Italy wants to expel Gypsies without housing and income

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

ROME: Italy wants to expel Gypsies who are citizens of other EU states who live solely off state benefits, the interior minister said recently, a move that would extend a crackdown on the Gypsy People criticised by rights groups as discriminatory.

France has sent masses of Roma on flights home to Romania in a mass repatriation that it says is voluntary, though some said they were coerced to leave. In fact, it is about as voluntary as were the round ups and deportations of the Nazi era.

Applauding France's move, Maroni, from the anti-immigrant Northern League party, said mandatory deportation of Roma who do not meet basic requirements should now be allowed.

The policy would apply to all non-Italian EU citizens who fail to meet certain criteria, not just Roma, said Maroni when asked if such a plan would be discriminatory.

"If anything, the problem is something else: unlike in France, many Roma and Sinti here have Italian citizenship. They have the right to remain here. Nothing can be done," said Maroni.

Maroni's comments were immediately denounced by the political opposition, including the Italy of Values party which said the plan smacked of racism.

What we can see is how the government of Italy thinks as regards to the Sinti and Roma in the country. If they could but find a way they would also consider throwing those Gypsies with Italian citizenship out of the country.

I am sure they will find a way soon; removing the citizenships off them is something that they, I am sure, are thinking about already.

At the same time Jobbik in Hungary is calling for all Gypsies in Hungary to be put into internment camps and if Jobbik can get the general public of Hungary behind it then the government of the country might just think of this too, I would not be surprised.

And while the European Commission may have spoken out rather strongly, finally, against the actions of the government of France with regards to their removal of Gypsies from their country. But, it would appear, France is going to take absolutely no notice of what they are told. Now let us see as to whether the Commission is prepared to go all the way and drag France before the court. I am not holding my breath.

All I am seeing is that the EU is permitting an ethnic cleansing by proxy...

© 2011

Gypsy People in Italy in Peril

Everyone Group issues SOS to the European Union and the United Nations

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

Everyone Group and others are launching a desperate SOS: an appeal to the European Union and the United Nations to intervene and save the Romani people in Italy from ethnic persecution.

Milan, January 2010: The Milanese authorities have bulldozed 80 makeshift shelters, home to a community of Romani families, and totally destroyed their blankets, warm winter clothes, stoves for heating and essential medicines. The forced eviction took place in Via Sant'Arialdo - near the Chiaravalle Abbey – in a racist and cruel Milan that the author of this report, (who was born in Milan) fails to recognise as the chief town he has admired for decades for its spirit of solidarity and open-mindedness. About 150 citizens of Romani origin, including children, pregnant women and sick people (many of them with cancer, heart problems, and handicaps) were thrown out onto the street and forced to set off on a tragic march to nowhere.

“It felt as though we had returned to the Hitler years,” commented a woman who lives in the area and who has often helped these families in difficulty. “Fortunately – after noticing the municipal police patrols driving up and down – many of the families left the settlement before the clearance began in order to avoid being charged for squatting and suffering the humiliation of the ethnic profiling that other families have been subjected to. However, their homes, makeshift shelters made from wood, plastic and cardboard, no longer exist”.

Ninety-five Romanian Roma were charged with illegally occupying a plot of land and are undergoing mass expulsion as the authorities have ordered them to leave the city: a reminder of the way the Gyosy were forced to leave centuries ago and during the pre-Holocaust years.

The January 21st pogrom (what else do we call the destruction in mid-winter of 80 makeshift homes, shelter to hundreds of human beings living in extreme poverty and bad health?) and mass expulsion (what else do we call the unlawful forced eviction of innocent families from the city they have lived in for years without the offer of any social aid or alternative lodgings?) is the umpteenth violation of human rights that has taken place in Italy. 150 vulnerable people in poor health are now wandering around in search of a new shelter in an attempt to prevent themselves dying of hunger, cold, infections and racial violence.

The police operation was carried out on the order of the local authorities, and was initiated by the deputy mayor, Riccardo De Corato, a politician who is responsible for numerous other measures of persecution against the Romani people and unfortunate immigrants.

The operation called for the deployment of 102 police officers from the local police force.

De Corato has expressed his satisfaction at this deliberately-induced humanitarian crisis, and has announced yet another camp clearance in Milan, in Via Vaiano Valle - the site of more makeshift huts where other marginalized, discriminated against and desperate families live. But the list is long: over the last two years more than 7,000 people from the Romani ethnic group have been forcibly evicted from their settlements in Milan without the offer of alternative housing.

Unfortunately, both the administration of the Mayor, Letizia Moratti, and the centre-left opposition are driven by intolerant and anti-Gypsy sentiments. As a result the tragic police operations are taking place with the blessing of all the political parties, government associations and local authority consultants. At the same time, the activists who are attempting with non-violent means to stop the brutal evictions are being intimated and threatened by the same institutions.

After learning of the terrible sanitary and social consequences of the police operation, EveryOne Group (which has lost all contact with the Roma left homeless during the Sant'Arialdo eviction) is today presenting a complete report on this tragic episode to the European Commission, the European Council, the European Court of Human Rights, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, and the International Criminal Court of the Hague. These operations are pushing Europe back to the days of the racial laws and ethnic persecution. EveryOne Group is appealing for urgent intervention, something more effective than a resolution or a letter of warning which have no legal bearing, and which the Italian institutions in the past have already shown to ignore and even mock. EveryOne Group, together with the committee against intolerance, “Sa Phrala”; the association for human culture, “Watching the Sky”; and the 586 anti-racist organizations that make up the “United” network are sending out a dramatic and desperate SOS to the international authorities, asking them to help the persecuted Roma people, who are being wiped out and expelled in mass from Milan and Italy.
We have to act immediately, because over the last two years the Roma community has fallen from 180,000 units to only 40,000 human beings.

This number includes the Italian Roma and those who fled from the former Yugoslavia, who are being profiled, rounded up into authentic ghettoes with round-the-clock surveillance and specially-created ethnic laws. We are talking about human beings who are being hunted out; subjected to brutality and racial violence; excluded from employment and integration programs and left in appalling sanitary and social conditions.

This appeal has been sent to the European Commission, the European Council, the European Court of Human Rights, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), the International Criminal Court of the Hague. It has also been circulated to Romanii Human Rights organizations and others.

The outcome and response will show, and I am not holding my breath to any response, at least not of one of action against the Italian authorities, how much value is placed on the lives and conditions of the Romani-Gypsy in Italy, and elsewhere in the European Union, by the European Union bodies and international bodies such as the United Nations.

From all what has gone before it is a foregone conclusion that, aside from maybe, if we are lucky, a statement by the Council of Europe and others, none of which will be binding to the Italian authorities, nothing is going to happen.

Gypsies are not on the agenda proper and never will be. I fact, the way it appears to me we are on the removal agenda, the “needing to be gotten rid off” agenda.

