Italy's persecution of Gypsies is now the shame of Europe

[panzerfaust]

From: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jul/10/race.humanrights

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...

Als die NAZIs die Kommunisten holten,
habe ich geschwiegen;
ich war ja kein Kommunist.

Als sie die Sozialdemokraten einsperrten,
habe ich geschwiegen;
ich war ja kein Sozialdemokrat.

Als sie die Gewerkschafter holten,
habe ich nicht protestiert;
ich war ja kein Gewerkschafter.

Als sie die Juden holten,
habe ich geschwiegen;
ich war ja kein Jude.

Als sie mich holten,
gab es keinen mehr, der protestieren konnte

Niemöller

When the NAZIs came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist ...

Niemöller was an early , who saw the light in Dachau - and survived to teach us this, which we have now forgotten.

[Solly Mack]

1. Disgusting

[Selatius]

2. Sounds like people have started to forget the lessons of Nazi Germany already.

Perhaps too many from the old generation have died off, and now the younger generation is forgetting the stories from before.

[Chovexani]

4. Atrocities toward Romani peoples in Europe didn't begin or end with the Nazis

That is not hyperbole, either.

[Selatius]

5. No, they've been persecuted about as long as the Jews have but haven't gotten the attention.

I referred to Nazi Germany simply because the conventional wisdom being that that episode was so shocking, so traumatic, so devastating that people finally learned their lesson. One would've thought a devastating war that eventually took upwards of 50,000,000 souls before war's end would've been enough to teach people.

Apparently, that lesson has been forgotten all too quickly. Y'know, they say upwards of 1.5 million Gypsies were exterminated in the camps.

[Chovexani]

7. People don't even want to learn it, that's the sad thing.

It's like Roma are one of the last acceptable groups to be openly racist about. The only way I can describe it to people is like taking the most awful anti-immigrant sentiment here, multiply it by about infinity, and spread it out over an entire continent. And it's not just individuals who perpetuate it, it's written into public policy. Things looked like they were trying to improve for a little while in Eastern Europe because the EU placed the onus on governments to clean up their act with regards to persecution of Roma in order to obtain EU membership, but everyone is back to their old tricks again. It's horrifying.

Meanwhile you get perfectly sane people who wouldn't dream of saying anything bad about Jewish people or other ethnic groups, saying things like "you don't know what those people are like, They have to do something about them" and telling stories about "filthy" Roma children pickpocketing from them on the Metro or something while they were on vacation as a justification. I've seen it right here on DU and on other progressive sites when stories like the OP come up.

As an aside, I didn't even know I had Romanichal ancestry until I did a geneology project in high school. There is literally an entire branch of my family tree that no one is allowed to talk about.

[Selatius]

8. Maybe it'll take another world war until people finally get it.

Maybe the amount of pain was not enough the last time. We're dealing with the evil specter of fascism lurking in America, and now I hear of this "pogrom" against the Gypsies in Italy. I'm frankly disappointed.

[Chovexani]

3. It's been said a thousand times, and it's true

The Porrajmos never ended. And what Italy is doing is par for the European course when it comes to violating the basic human rights of the Romani peoples.

Doesn't get a peep in the press, of course.

[eShirl]

6. this sort of thing doesn't just happen out of nowhere

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.

Never forget: "All that is required for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing."

[Irreverend IX]

10. Wait a minute...

Italians often confuse Romanians with Roma? I'd expect that from Americans, but not from people who live just a few hundred miles from Romania.

[formercia]

9. 2 peas in a pod

Going over the plan...



The result

[eShirl]

11. Bush's "amigo." n/t

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x3589071

[YOY]

12. You mean "Pizon" or "AmiCo"

n/t

[eShirl]

13. that's what Bush called him though.

[YOY]

14. Sweet Jesus his stupidity knows no bounds...

He is the President of the United States and is supposed to have a better grasp on things...

Sorry I thought lesser of you inappropriately.

[eShirl]

15. heheh ... no problem. n/t

[Dissent Is Patriotic]

28. I think you mean "paisan" or more correctly "paisano"...

...

[YOY]

30. Yes I do.

n.t.

[FredfromSpace]

16. There have been civil protests against this

In Milan and in Rome.

I was just over there and my Italian friends are shocked and disgusted.

There should be EU, US, and UN sanctions enacted against the current Italian government, as they were in other cases of ethnic persecution and cleansing (which is obviously the goal here).

[Name removed]

17. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[agentS]

18. Downright cold-blooded.

This is cultural smearing at its worst. How could that few a people be responsible for so many crimes? Its just not logical to persecute the Roma to this extent.

Would you want to persecute a woman THIS hot?

[windoe]

19. Nomads, indiginous tribes, peaceful people

worldwide who are not with the program, are in the way of 'progress'. Denying rights, land, food are just short of a 'final solution'.

Where will peaceful people go, and who will champion them?

[formercia]

20. If you can't profit from their labor

kill them.

Been this way forever.

When will humans become enlightened?

