. He accused the far right of creating "scapegoats" for Italy's social problems that "brings in votes in a climate of insecurity, but also sows a long trail of hate".
The defeated centre-left candidate for prime minister, Walter Veltroni, said: "We are faced with a neo-fascist-style aggression that cannot and should not be underestimated".
In an informal poll by one television station, 51 percent of respondents said they feared the Verona attack could herald the start of a new wave of violent intolerance.
City of love?
The mayor of Verona, from the anti-immigrant Northern League which backed Silvio Berlusconi as premier, rejected any link between his party and Tommasoli's assailants.
"There are millions of people that voted for us. It could be that one of them is a criminal," Tosi, who is cracking down on illegal immigrants in Verona, a city made famous by Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet".
But Tosi is not the only right-wing politician who had to distance himself from far-right elements. Rome's new Mayor Gianni Alemanno urged supporters to avoid "excesses" after a small group gave him the right-armed Roman salute associated with fascist dictator Benito Mussolini and chanted "Duce!" (leader), as Mussolini's followers called him. Alemanno, whose National Alliance is the successor to the post-war neo-fascists but is trying to become a mainstream conservative party, complained that the left tried to depict him as a fascist and anti-Semite during the campaign.
"We must condemn any form of ideological extremism regardless of where it comes from," said Alemanno as he visited monuments in Rome to Jewish victims of Nazi occupation, Italian wartime resistance heroes and Rome's synagogue. "There are extremist fringes on the far right as well as the far left, but they are more an expression of urban marginalization than actual politics."
During the mayoral race, Alemanno came under attack for wearing a Celtic cross round his neck -- a symbol of the far right in Italy comparable to the Nazi swastika.
Reuters
The victim, 29-year-old Nicola Tommasoli, finally succumbed to his injuries and died on Monday after being beaten into coma on May 1 by a group of youths identified by police as neo-Nazi soccer hooligans. The beating, in the northern city of Verona, was condemned across the political spectrum; police have so far ruled out any political motive for what appears to be an isolated act of violence.
Still, Italy's centre-left portrayed it as a sign a growing intolerance in a country where fears about crime -- particularly by immigrants -- contributed to their resounding defeat by the right in last month's national and municipal elections. The incident has put right-wingers on the defensive over the suggestion that support by militants helped them to win the April elections, including the mayorship of Rome.
"The responsibility lies with right-wing populists," said Paolo Ferrero, a leftist minister in the caretaker government expected to step down later this week. He accused the far right of creating "scapegoats" for Italy's social problems that "brings in votes in a climate of insecurity, but also sows a long trail of hate".
The defeated centre-left candidate for prime minister, Walter Veltroni, said: "We are faced with a neo-fascist-style aggression that cannot and should not be underestimated".
In an informal poll by one television station, 51 percent of respondents said they feared the Verona attack could herald the start of a new wave of violent intolerance.
City of love?
The mayor of Verona, from the anti-immigrant Northern League which backed Silvio Berlusconi as premier, rejected any link between his party and Tommasoli's assailants.
"There are millions of people that voted for us. It could be that one of them is a criminal," Tosi, who is cracking down on illegal immigrants in Verona, a city made famous by Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet".
But Tosi is not the only right-wing politician who had to distance himself from far-right elements. Rome's new Mayor Gianni Alemanno urged supporters to avoid "excesses" after a small group gave him the right-armed Roman salute associated with fascist dictator Benito Mussolini and chanted "Duce!" (leader), as Mussolini's followers called him. Alemanno, whose National Alliance is the successor to the post-war neo-fascists but is trying to become a mainstream conservative party, complained that the left tried to depict him as a fascist and anti-Semite during the campaign.
"We must condemn any form of ideological extremism regardless of where it comes from," said Alemanno as he visited monuments in Rome to Jewish victims of Nazi occupation, Italian wartime resistance heroes and Rome's synagogue. "There are extremist fringes on the far right as well as the far left, but they are more an expression of urban marginalization than actual politics."
During the mayoral race, Alemanno came under attack for wearing a Celtic cross round his neck -- a symbol of the far right in Italy comparable to the Nazi swastika.
Reuters
Labels:
Duce,
far-right,
Italy,
National Alliance,
neo-fascist,
neo-Nazi,
Northern League,
scapegoats,
Verona
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