Europe of the early twenty-first century looks more like Europe of seventy years ago than even. The specter of Black Legions is haunting the countries of the European Union once again, with Italy presently in the lead, and others following just a little behind.

When the Gypsy Union and the IRG warned years ago that the writing was on the wall as to what the European Union was going to be up to as far as the Romani-Gypsy is concerned everyone laughed and claimed that the EU was the best thing ever for the Romani. I think we are being shown who was right now, unfortunately.

One would have hoped that this was a thing of the distant past and never ever to rear its ugly head again but by the mid- to late 1990s it was becoming clear what was happening, at least clear to those that could see it. Now, only the blind will deny that the EU is aiming to ethnically cleanse the Gypsy from its books.

© 2010

Fingerprinting of Italy’s Gypsies wins EU approval

Fingerprinting of Romani Gypsies in Italy has been given the blessing of the European Commission

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

A spokesman for Justice Commissioner Jacques Barrot said co-operation between the center-right government of Silvio Berlusconi and Brussels had made this possible.

Critics of the plan said it was a violation of fundamental human rights. Yet Barrot’s spokesman said fingerprinting will not be systematic and that strict conditions will be applied.

The EU had questioned Italy’s ‘crackdown on crime’ initiative which the government said would improve information about the circumstances under which an estimated 160,000 Roma live in Italy.

The government insisted the plan is not ethnic discrimination, and claimed Brussels had fully-vindicated the Italian authorities’ intentions. Ministers said critics of fingerprinting had stoked anti-immigrant feeling.

So, instead of actually condemning the actions of the Italian the European Union goes along sanctioning those acts.

The words of the spokesman for Jacques Barrot that “fingerprinting will not be systematic and that strict conditions will be applied” is a joke and everyone must realize that.

What strict conditions? We now have badges added to the fingerprints. All we now need is ghettos with barbed wire and watchtowers but I am sure they are on their way and, the g-ds forbid, probably not just in Italy.

Are there still some that think that my predictions of while back that this is the new Europe that we are seeing here, one that is as fascist as far as the Gypsy People are concerned as was Hitler and his predecessors?

We have been seeing for some time now an “ethnic cleansing by proxy” with the EU bodies allowing things to happen and now we are seeing that the EU bodies will sanction such things without an qualms.

How long will it be before the Romani People in Europe wake up and understand that the European Union and its various bodies are not at all benignly inclined towards them but rather the opposite.

We hear lots of nice words as to integration and all that but that is but window dressing.

We, the People, must do something against this.

© 2009
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Shame on Italy

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

The Italian Council of State has approved finger printing and special badges for Gypsy children

This is the worst most discriminative and blatantly barefaced racist decision taken by a Country in the EU since the reign of Hitler and Mussolini.

On August 28, an amazing decision was taken by Italy's Council of State, Consiglio di Stato.

In spite of all protests against finger printing of Romani-Gypsies in Italy, whether immigrants or not, the Council of State has approved this procedure.

But not only that.

The Consiglio di Stato also finds it admissible that the Roma must w special badges on their clothes when leaving their camps. Does anyone remember the Star of David, that Jews had to carry in Nazi times? Most reminiscent of the era of Hitler and Mussolini for sure.

It was not only the Jews, though, that had to wear a badge during the Nazi era. Nay! Gypsies too had to wear a badge identifying their ethnicity and that badge was a brown triangle; and the practice of particular minorities forced to wear badges depicting their ethnicity is one of the most poignant reminders of the Holocaust.

Who would have thought that now, more than sixty years after the end of the Nazi regime, such policies, that we thought and were told would never again be used against our fellow man, would be getting a new airing in Italy.

Every Government in the so-called “free Europe”, and indeed the so-called “free world”, should, nay must, if they have any real sense of the horror of what was the Holocaust, condemn Italy and call for it's immediate expulsion from the European Union – at least from all of its bodies, including the Council of Europe and the European Parliament – especially when, measures of this nature are about to be implemented against a particular minority.

But, seeing that Italy is one of the founders of the European Union this is not going to happen; that we can be sure about.

However, the world should sanction and boycott that country until such a time that they reverse the policies and apologize publicly to the Romani People as a whole.

The call must go out for every NGO and individual around the world to write to their government to ask them to condemn Italy, and if they do not give rise to its condemnation then, please ask your government how they will have the gall to hold one more Holocaust Memorial Remembrance Day while, happy to have an EU partner with such disgusting and dehumanizing policies in force against a particular minority in 2009.

Europe more and more, to me as a Gypsy at least, begins to look like Europe 70 years ago, namely 1939. The Anti-Gypsy policies alone are one thing and the surveillance of every individual in most countries another.

While Italy is presently the worst perpetrator as to officially sanctioned Anti-Gypsyism France is beginning to follow suit with an action recently where the police “branded” Roma during some checks as to identity and resident status in France with a stamp on the arm. This too being most reminiscent of the days of the Holocaust and of time before when Gypsies were branded on the arm or the face.

One really could be mistaken to think that one has gone back in time accidentally to the 1930s.

How can the leaders of the nations and especially the Romani leaders, for instance, remain so silent?

Maybe the People can come to their own conclusions here and maybe, just maybe, they come to understand that many of those leaders are not in fact interested in their affairs but in their pockets.

© 2009
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Gypsy families hit by the earthquake are being denied aid and shelter.

Pescara, April 7th, 2009. The citizens of Aquila and nearby municipalities hit by the earthquake are mourning their dead. Those left homeless are being offered shelter and aid in hotels and hostels. Many Roma families living in makeshift accommodation were also hit by the earthquake, with the same impartial cruelty, but no shelter is being offered to them and they are being turned away when they approach the civil protection units or the hotels for help.

The authorities have defined the Roma families “vultures” and the Carabinieri of the Provincial Commando of Pescara have set up ”checkpoints” near the assistance structures in order to prevent Roma families seeking shelter.

According to them, the Roma families “are trying to take advantage of the tragedy in order to sleep in hotels free of charge”.

Roberto Malini, EveryOne Group
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Romani People in Italy - When Racism Kills!

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.

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Italy and the Rom

by Michael Smith

The period of 2008-2009 will be remembered by Romani rights and human rights activists for the extremely troublesome situation of Romani-Gypsy communities in Italy.

Increasing racism and anti-Romani sentiment erupted in Naples and Milan in May 2008, culminating in firebomb attacks on Gypsy camps in the area. The camps were allowed to burn while the Carabinieri, so it is understood, even prevent firefighters from entering.

In addition to that, various legal measures and policies have been adopted by the public authorities, such as the ongoing “census” of the Romani population and the transportation of Roma to special camps even further from city centres in order to “sanitise” urban areas, are outright abuses of individual freedoms and rights. Those so-called “Solidarity Villages” are being guarded by special anti-terrorist units of the Carabinieri which, we must not forget, are not ordinari police but military police.

