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Paramilitary police officers patrol downtown Naples.
Italian Crime Clean-Up Inspires Xenophobic Violence
by
Anne Szustek
Italy is cracking down on urban shantytowns after campaign promises to cut crime. But some Naples residents have resorted to arson and murder to force out migrant groups.
30-Second Summary
Police detained 400 illegal immigrants in what the government sees as a first step toward lowering crime. According to the Times of London, 118 of them are to be expelled from Italy for a variety of crimes including drug dealing, prostitution and robbery.
The paper continues, “In Naples local people have anticipated the new policy, taking the law into their own hands.” Shantytowns created by the Roma, also known as Gypsies, were torched by civilians in a series of raids that have left the camps a pile of smoking rubble.
The riots were instigated by the capture of a 17-year-old Roma woman who allegedly tried to snatch a six-year-old girl. Hundreds of families were sent packing post-haste, fleeing the scene with handcarts and small vehicles.
Italy has recently seen a marked trend toward nationalist politics. In April Gianni Alemanno won his bid for mayor of Rome on a campaign that profiled statistics that purported to show a link between immigration and rising crime rates.
Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was re-elected with heavy support from the Northern League, an anti-immigration political group. The deputy head of the Northern League, Robert Maroni, is the country’s interior minister and the chief of a task force charged with “the Roma problem.”
Italy is not the only country to bulldoze Roma shantytowns. The Fatih Municipality in Istanbul, Turkey, is bulldozing the Sulukule neighborhood, claiming that its buildings would not survive an earthquake. But critics see the project as a ploy by the Islamist-leaning government to eradicate the district’s legendary taverns.
The paper continues, “In Naples local people have anticipated the new policy, taking the law into their own hands.” Shantytowns created by the Roma, also known as Gypsies, were torched by civilians in a series of raids that have left the camps a pile of smoking rubble.
The riots were instigated by the capture of a 17-year-old Roma woman who allegedly tried to snatch a six-year-old girl. Hundreds of families were sent packing post-haste, fleeing the scene with handcarts and small vehicles.
Italy has recently seen a marked trend toward nationalist politics. In April Gianni Alemanno won his bid for mayor of Rome on a campaign that profiled statistics that purported to show a link between immigration and rising crime rates.
Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was re-elected with heavy support from the Northern League, an anti-immigration political group. The deputy head of the Northern League, Robert Maroni, is the country’s interior minister and the chief of a task force charged with “the Roma problem.”
Italy is not the only country to bulldoze Roma shantytowns. The Fatih Municipality in Istanbul, Turkey, is bulldozing the Sulukule neighborhood, claiming that its buildings would not survive an earthquake. But critics see the project as a ploy by the Islamist-leaning government to eradicate the district’s legendary taverns.
Headline Links: Italy considers special group for Roma; Naples residents assault Roma
Former EU commissioner and current Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini refuted claims that the current administration is “xenophobic,” yet said that EU immigration policy needs to be “updated.” Said one person interviewed near the site of the riots, “The gypsies don’t work, they don’t wash, and they steal. This is our version of ethnic cleansing.”
Source: The Times of London
Italian opposition leader Walter Veltroni, who lost to Berlusconi in the national elections, condemned the Naples attacks, calling them “very grave.” Reports Irish paper The Sunday Business Post Online, “There are some 7,000 Gypsies in Rome. … Many Gypsies arrived from the Balkans in the early 1990s when ethnic conflict raged there, but other Roma families have been in Italy for generations and some trace ancestors in Italy to the 15th century.”
Source: The Sunday Business Post Online
Background: Italy’s rightward shift
The return of Silvio Berlusconi and the election of Gianni Alemanno, Rome’s first far-right mayor since World War II, signal a possible national shift to the right.
Source: findingDulcinea
Amir Taheri of The New York Post suggested that Italy’s move to the right is representative of a larger, continentwide movement in Europe, with France and Italy leading the way.
Source: The New York Post
Silvio Berlusconi reclaimed his post as Italy’s prime minister April 15 after he and his party, the conservative Popola della Liberta, won 47 percent of the vote. The far-right, anti-immigration Northern League was allied with Berlusconi’s party.
Source: findingDulcinea
Audio: ‘Berlusconi, Northern League Notch Wins in Italy’
NPR’s Sylvia Poggioli reports from Rome on the rise of the Northern League, which draws largely from traditionally left-leaning electorates in northern Italian cities such as Milan. Poggioli notes that the party “traces its roots to the Celts rather than from the people of the Mediterranean. Its campaign poster features a Native American with the tag line, ‘They allowed immigration and now they live on reservations.’”
Source: NPR
Related Topic: Istanbul’s eradication of Sulukule
Istanbul’s Sulukule district, an enclave of the Roma people for nearly a millennium, is being torn down by the Fatih Municipality—a similar governmental unit as a borough in New York City—on the grounds that the buildings could not sustain seismic damage. April 9, “International Roma Day,” was marked in Sulukule by ”bulldozed houses, wrecks, homeless people sheltered by their neighbors or relatives, and orphans left on streets.”
Source: Turkish Daily News
Sulukule was known in Istanbul as a center for belly dancing and folk music, immortalized by the 1963 James Bond film “From Russia with Love.” Yet pressure to close down its local taverns by Islamist conservative governments has left the neighborhood’s entertainers unemployed—and now homeless.
Source: Casbah Dance
Reference: Italy
The CIA World Factbook has an outline of Italy’s history, demographics and economic statistics.
Source: CIA World Factbook
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