Italy is still Western Europe's armpit.

[TheKwas]

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. Peter Popham reports

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."

The Independent.

[Melchior]

I'm appalled, but, still, Switzerland did worse.
There is some hope, uncharacteristically, coming from the Vatican: the Church doesn't like this and has a lot of pull with the current government. The law would also be blatantly unconstitutional, but this hasn't stopped Mr. Berlusconi before.

[MKSheppard]

Ah yes, more "the poor Roma are misunderstod" babble. What's next? The Irish Travellers complaining of persecution becuase the police crack down on their scams?

[Melchior]

Ah yes, more "the poor Roma are misunderstod" babble. What's next? The Irish Travellers complaining of persecution becuase the police crack down on their scams?

Arson is surely not the solution. Frankly, I prefer petty theft to having to hear racist morons spout their drivel, and use public transportation every day. Their culture is deeply questionable, but riding the public lower instincts for political gain, while a time-honored tradition, is not helpful.

[Edi]

Ah yes, more "the poor Roma are misunderstod" babble. What's next? The Irish Travellers complaining of persecution becuase the police crack down on their scams?

Do you have anything but ignorant racist crap to spew? Sure, there are problems with the Roma all over Europe, but you clearly have no fucking idea what you're talking about.

[MKSheppard]

Do you have anything but ignorant racist crap to spew?

You can suck my cock for all I care.

Iterant migratory groups are nothing but hotbeds of petty crime and fraud here in the States. Consumer Reports and the AARP have run articles detailing how said groups take advantage of and prey on the elderly.

[Melchior]

Iterant migratory groups are nothing but hotbeds of petty crime and fraud here in the States. Consumer Reports and the AARP have run articles detailing how said groups take advantage of and prey on the elderly.

Is the difference between correlation and cause so difficult to grasp?
The problem is one of integration; integration is not helped by facilitating violence.

[hongi]

Do you have anything but ignorant racist crap to spew?

You can suck my cock for all I care.

Iterant migratory groups are nothing but hotbeds of petty crime and fraud here in the States. Consumer Reports and the AARP have run articles detailing how said groups take advantage of and prey on the elderly.

Travelling hobos in America relate to Roma people in Europe...how?

[MKSheppard]

The problem is one of integration; integration is not helped by facilitating violence.

Yeah, I'm sure that integration is so going to solve the problem of that oh so common Irish Traveller scam - one of them distracts you out in front of your house with some perceived flaw; like cracks in driveway, etc so that the other one can gain entry to your house while you're distracted and rob you blind.

Such lovely charming cultural diversity...

[Edi]

The problem is one of integration; integration is not helped by facilitating violence.

Yeah, I'm sure that integration is so going to solve the problem of that oh so common Irish Traveller scam - one of them distracts you out in front of your house with some perceived flaw; like cracks in driveway, etc so that the other one can gain entry to your house while you're distracted and rob you blind.

Such lovely charming cultural diversity...

Look, you inbred goat-molesting cunt, what the fuck does this rant of yours have to do with the actual goddamn topic and substance of the article in the OP? You're just throwing out red herrings and a temper tantrum as usual and derailing the thread. Fuck off.

[Ziggy Stardust]

Iterant migratory groups are nothing but hotbeds of petty crime and fraud here in the States. Consumer Reports and the AARP have run articles detailing how said groups take advantage of and prey on the elderly.

Not only is this utterly irrelevant to Italy, the Roma, and the article at hand, but it is also quite false. In the US, Arizona has the highest population of migrant workers (as a proportion of the total population). And guess what?
http://hispanic.cc/migrant_crime_rate_e ... umbers.htm
Your blustering doesn't bear up with the facts.

[Broomstick]

Iterant migratory groups are nothing but hotbeds of petty crime and fraud here in the States. Consumer Reports and the AARP have run articles detailing how said groups take advantage of and prey on the elderly.

Travelling hobos in America relate to Roma people in Europe...how?

America also has Rom (in fact, when I first moved to my present location the neighbors in the building next door were Rom who, regrettably, seemed eager to adhere to certain negative stereotypes) and also Irish Travelers (a group pulled a major scam against one of the Disney parks a few years back). Unfortunately, given their desires for low profiles, the only time most of the public hears about them is when one of them commits a crime.

Yeah, I'm sure that integration is so going to solve the problem of that oh so common Irish Traveller scam - one of them distracts you out in front of your house with some perceived flaw; like cracks in driveway, etc so that the other one can gain entry to your house while you're distracted and rob you blind.

That scam is hardly limited to Irish Travelers - in this area every ethnic type has been caught doing that or similar at one time or another.

[Metatwaddle]

Consumer Reports and the AARP have run articles detailing how said groups take advantage of and prey on the elderly.

I propose that we fingerprint every past and present member of the College Republicans.