Growing fear and hatred of Gypsies among the general population on the one hand and the hostile approach of the national government and some local administrations on the other created a witch hunt atmosphere directed against even long-established Roma and Sinti Italian citizens as well as newly arriving Romani migrants.

Reports had it that even Roma and Sinti of Italian citizenship were fleeing from the Tyrolean areas into Austria. Not that they will be accepted as refugees now.

It is true that the problems of the Rom are not limited to Italy only. The Romani People are struggling to cope with physical violence, segregation and other forms of discrimination all over Europe. The uniqueness of the Italian case is that the Government at its highest levels has made a policy of promoting racial animosity and xenophobia, and even children have been indoctrinated against Gypsies in that they do not want to have them as classmates in schools and children as young as eight have been making comments to the media that Gypsies should be removed from Italy. Welcome to the New Europe!

And what are the Council of Europe and European Commission, who are basically the controllers of the European Union and the European Parliament, doing about this? Nothing, to be precise and as a Gypsy one can be but left wondering as to whether this is in fact a policy if the New Europe, namely to ethnically cleanse Europe of the Gypsy.

© M Smith (Veshengro), 2009
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Bathrooms and showers for Gypsy pupils

by Michael Smith

Rome, March 2009: A school in Milan, northern Italy, is considering making bathrooms and showers available to Gypsy children who attend local schools to allow them to wash before entering class.

The project, entitled 'Water and Soap', is an initiative by the Riccardo Massa public school, located in Milan's western outskirts.

Giovanna Foglia, the school's principal, apparently told the Italian daily 'Il Giornale' that Gypsy children come to school 'unwashed' making their classmates unwilling to sit next to them.

"Children from the camp”, she said, arrived at school very dirty: this made them feel embarrassed and the other pupils shared school desks with them reluctantly” and she claimed that many Gypsy families "are in favor of the initiative."

Asked about dirty Italian pupils at the school, Foglia said in her experience, they always come from socially inadequate families.

"In these cases, I speak to the families and if necessary, the social services are brought in," she said. "It's not a cultural issue."

So, it would appear that, according to the school's principal quoted, being dirty is part of the Romani-Gypsy Culture, Pfui! And such racism is permitted in Italian schools, a country that is part of the European Union

There are an estimated 160,000 Roma Gypsies in Italy, nearly half of whom were born in Italy and have Italian citizenship.

Others come from European Union countries such as Romania and the countries of the former Yugoslavia.

The Italian government claims it wants to give those who are in Italy legally better access to schools, medical and social services.

This all smacks of the same attitude that existed in some British schools some years back when in some cases Gypsy children were forced to have a wash at school.

One of those cases that I fully know of was of a Romany boy, aged then about seven, who was forced by the teacher at the primary school he attended to strip in front of the class and his classmates and was then washed by the teacher.

However, knowing the family it was knows that the child would not be sent to school unwashed. It was the teacher's assumption though that, being a Gyppo, he needed a wash it was assumed by her that he would not get one at home.

The truth, however, is that the family of this boy made sure that he left each and every morning washed and combed for school. That he had to travel a path that was often muddy and hence he might get a little dirty no one took into consideration. As far as the teacher was concerned he was a Gyppo kid and Gypsies are simply dirty.

We had hoped that such attitudes had become a thing of the past but, alas this does not seem to be the case and, in fact, things seem to be getting worse rather than better.

While the so-called watchdogs may bark and condemn this or that anti-Gypsy action in Italy or other countries those dogs just simply do not have teeth or are afraid to bite. Nothing gets done and the likes of Italy thumb b their noses at the folks in the Council of Europe, the European Commission and the European Union and its parliament. What a farce.

© M Smith (Veshengro), 2009
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PESARO (ITALY) HAS BROKEN UP THE LOCAL ROMA COMMUNITY

THE AUTHORITIES GAVE THE ORDER TO CLEAR THE ABANDONED FACTORY WHERE THE ROMA WERE LIVING AND DISPERSED THE FAMILIES.

EveryOne Group: “It was a terrible experience. One woman collapsed to the floor. Mothers and fathers in tears threatened to set fire to themselves if the authorities took their children from them. Our activists were not allowed to offer any humanitarian mediation and no assistance was offered the sick. The action by the police was totally unexpected, because the Mayor of Pesaro and authorities had officially promised to carry out an integration programme with jobs and housing.

At about 7 a.m. on the morning of February 25th in Pesaro, about 20 officers, (regular police and municipal police) entered the abandoned factory situated in Via Fermo, 49, where 30 Romanian Roma have been living for the last year. Among them patients being treated at San Salvatore Hospital for heart problems and tumours; many women and nine minors, including a few-month-old baby. The intention was to clear the factory and separate all the children from their parents. “We rushed to the factory and witnessed a heart-rending sight”, say the EveryOne activists. Mothers and fathers in tears, the children terrified. The police officers had announced that the children would be put in the care of the social services and taken to an institute. Only the mothers would be allowed to stay with them, the men would be thrown out into the street”. Nico Grancea, one of the most well-known international Roma activists is a member of this “nomad” community living in Pesaro. “The police told us the owner of the factory had reported our occupation of the premises. However, they knew that the Mayor of Pesaro and all the local authorities were well aware of our presence in the building we had taken refuge in after fleeing from poverty and racism in Romania. Many of the people involved in the clearance are under the protection of the European Parliament as they have been subjected to attacks, beatings, and intimidation in Italy in the past - both from members of the police force and groups of racists”. The authorities, though, did not listen to reason, in spite of Roberto Malini and Dario Picciau from EveryOne explaining how delicate the situation was, seeing the community are witnesses for the European Union to the camp clearances being carried out throughout Italy. “Our group had obtained a formal commitment from the Pesaro local authorities promising a housing-employment programme”, say the activists. The programme was supposed to have begun in early September 2008, but it has been kept on being postponed. ‘Il Messaggero’ and other local newspapers published the statements issued by the mayor and some councillors concerning the commitment taken up by the local authorities”. EveryOne had already supplied the social services and local authorities with the full names and details of the Roma community. The local San Salvatore Hospital, after hearing about the presence of children, pregnant women and seriously ill persons in the community, initiated a health and assistance programme for the families. Still awaiting the integration programme, exhausted from poverty and the hardships of winter, the Roma community now finds itself facing another humanitarian tragedy against which the EU Commission, CERD and the international organizations for Roma rights are fighting: the removal of minors from their parents by local authorities. “Roma families consider the family unit their whole reason for living,” explain the experts from EveryOne, “and in many cases separation from their loved ones can lead the adults to attempt suicide. In the years of the Holocaust, the Nazis were aware of this aspect of Roma culture. In fact in Auschwitz, unlike for Jewish families, the “gypsy” families were kept all together in the “Zigeunerlager”. When fathers, mothers and children are separated it leads to situations of great suffering and uncontrolled panic. During the police operation, a young woman threw herself to the ground, others shouted desperately, while one mother hid a kitchen knife in the folds of her skirt and murmured that she would slit her own throat if she was separated from her husband. In spite of the police cordon, we were able to communicate with the Roma community and prevent the worst happening”. Free movement and communication with the activists was not even granted to Nico Grancea, the young activist and protagonist of many actions in defence of the persecuted Roma, a witness and consultant for the European Parliament and international human rights organizations. “My wife was holding our four-month-old baby,” Nico told us, “while the other mothers were terrified at what might happen. The police officers would not listen to us, they didn’t see families standing before them, just a job to be over and done with as quickly as possible. They are unaware of the Roma people’s spirit of sacrifice. They don’t know that many of us were very close to carrying out acts of irreparable self-harm. Some were considering setting fire to themselves if the authorities had split their families up. They would not have separated us, we would have protested by sacrificing our own lives. My friends from EveryOne understood perfectly how serious the situation was and they helped us with their past experiences of dramatic situations. The police officers, however, refused to acknowledge their role as official mediators working on behalf of the European Parliament”. Fortunately the Roma mothers got together and made a courageous escape with their young children.

