It has begun! Compulsory fingerprinting of ALL Gypsy children In Italy!

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

While, officially, this is to include all Gypsies living in the camps, whether they are “illegal” immigrants (how pray can they be illegal immigrant when both Romani and Bulgaria are in the EU?) or Roma and Sinti with Italian nationality and citizenship, the primary aim is to fingerprint all Romani children.

While the Italian government proposal to fingerprint all the country's Gypsies, including children, has drawn stern criticism from members of the Catholic Church and from the opposition, this, like always, is nothing but rhetoric.

Gypsy children whose parents keep them out of school and send them to beg on the streets would be taken into care, under plans announced by the Interior Minister Roberto Maroni.

Here we can see the aim of this fingerprinting – and I assume we also will have their photos taken, much like in Nazi Germany in the 1930's – and that is so the children can be manipulated. This means either send you children to government schools or lose them. In the same way as the voluntary integration (for integration read assimilation please) scheme in France which is so voluntary that Gypsy families who do not wish to take part will have their children taken into “care” by the state. And all this in the European Union which claims to be so great for the minorities like the Romani People, the Gypsy, my People.

Maroni said the planned 'census' of Gypsies is not 'ethnic profiling' but aimed ensuring decent living conditions for all individuals who have the right to residency in Italy and expelling those who are here illegally and he added, while addressing the lower house of Parliament's constitutional affairs committee, “does living among rats as Gypsy children do in their camps respect their rights? As Italian citizens , we should be ashamed about this situation, which should not be allowed to continue.”

Therefore we must take those children into state care so that the families conform and go and live in those flats in those high-rise blocks that we will allocated to them. The latter is my sarcastic addition, as you may have noticed, but, methinks, this is the pattern of thought that is in the minds of those fascist politicians in the Italian parliament.

Under Maroni's plans, the fingerprinting of Gypsies would be overseen by special Gypsy commissioners appointed in Italy's major cities since the conservative government took office last month.

Now what a surprise; he has even organized Gypsy capos already. Are those drawn from the Gypsy community; if so then shame on them and outcast they shall be. If they are Gadje, well, then, I am sure, many will know what to do with them as well.

When is Italy going to institute the compulsory wearing of the Brown Triangle for the Romani in that country (again) so as to ensure that everyone knows that that person is a Gypsy and therefore, maybe, should be avoided. Maybe just schools for Gypsy children need to be set up as well, and everything else segregated. Park benches with “Only for Gypsies” or “Not for Gypsies” must also be instituted.

I am sure there are a couple of architects of the South African Apartheid still alive that could assist Berlusconi and his ilk his jackbooted Carabineri thugs.

Of the 150,000 Roma Gypsies who live in Italy, about 70,000 have Italian citizenship. Many Roma Gypsies come from Romania and those are citizen of another EU member state and therefore also have the right to be in the country, theoretically. It would appear, however, as if Duce II is just changing the goal post and may be even prepared to remove citizenship from those Italian Gypsy that currently have it.

Welcome to Italy 2008, a rerun of the 1930's, only with modern methods.

While presently this is confined, to some degree, to Italy though with some refugee Gypsy arriving in Austria already, I doubt that it will remain contained there. In fact I am rather concerned that this is just the beginning of a repeat of the 1930's and the wholesale persecution of the Gypsy People in the European Union by government decree.

One is rather overcome by a sense of deja vu on hearing such happenings, and the EU and its commissioners are full of rhetorics and that is all. A country of the European Union, a founding member of it, in fact, when it began as the European Economic Community, is repeating the 1930's and the rest of Europe and the world remain silent; far more concerned with the happening in Rhodesia than in the EU.

Oh, did I say, Rhodesia? I guess I must have...

Time we, the Romani, woke up to the fact that no one is going to do anything beneficial for the Gypsy. We will have to do it for ourselves, and so we should. First and foremost we must wake up and we must be prepared to stand up to this and fight it.

© M Smith (Veshengro), June 2008
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