The persecution of the Roma and Sinti in Italy has led to the deaths of four thousand innocent people over the last two years. A figure that greatly exceeds the statistics from the years of the racial laws and the Holocaust.
by EveryOne Group
April 7th, 2009. Before the long sequence of unjust camp clearances - carried out without the offer of alternative lodgings and assistance - there were about 160,000 Roma and Sinti living in Italy. Today, despite the reports and declarations dictated by political and other interests, only about 50-60,000 Roma and Sinti remain in our country. We recently read a report, compiled by an Italian association, according to which - in the city of Rome alone - there are 20,000 Roma, including 16,000 “beggars” and 2,000 “criminals”. These figures are greatly exaggerated, because not even in Bucharest are there this many mendicants. This number, on the other hand, can be found in Dakar, the city in Senegal known as “The City of Beggars”. We will not even comment on the “2,000 Roma criminals”: this is totally unfounded data that stems from atavistic prejudices.
The figures that leave us stunned and horrified, on the other hand, are those linked to the victims of the institutional persecution of the Roma and Sinti in Italy. If we consider the population of 160,000 individuals, before, during and after the tragic diaspora, it is estimated – and backed up by statistics – that the number of deaths due to social exclusion; camp clearances followed by “marches to nowhere”; by hardship and sanitary conditions; disease; child mortality; accidents in the settlements (particularly fires); and episodes of violence; we are talking about 2,000 deaths per year. The figure was calculated by taking into account the average life expectancy of the Roma and Sinti; (which is about 40 years old, compared to an average age of 75/80 for other citizens) the child mortality; and the known cases of violent death. These figures (that do not take into account the number of miscarriages due to camp clearances and purges) must not be underestimated, because they are far higher than the number of Roma and Sinti deaths in Italy during the years of Nazi-Fascism - with the racial laws and the Holocaust. It is an annual figure that compares with those of the horror that hit the Jewish people (again in Italy) during the years of the Shoah.
<>