“I have been studying the Holocaust and the dynamics of the persecutions for the last thirty years”, says Roberto Malini, “I have published books and held conferences on the subject. It is undeniable that there are precise similarities between the years of the racist laws and the present. The flight of the Roma mothers in Pesaro reminded me of the famous operation carried out by the Westerweel Group in Holland, led by Mirjam Pinkhof – a dear friend of mine and survivor of the Holocaust – and other activists who saved the lives of countless Jewish children”. Some members of the EU Commission and Parliament, who are in contact with EveryOne, followed the events taking place in Pesaro with trepidation. “While all this was happening, we were constantly in touch with a number of Italian MPs and senators, as well as the Pesaro and Urbino Public Prosecutor’s Office”, says Matteo Pegoraro. “We all feared the police operation would end in tragedy. Malini, Picciau and Grancea, however, have a lot of experience and it is not the first time EveryOne has found itself in these difficult and delicate situations. However, now the operation is over, it is necessary for those involved in politics to take a stand, and some MPs from the Radical Party have confirmed their intention of bringing up a parliamentary question on the episode”.

“I don’t understand why the authorities did not contact us before carrying out such an operation” Dario Picciau says. “While all this was taking place I was on the phone to Viktoria Mohacsi, the Euro MP, while the principal European NGOs were about to organize a task force in support of the Roma community. We cannot criticise the police officers, who were only obeying orders. They did not take into account, because it was not part of their job, the vulnerability of the families, as well as their precarious health, and their great fear, the result of many episodes of racism. However, we are unable to understand the reason for sending 20 armed officers with patrol cars and a police van to the factory, instead of trying to solve the problem around a table with politicians, local authorities and activists present. Viktoria Mohacsi, other Euro MPs and some of the leading experts in Roma life and culture were ready and willing to take part in a round-table conference”.

On Sunday 22nd February, Canale 5 sent a film crew (led by the journalist Mimmo Lombezzi) to the abandoned factory in Via Fermo to do a piece on the conditions of the Roma people in Italy - which should have been shown on Tuesday February 24th. Grancea and several Roma had spoken before the cameras about the persecution they are forced to undergo every day; the attitude of the police force towards them; the segregation they are kept in; and the actions of the “ethnic cleansing patrols” who are using violence towards the Roma exploiting the present climate of intolerance. One man had shown the Canale 5 cameras the bruises still visible on his body after he was beaten up in Ancona on February 15th, when xenophobic violence broke out in Italy following the brutal rape of a young girl in Caffarella Park in Rome the previous day.

A dossier on the episode has been sent to the European Parliament; the EU Commission and Council; the International Criminal Court of the Hague; CERD (the UN’s Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination); and the Legal Office of the European Roma Rights Center (ERRC) concerning the serious damage the lack of assistance and failure to carry out the integration programme promised by the Pesaro authorities has had on the Roma community.

Source: EveryOne Group
www.everyonegroup.com
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Extremist group calls for expulsion of Gypsies from Italy

by Michael Smith

Rome, Italy, February 22, 2009: An extreme right-wing organisation has taken to the streets of Rome calling for the expulsion from Italy of the entire Romani or Gypsy population of the country.

While there seems to have been little little public support for the Forza Nuova group which is pressing for the end of the Schengen agreement which allows passport – free travel in much of the EU – the situation for the Gypsy population, indigenous and immigrant, in Italy is becoming more and more precarious.

Protest organizer Roberto Fiore said: “This is a situation that requires political will. We want to suspend the Schengen agreement, which is one of the main reasons for the disaster and we want to start all the expulsions of the gypsies and at the same time we think that all the people who have committed crimes in Italy. They should be sent back to their own countries.”

A series of sex attacks in Italy is being blamed on foreigners living in the country and three rapes last weekend triggered a media frenzy and a diplomatic row with Romania.

Italy’s conservative government rushed through a law toughening penalties for sex offenders and permitting neighborhood citizen patrols.

No doubt we can imagine against who those patrols will be used and, having seen the pictures of the camps into which many Gypsies have been moved by the authorities and the special police units guarding them, I do not think we have to ask.

In addition to this Hungary is ablaze with anti-Gypsyism right now with the right-wing also calling, basically, for the expulsion of all Gypsies from that country. And this all in countries that are members of the European Union.

I mean not that it surprises me in the least. I have seen this coming for years now, only no one wanted to believe it. I hate to be the one to say “I told you so”, but such it is. The writing was on the wall but everyone wanted to be blind to it.

As far as we, the Gypsy, are concerned nothing will ever change and all the EU does is talk nice words but that is about it. When it comes down to it the Gypsy will remain their whipping boy and be held responsible for all ills of their society.

© M Smith (Veshengro), February 2009
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With an emergency decree Italy authorizes racism, spying and ethnic persecution

With an emergency decree Italy authorizes racism, spying and ethnic persecution

by EveryOne Group

Rome, February 9th, 2009: The Italian institutions have approved with an emergency decree the presence of anti-Roma and anti-foreigner patrols, the filing of the homeless and ghetto-camps. The “security package” encourages doctors to report “illegal” immigrants. In the meantime ten Tunisian refugees awaiting deportation have attempted suicide on Lampedusa. EveryOne Group: “The “Padane” patrols are the equivalent of the Blackshirts whose aim is racial persecution. Extreme Right ideology prompted by racial hatred triumphs, while we are amazed at the insubstantiality of the protests coming from the democratic parties against such injustice. It is no longer a matter of politics, it is endless horror that mainly affects women, children and the most vulnerable. Urgent and determined intervention from the international institutions has now become necessary”.