[Kanastrous]

Ah yes, more "the poor Roma are misunderstod" babble. What's next? The Irish Travellers complaining of persecution becuase the police crack down on their scams?

Prosecuting people for crimes is fine.

Calling indiscriminate open season on the ethnic group that they belong to, citizens or not, evidence of crimes or not, is worse than poor law-enforcement practice; it's officially-mandated racism.

[scythewielder]

Can't agree with such an idea. Interestingly though...the article tacitly seems to suggest that, if crime levels in Italy were similar to Colombia's, or any other nation generally thought (and not without some reason) to have higher crime for that matter, then the measure would make sense. Errr, how about no?

Compulsory fingerprinting in general, while at least far less ethnically discriminatory (or not at all) and potentially more useful than this, could arguably still be bad for other reasons as it could violate certain rights, if no such records already exist, or if the measure is selectively implemented in the first place (if not following racial lines, then social or economic ones). Higher crime rates don't suddenly make that less of a concern.

[Elfdart]

What do you expect from one of the only parts of Western Europe that still elects known fascists to high office? Mussolini's granddaughter got elected there by emphasizing the fact that Il Duce was her grandfather.

By the way Shep,

VA FAN CULO!

[Darth Wong]

Shep actually has a point buried in his posts, but he doesn't do a very good job of arguing it. It's completely reasonable to surmise that the correlation between incessant migratory behaviour and anti-social behaviour is more than mere coincidence.

[MKSheppard]

Shep actually has a point buried in his posts, but he doesn't do a very good job of arguing it.

Why thank you Mike.

I'll say it as bluntly as I can. I have very little sympathy for various iternary groups which wander around -- take your typical redneck, add a couple of cars on cinder blocks out in the front yard, add in some petty theft of stuff, and generally trashing the place you live in (who cares, you're moving in a few months); and then have them and their descendants be at it for so long (hundreds of years) that such behavior is no longer that of a total dickhead, but normal behavior to their "ethnic group".

I particularly like this excerpt from the OP article:

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"?

They behave like hobos, except they have protection because they have been hobos for generations. Which is utterly ridiculous. The only problem I have with the current crackdown on the Roma in Italy is because it's on very tenuous legal grounds.

Arrest them for littering, camping without a permit, digging through trash, etc; and for child neglect --- I'm sure that they don't have a regular school system or health system for their kids...

[Raptor]

I think a lot of people get a pissed off at Gypsyies, here in the U.K. it's a national pastime. The main problem here, is Gypsyies turning up at a carpark/field/empty indutsrial ground, pitching camp and leaving a pile a crap in their wake (which local councils have to pay to clean up and as they've left they can't be charged), and then moan about intolerance and racism. They don't pay tax, T.V licence, claim benefits, and work cash in hand. They connect themselves up to electric and sometimes water, how this works I don't know. Recentley they have been complaining about that their are not suitable sites to camp, and stay. Stay. Why not, I don't know live in a house like normal people. Calling yourselves travellers and then wanting to stay in one place is just bollocks.
The problem here is perception, using crime to class a large community as crimnals righlty or wrongly. Whether this is what the fingerprnting is for, doesn't matter, it just looks like it is. If another group had to do this (say Muslims) the outcry would be massive. But we've had stories here, of child pickpocket Roma since they joined the EU. seems to be an EU thing. Perhaps just suspsion of people who keep moving around.

[Melchior]

But we've had stories here, of child pickpocket Roma since they joined the EU. seems to be an EU thing. Perhaps just suspsion of people who keep moving around.

They never joined the EU, actually, being nomads.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

But we've had stories here, of child pickpocket Roma since they joined the EU. seems to be an EU thing. Perhaps just suspsion of people who keep moving around.

They never joined the EU, actually, being nomads.

What kind of fucked up argument is that? They're not a nation, they're hobos who are citizens of the nation they were born in.

[Melchior]

But we've had stories here, of child pickpocket Roma since they joined the EU. seems to be an EU thing. Perhaps just suspsion of people who keep moving around.

They never joined the EU, actually, being nomads.

What kind of fucked up argument is that? They're not a nation, they're hobos who are citizens of the nation they were born in.

Obviously, yes. They are EU citizens since their actual countries became members, but they cannot "join" the EU because they are persons, not states. The poster I quoted mistook them for Romanians. Romania recently joined the European Union, as you probably know.

[MKSheppard]

They connect themselves up to electric and sometimes water, how this works I don't know.

It's called Utilities piracy. Run a couple of jumpers from a local substation, dig up a water main, etc. All very perfectly safe.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

No one has tried to electrify the fences around the substation to prevent these.. leeches of society from doing their dirty work?

[Questor]

No one has tried to electrify the fences around the substation to prevent these.. leeches of society from doing their dirty work?

If they did, the migrants would sue. Remember, the US is a litigation based society.