[YOY]

23. Apparently you've never live around them.

I've met some nice Roma, including one young lad but I've know a few you don't want to let near your wallet. Children pickpocketing you and begging for change while their parent stands across the street smoking and drinking. Sorry, but I've had knives put in my face. If you want a peaceful people then hang with the monks in Tibet (or outside of Tibet as the case may be.) The Roma suffer from the same affliction as the rest of humanity: assholes. There is still no excuse for their persecution.

Also the dancing bear gig still rolls in some towns in Eastern Europe. It's cruel as hell.

If you want to see a great film see "The Times of the Gypsies". It does justice to them. You will love some of the Roma characters and be revulsed by others.

[tomreedtoon]

21. Isn't this just werewolf control?

Even a man who is pure at heart, and says his prayers by night, and all that. And there aren't that many people who are pure at heart or say prayers there. So there's a good chance that lycanthropy will overtake AIDS as the main cause of death in Europe.

[Heidi]

22. AIDS isn't the leading cause of death in Europe. (nt)

[LeftishBrit]

26. AIDS is not the largest cause of death in Europe!!!! I think heart disease is.

[tomreedtoon]

31. Sure. They HIDE the werewolf attacks that way.

And as we all know, gypsies have an affinity for werewolves. But that would seem racist to start hunting down the gypsies. So they called all those clawed-to-pieces corpses (the lucky ones) "heart attack victims" to prevent a panic. The unlucky ones - the ones who survive to become werewolves - continue on.

Maybe Europe has gotten smarter about lycanthrope hunting.

[LeftishBrit]

33. America has a bit of a problem with werewolves too, I understand...

isn't one of them called 'Cheney'?

[tomreedtoon]

35. Old news, LeftishBrit! Check this out...

The Werewolf of Washington (1973)

http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0070908/

Synopsis from the page: A reporter who has had an affair with the daughter of the U.S. President is sent to Hungary. There he is bitten by a werewolf, and then gets transferred back to Washington, where he gets a job as press assistant to the President. Then bodies start turning up in D.C. . . .

[Rhythm]

24. Absolutely disgusting.

One of our best friends is of Roma descent, and he's an amazing man with a lot of integrity. It's ridiculous to judge people based on prejudiced racial and ethnic stereotypes, and abhorrent that the high court of a European nation should do so.

*hugs Prophet451*

[Anarcho-Socialist]

25. due to their nomadic nature

The Roma are not able to play the media game and are less able to counter anti-Roma prejudices.

Politically, here in Britain it's only the far-left parties that are making any effort to battle against anti-Roma prejudice. Labour and the Lib Dems have been pretty quiet about it. Although when John Prescott was Deputy PM he did try and do something to help Roma by establishing safe havens for them to camp, but the right-wing press (particularly the Daily Mail, Daily Express and The Sun) made him drop the policy with a concerted anti-Roma hate campaign.

Here are some examples of the above:


No, you're not reading the onion. This is a real right-wing rag.

[muriel_volestrangler]

32. Strangely, the person who is needed is another Barbara Cartland

While a Conservative councillor, she was instrumental in getting laws about provision of sites and education for them:

"She is known for her romantic novels but there is another side that is less well known. At a time when the Gypsies were treated with disdain in the early 1960s, she saw that they needed permanent sites where the children could go to school and there could be medical care. Now that community, which has lived and thrived on the site for four generations, is under threat because of the same unfairness that my mother disliked so much."

Barbaraville was founded in 1964 while Dame Barbara was at the height of a brief political career as a Conservative member of Hertfordshire County Council.

She joined a campaign by representatives of the Romany and traveller communities which resulted in a law requiring local authorities to provide permanent sites with access to amenities.
...
Mary Davis, 62, who has lived on the site since its inception, said: "Barbara Cartland was a friend when there was still a lot of prejudice about Gypsies. She stuck with us and for years she used to come and visit. I remember her turning up in her Rolls-Royce, all dressed in pink.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_20060214/ai_n16230520

They could do with another Tory friend, it seems.

[LeftishBrit]

27. Horrible!

Italian politicians are currently going down a route that reminds me a little too much of the route they went down 70-odd years ago.

And Gypsies/Travellers are often used as whipping-boys; and do not even seem to have the internal and external defense groups that many other minorities have. The British tabloids attack Gypsies in the same way as they attack immigrants - but some immigrant groups can hit back to a degree (e.g. a Polish-British organization made official complaints against the Daily Mail for its regular attacks on Polish immigrants), while Gypsies don't seem to have any powerful group on their side.

It's a real disgrace.

[KamaAina]

29. Doesn't Italy still have some of these?

Use them!

[leftynyc]

34. As a Jewish woman from New York

this story send shivers up my spine.

[RainDog]

36. it's so sad to see fascism return to Italy

Mussolini's daughter got her way with this last election.

As a member of the EU, can't other nations threaten to kick them out or something? That's the whole reason the EU came together... to fight with money/trade rather than guns.