Racist and xenophobic actions and policies have established themselves in Italy at all levels, and it is to be pointed out that the Italian institutions are now ignoring all the international laws against discrimination and in defence of human rights when issuing laws and decrees. On Friday 6th February, 2009 the Italian Senate approved the new emergency decree known as the “security package”. We are talking about a series of discriminatory and persecutory measures that will affect the Roma people, immigrants and the homeless. After the protests last year from all over the world against the ethnic filing of the Roma put forward by Minister Maroni, (a member of the anti-immigration Northern League Party) the same measure has returned again in a different form. The security package foresees, in fact, the filing of all citizens without a fixed address, with details of their ethnic group. The records of the homeless will be kept at the Interior Ministry and according to reliable sources it will also foresee the taking of fingerprints and maybe even the person’s DNA. We must remember that during the years of the racist laws, the Nazi party set up a register of “asocial” citizens, including the “gypsies” and the homeless.

What is more, the security package also authorizes the presence of “Padane” patrols. Like the Arrowed Cross in Hungary, the Brownshirts in Germany and the Blackshirts in Italy, we are talking about voluntary militia legally authorized to work alongside the police force in the operations of hunting out and reporting people who are considered a security problem. Even before they were authorized, the Padana patrols were the protagonists of violent actions against the Roma people and immigrants, including the arson attack on the Roma settlement in Opera (Milan) in2007. Between November 2005 and June 2007 the so-called “Black Panda Gang” made up of private citizens and members of the police force, were guilty of many cases of beatings, violence and kidnapping carried out against illegal immigrants. Many of those violent police officers are still on duty, others have been sentenced. Many cases of ill-treatment have been reported in Monza, Lecco, Varese and in other cities in northern Italy: cases of torture, rape and the stealing from young Roma of money obtained from begging. Two “patrols” who carry out these crimes are known as the “Company of Death” (who wear green shirts) and the “Barboso Gang” (who according to the victims wear police uniforms). Officially founded in 1990, the Padane patrols follow the philosophy contained in the slogan coined by the Leghista Mario Borghezio: “Sticks against immigration”. Three years later Gianfranco Miglio, the ideologist of the Northern League and supporter of the anti-immigrant patrols, stated that “Lynching is the highest form of justice”.The associations defending the rights of the Roma people and immigrants have received dozens of reports of abuse carried out by these patrols. Often these patrols are copied by groups of racists – such as GAPE in Tuscany – who have been the protagonists of attacks in which Roma citizens have died a terrible death: we remember the fire of Livorno in which four young children perished.Since the emergency decree was approved, parties and racist groups have started to recruit members. There is a real danger that the 176,000 Italian racists active with violent slogans and statements against the Roma people on Facebook – only a part of the Italian xenophobic and Neo-Nazi movement – will join the patrols in order to carry out these “authorized” ethnic purges.Before the accusations of the victims, the militia will be covered by the institutions, and their testimonies will be considered on the same level as those of “public officials”. The decree has also cancelled out the law that says doctors do not have to report the immigrants who turn to them for health treatment, and it asks hospitals and clinics to report “illegal” immigrants - in violation of the Hippocratic Oath. The renewal of the foreigners’ residence permit will now cost up to 200 euros: an exorbitant sum that will hit already discriminated against immigrants, people who are often already reduced to slavery by the power Italian law grants their employers. While the Senate was approving the racist package, in Lampedusa a group of Tunisian refugees faced with deportation attempted suicide by hanging themselves with their own clothes. As for the running of the Roma settlements, Milan has officialized the new “security package” which transforms every camp into an authentic “closed” ghetto with 24-hour police surveillance, and where Roma citizens are deprived of any rights. Deputy mayor, De Corato, after confirming with satisfaction the responsibility of the Milanese authorities in the humanitarian tragedy of the “clearance of over 100 camps, some of which of large dimensions” has announced for 2009 “the demolition of squatter buildings and settlements in private areas” and “more rigid regulations” against the Roma community. We must emphasise that in the city of Milan alone, there have been hundreds of episodes of violence against women from the Roma ethnic group. They have often been thrown out onto the street on their own (or with small children) following camp clearances while their men, who could have protected them, were taken off to police HQ to have their documents checked. “We are asking the EU and UN institutions, the democratic nations and the human rights organizations to join us in our campaign against the persecution of the Roma people and immigrants in Italy”, say the worried leaders of EveryOne Group, Roberto Malini, Matteo Pegoraro and Dario Picciau. “After the ethnic purge that wiped out or forced the majority of Roma to flee Italy, after the countless violations of human rights and tragic violence, Italy is now taking the European Union back to the times of the Brownshirts, the ghettoes and collaborationism. It has become necessary to take up a position of responsibility and intervene with determination to prevent these intolerant and uncivil measures being spread in the form of ideologies and “infecting” other Members States. The recent past has taught us that resolutions and warnings have had no effect, while the directives have been constantly sidestepped or ignored, and gone unpunished. Inertia is dangerous, and the presence of racist and xenophobic leaders in the European Parliament itself (even on the Civil Liberties Committee), and the re-emergence of intolerant and anti-Semitic ideologies, is symptomatic of a phenomenon that causes anguish and offers, instead of a Europe of human rights, the most sinister of ghosts”.

Contact: info@everyonegroup.com
www.everyonegroup.com
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Criminalization of the Roma people in Italy: two attacks in Rome spark off another witch hunt

by EveryOne Group

Rome, January, 2009: Following two episodes of attacks and rapes in Rome and Guidonia, the police are combing the Roma camps of Rome around the clock.

EveryOne Group: “The fact that there are those who exploit the victims’[i] suffering in order to carry out a campaign of racist and xenophobic propaganda arouses our indignation. It should lead the Italians to reflect on the moral barbarization that intolerance can bring about in a modern country”.

The police operations are very spectacular and are carried out with the use of helicopters, police dog units and armed men in uniform. The interventions are carried out both during the day and in the dead of night, causing serious problems for the Roma families. The operations foment racial hatred in the local people, who are often present at the police operations shouting insults and threats at the Roma and yelling at them to leave the country[ii].

During the police manhunt, the details of 500 Roma were taken, while 20 were arrested on charges that had nothing to do with the rapes. The local people, however, witness these “spectacular” arrests and the intolerance increases. In the meantime the politicians and the authorities sound the “rape alarm”, pointing their fingers at the Roma without any evidence to back it up.

A few hours after the media had given the news of the attack gangs of racists destroyed some makeshift shelters in the Primavalle Roma camp. The police immediately completed the operation and bulldozed the camp leaving 50 people homeless (including many sick people and 20 children). As always, their only sin was being Roma and happening to live near the scene of the attack.

January 27th, 2009 – police have arrested six Romanian citizens (who are not from the Roma ethnic group).
However, newspapers and TV news are continuing to blame the crime on the Roma, even if they belong to a different ethnic group from the arrested men. A furious crowd tried to lynch the arrested men, while all over Rome a series of violent acts are being carried out against the Roma. In this climate, Ministers and member of the Lega “Nord” party are fomenting this xenophobic wave by proposing chemical castration to “protect society”[iii].

Those responsible for the rape are not Roma, and the culprits’ responsibility, according to both Italian and international law, is individual. Extending the guilt to the whole of the Romanian population is a terrible abuse. We must also point out that in 2008 EveryOne received dramatic testimonies of rape that young Roma women suffered after they found themselves helpless in the hands of racists (especially in Northern Italy). These crimes took place after the police had cleared the settlements and taken their husbands to police headquarters - yet nobody has ever taken action against this “invisible” drama.

On the wave of the intolerance aroused by these cases, the institutions have announced the employment of 30,000 more soldiers to work alongside the police on the streets of the major cities[iv]. It is to be noted that already back in 2008 the Ministers of the Interior and Defence initiated a project to increase the number of soldiers in the cities to 30,000, investing a total of two billion euros a year. The Prime Minister defined the Roma, immigrants and the homeless “the evil army” and “the enemy” to be combated using these troops[v].

On January 25th, in the city of Guidonia where the rape took place, a group of about twenty Italian neo-Nazis (members of Forza Nuova) carried out acts of violence against immigrants and Roma[vi]. Four of them attacked immigrants from Eastern Europe.

There is a concrete possibility that someone is trying to raise the level of xenophobia to repeat the effect generated by the brutal Giovanna Reggiani murder - maybe by accusing innocent people from the Roma ethnic group of rape. It is a line of conduct went along with by the Neapolitan magistrates who recently sentenced a young Roma girl called Angelica to 3 years, 8 months’ imprisonment without any proof and on the mere evidence of an Italian mother who had accused her of trying to kidnap her baby. EveryOne had already demonstrated that the charge was unfounded at the time. Angelica’s lawyer has made an official protest against this unjust verdict[vii]

For some years now EveryOne Group has been monitoring the Roma settlements in Italy very carefully. It pays particular attention to the situation of the Roma families of Romanian origin who are being subjected to true policing and judicial persecution[viii] However, deliberately put-up cases against the Roma are not only confined to Romanians.[ix]

It is now obvious that organized racist groups are now at work in Italy. They have never been investigated by the police, they act, unfortunately, without any hindrance from the authorities and with the tacit support of the majority of the press and media. There have been no arrests or sentences following assaults on the Roma people, or the arson attacks on their makeshift shelters. And no action has been taken when on several occasions the members of EveryOne have reported, not only brutal assaults, but also orchestrated attempts to attribute to the Roma particularly hateful crimes capable of inciting public opinion and the media.

It is just as evident that a press and political campaign is underway aimed at criminalizing the Roma people by setting public opinion against them. This has allowed an appalling number of brutal camp clearances, intimidation, de jure and de facto expulsions of entire Roma families and judicial errors.[x]

For example, the case of the kidnapping of little Denise Pipitone, a crime constantly attributed to a hypothetical “gypsy” woman, in spite of all the evidence leading to Italian kidnappers; and the case of the “Roma racket” where, according to the Milanese authorities, children were forced through torture and threats to carry out thefts amounting to millions of euros every year. The truth of the matter was that they were children from families living in conditions of terrible hardship who were involved in petty theft[xi]

Then we have the “attempted kidnapping at Ponticelli”[xii] which led to young Angelica’s prison sentence: it was an authentic set-up, announced months before with the creation of an anti-Roma committee and the participation of members of the Camorra who had set their eyes on the land the Roma community were occupying.

Then again, the attempted child snatching in Catania[xiii], thanks to inquiries carried out by EveryOne, we were able to convince the authorities the charge was unfounded.

In the meantime in the large cities there have been cases of police officers beating up Roma citizens then making false and unfounded accusations against the victims. Typical cases were the assaults on Stelian Covaciu[xiv] and Anton Caldarar [xv] video. (whose story appears in a video on our website). EveryOne also demolished another absurd case, that of the so-called “gang of Roma women robbers”[xvi]

EveryOne Group has also pointed out how some of the particularly horrible crimes attributed to the Roma ethnic group seem to happen just before restrictive measures are taken (either by the government or local authorities) against the liberty of the Roma community. Measures carried out in order to facilitate the expulsion of Roma families from Italian soil. We remember the case of Giovanna Reggiani, which took place shortly before the approval of the Prodi government’s “security package”; the cases of Ponticelli and Catania, which took place before the Berlusconi government’s “security package”; the case of the Roma torturers and the child pickpockets at Milan’s Central Station during the “Sociality Pact” debate in Milan (resulting in an authentic racial law)[xvii]; and the case of the assault on two Dutch tourists by the Romanian shepherds Andrei Vasile and Paul Petre just before the visit from the European delegation to inspect the Roma settlements in Rome. And now, just after the European Commission has published its report condemning the institutional persecution of the Roma in Italy[xviii], here we have two gang assaults with violence and rape, which have already been attributed to the Roma community in the capital by the media. “Inhuman Violence. Police comb the Roma settlements,” writes ‘Il Corriere della Sera’. Italy has to answer for its xenophobic and racist actions to the European institutions, but now its operations appear justified by the “criminal and ferocious nature” of the Roma people.
Over the past few months the EveryOne activists have collected together the testimonies of Roma people who have been approached by Italians asking them to commit illegal or morally ambiguous actions. The coincidence of crimes ascribed to Roma citizens, the racist measures and the need to justify them, would lead us to suspect there is a real danger of deliberately set-up cases finalized at criminalizing the Roma ethnic group. The Giovanna Reggiani murder presents several disconcerting breaches and procedural flaws in the investigation, beginning with the fact that the authorities declared they had found blood on Mailat’s face and under Mrs Reggiani’s fingernails (after she had inflicted deep scratches on her assailant’s shoulders). No DNA results, however, were included in the legal proceedings in court and it appears that they have instead gone missing. The key witness, Emilia Neamtu (on whose testimony Mailat was sentenced to 29 years’ imprisonment) is an unreliable witness, suffering as she is from a serious psychotic illness. What is more, there are testimonies of strange contacts between some Italians and Romanian Roma in Rome shortly before the crime took place.

We are convinced that the investigation should be repeated in a more objective fashion. The same goes for the attempted kidnapping at Ponticelli, which led to a young Romanian girl, Angelica, being sentenced without proof. We now have reason to fear that the new series of attacks carried out in Rome - which have triggered off this new “witch hunt” – are part of the same plan.

The 29th January 2009 the four romanian confessed the rape[xix] and finally the auhtorities officially stated that they were not Roma people. However the initial accusations of a hypothetical “gang of Roma wearing balaclavas” spreaded racial hatred and provideed racism with an alibi. In fact such accusations have created abuses on Roma an Romanian People[xx]
We are therefore asking the European authorities to keep a close eye on the situation in Italy in order to prevent further abuse from the police and magistrates being carried out against the Roma people. We also ask for the present political and press campaign to be stopped as its aim is to criminalize the Roma ethnic group in Italy. EveryOne Group is also asking for new in-depth inquiries to be carried out into the Giovanna Reggiani murder (the key witness, Emilia Neamtu, has now returned to Romania where it is possible to talk to her without any pressure from the Italian authorities) and the Ponticelli case (Soccorso Legale Napoli is in possession of all the evidence that proves the innocence of the young Roma girl, and the judicial errors carried out in the legal procedure).

Let us remember that intolerant movements have often, throughout the course of history, attributed brutal and ferocious crimes to unwelcome minorities in order to justify their repression. It is no coincidence that in the years when the Nazi-Fascists were power Jews and gypsies were described as negative stereotypes whose rehabilitation was considered impossible.

[i] January 23rd, 2009. Young couple assaulted at night in their car just outside Rome. The young man was beaten up and locked in the car boot while his girlfriend was being raped.
EveryOne Groups wishes to express its solidarity to the victims of this attack, a couple who will never forget the tragedy of this crime. However, violence against women is an emergency that needs to be tackled on all levels, starting from schools. In spite of official figures showing that 99% of rapes take place within the home, that is it a brutal crime that often subjects the victims (often children and youngsters) to repeated violence, propaganda is still exploiting the events that involve (in theory) foreigners in order to spread racial hatred. Last year Amnesty International initiated a “violence at home” campaign in an attempt to prevent cases of rape and supply the public with correct information. However, this has proved ineffective against the propaganda from the politicians and media.

[ii]
http://www.corriere.it/cronache/09_gennaio_24/stupro_roma_branco_6c352d5a-e9e5-11dd-a42c-00144f02aabc.shtml

[iii]
http://www.corriere.it/cronache/09_gennaio_27/arrestati_stupratori_guidonia_5dc644c6-ec41-11dd-be73-00144f02aabc.shtml

[iv]
http://www.corriere.it/politica/09_gennaio_24/berlusconi_lampedusa_a6cb8946-ea03-11dd-a42c-00144f02aabc.shtml

[v]
http://it.notizie.yahoo.com/19/20090124/tpl-sicurezza-berlusconi-30-000-militari-1204c2b.html

[vi]
http://www.adnkronos.com/IGN/Cronaca/?id=3.0.2947746808
http://www.corriere.it/cronache/09_gennaio_25/guidonia_stupro_raid_razzista_arresti_28ecc99c-eaf1-11dd-9c57-00144f02aabc.shtml

[vii]
http://www.osservazione.org/documenti/condanna_soccorsolegale.pdf

[viii]
http://www.everyonegroup.com/it/EveryOne/MainPage/Entries/2008/10/13_I_Rom_in_Italia_e_in_Europa.html

[ix]
http://www.everyonegroup.com/it/EveryOne/MainPage/Entries/2008/7/4_Verona,_dopo_campagna_EveryOne_il_Gip_smonta_inchiesta_sugli_otto_Rom_croati.html

[x]
http://www.everyonegroup.com/EveryOne/MainPage/Entries/2009/1/8_The_Roma_people,_the_new_untouchables_in_Italy_and_in_the_European_Union.html
http://www.everyonegroup.com/EveryOne/MainPage/Entries/2009/1/20_Italy_is_a_xenophobic_and_racist_country.html

[xi]
http://www.everyonegroup.com/it/EveryOne/MainPage/Entries/2008/10/13_I_Rom_in_Italia_e_in_Europa.html

[xii]
http://www.carta.org/campagne/migranti/14008

[xiii]
http://www.everyonegroup.com/it/EveryOne/MainPage/Entries/2008/5/20_Allarme_razzismo._Un_altro_rapimento-montatura.html

[xiv]
http://www.everyonegroup.com/it/EveryOne/MainPage/Entries/2008/6/29_Milano,_Stelian_Covaciu,_pestato_ieri_sera_dai_poliziotti_e_minacciato_di_tacere.html)

[xv]
http://www.everyonegroup.com/EveryOne/Anton_Caldarar.html)

[xvi]
http://www.everyonegroup.com/it/EveryOne/MainPage/Entries/2008/6/1_La_banda_delle_donne_Rom.html)

[xvii]
http://www.casadellacarita.org/index_files/userfiles/Patto%20viaTriboniano.pdf

[xviii]
http://www.everyonegroup.com/it/EveryOne/MainPage/Entries/2009/1/22_Rapporto_della_Commissione_europea_sulla_missione_nei_campi_Rom_in_Italia.html

[xix]
http://www.adnkronos.com/IGN/Cronaca/?id=3.0.2961619897

[xx]
http://www.corriere.it/cronache/09_gennaio_29/guidonia_bomba_carta_romeni_586b6e96-edf1-11dd-b7db-00144f02aabc.shtml

EveryOne Group
Tel: (+ 39) 334 3449180 - (+39) 334-8429527 - (+ 39) 331-3585406
www.everyonegroup.com :: info@everyonegroup.com
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Italy is a xenophobic and racist country

The data from the report made up by Ismu (an organization promoting studies, research and projects on multi-ethnic and multi-cultural society) reveals that Italy is a xenophobic and racist country.

Ismu has published its data from the national report on the presence of foreigners in Italy. There are 4,328,000 foreign citizens living in Italy, about 8% of the total population of our country. Some of the figures in the report are disconcerting and reflect the institutional persecution against immigrants.

Of particular note is that on 30th June, 2008 out of 55,057 inmates in Italian prisons, 20,167 of them were foreigners. According to a xenophobic vision, this data would show that foreigners have a much greater tendency to commit crime than the Italians. However, the record profits of last year made by Italian organized crime, amounting to 130 billion euro, would prove otherwise. What is more, according to all the research carried out by modern sociology, there is no such thing as a population that possesses a greater tendency to commit criminal acts than other populations. And yet the magistrates have sentenced foreign citizens in Italy, not in the ratio of 8 per cent, which would be in line with sociological studies and common sense, but in the totally amazing ratio of 37 per cent.

This revelation shows beyond any shadow of doubt that both police and legal persecution is underway. If we then analyse the percentages of inmates of Roma origin the figures become grotesque: there are some prisons in which the inmates from the Roma ethnic group amount to over 30%, while the Roma – now less than 60,000 in Italy – barely amount to 0,1 % of the total population.

Source: EveryOne Group
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Municipal police snatch blankets from the Roma sleeping outside

Florence, Italy, Friday, October 10th, 2008: Florence, at three o'clock in the morning the municipal police snatch blankets from the Roma sleeping near the station and send them to be destroyed: "sleep on cardboard instead!"

Indignation from everyone group and aurora association who are requesting an urgent meeting with the mayor, Leonardo Domenici, and appealing to the people of Florence to help the Roma fight off the cold.

Over the last few days the voluntary association Aurora ONLUS in Florence handed out fifty blankets received from various donations to the Romanian Roma. Over recent months the Roma have been sleeping in the cold (with only cardboard to protect them) in Piazza Adua in front of the Santa Maria Novella railway station. The Roma families have never received any socio-medical assistance from the Florentine authorities or been offered any alternative lodgings. Most of all they need a warm place to stay seeing people below the age of 48 are barred from entering the centres set up by the authorities to shelter from the night cold.

At about 3 a.m. on Tuesday October 7th some municipal police patrols arrived in Piazza Adua where the Roma have set up their makeshift beds with some trucks owned by Quadrifoglio - the company that deals with the disposal of waste material from the city of Florence. After waking them with a start, the Municipal police ordered them to hand over all their blankets, and to those who objected saying it was too cold, they replied: "You can sleep on the cardboard instead!" All fifty blankets were confiscated and the Roma looked on as the blankets were thrown into the Quadrifoglio truck and taken away to be destroyed.

"This action is unacceptable" say Stefania Micol, president of Aurora, and Matteo Pegoraro, co-president with Roberto Malini and Dario Picciau of EveryOne Group. "It shows how the authorities of the City of Florence are following the racist, xenophobic current that is spreading throughout Italy, abandoning the path of tolerance and respect for human rights and resorting to hunting down the foreigner and criminalizing poverty.

"It is a civil disgrace" continue the activists "that in a city like Florence no programmes have been set up to help these people, leaving them to wander around the city centre without any kind of sustenance or social integration. Instead they have had the few means they possessed for bracing themselves against the cold brutally taken from them.

"We have already reported the episode to Viktoria Mohacsì, the Hungarian Euro MP of Roma origin" - explain the leaders of EveryOne, Malini, Pegoraro and Picciau. "She has already brought it to the attention of the European Parliament and the EU Commission. With this episode Florence becomes the sad symbol of racial hatred, along with another city, Pesaro (in the Marche region) which has recently announced the imminent clearance of a derelict building where a small community of Romanian Roma families have taken shelter. They were naturally not offered any alternative lodgings. There are many small children in the group and people suffering from serious health problems: malignant tumours, heart problems, physical handicaps, all living in conditions of extreme hardship. Pesaro and Florence are therefore under observation by the European institutions: they are modern cities that have fallen prey to the evils of racism, which is at the root of this persecution, mingled with the indifference shown by the local authorities and institutions. If they fail to take a step backwards and rediscover the values of solidarity and welcome, it will result in the cruel eradication of innocent human beings who have been offered no hope of integration, and, at the same time, it will result in the triumph of intolerance".

The Aurora Association and EveryOne Group are requesting an urgent meeting with the Mayor of Florence, Leonardo Domenici, in an attempt to find a speedy solution for these people, who, as the days go by, risk catching serious illnesses and infections due to the conditions of hardship they live in - as well as the low temperatures against which they have no way of defending themselves. The two associations are also appealing to the people of Florence to show their solidarity towards these unfortunate and persecuted families by coming to the Aurora offices in Via Macci, 11 and simply bringing a blanket - which will become the symbol of brotherhood, and also represent a civil response to the indifference of the local authorities and the inhumane treatment shown by the Municipal Police and the police force.

Source: EveryOne Group
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European Commission OK's Italy's treatment of Gypsies

European Union gives blessing for Italy's Roma fingerprint scheme

by Michael Smith

The European Union has basically told the Berlusconi regime in Italy that their actions against the Roma (and Sinti), the Gypsies, in the camps in Italy is fine by them and Berlusconi states that he always was certain that the EU would clear his government's actions as regards the Gypsy menace.

A Commission spokesman said Brussels was satisified that in conducting a census of Roma gypsies in camps as part of its crackdown on street crime since coming to power in May, the Berlusconi Government was not seeking ''data based on ethnic origin or religion". The controversial fingerprinting programme had the sole aim of ''identifying persons who cannot be identified in any other way".

Well, did anyone think different? Yes, I know, the majority of the Rom in Europe and elsewhere had put their hopes in the EU and some, I guess, still do and I hate to say that I told you so, but I did. The European Union is the greatest danger befalling the Gypsy People in Europe since the Nazis.

This is making the fear that I have that this in Italy – and actions against Rom in other parts of the European Union – is a stalking horse as to what is in store for our People in Europe under the EU leadership at present.

The fingerprinting of minors was only being carried out ''in strictly necessary cases and as the ultimate possibility of identification,'' the statement from the Commission said. On press photos, however, that have been seen by this author and others the stains of the fingerprinting ink is clearly visible on the great majority of all children, including, so it would appear, toddlers.

Mr Berlusconi said the scheme was intended not only to stop gypsy children begging and stealing but also to help Roma people to integrate by drawing them into the Italian health and education systems. Mr Maroni said illegal Roma camps were being dismantled so that "those who have the right to stay here can live in decent conditions".

There are an estimated 160,000 Roma gipsies in Italy, nearly half of whom were born in Italy and have Italian citizenship. The rest are mainly illegal immigrants from the Balkans and Romania.

Obviously, because all of those actions by the new Duce's regime are so benign many Roma who are legal citizens of Italy have been forced to flee into Austria from the regions of South Tirol, for instance.

We are having a problem and no one wants to realize it and our problem as a People does not lie simply with one EU member state, in this case Italy, for it is not just in Italy that official anti-Gypsy actions are taking place. Our problem is with the European Union per se, as it would appear that those anti-Gypsy actions are the new policy coming our way.

I must say that I have been seeing this writing on the wall for a very long time and have written about it and issued warnings and everyone called me a scaremonger and worse even. What worries me most is that it would appear that my predictions have been right and in a way they are worse that what I thought.

The European Commission has now, basically, given the green light to all EU member states to enact their own anti-Gypsy measures under the various guises that they will be using. France is already playing with a number of ideas, as are the former Czechoslovakia and others.

Would this happen if those being the target of those measures would be Jews, whether or not involved in (small) criminal activities? It would not, of that we can all be more than certain. But, yet again, no one cares because the victims are but dirty Gyppos and as far as the great majority of EU member state citizens are concerned Gypsies are worth less than animals, even wild animals that might decimate flocks, such as wolves. While they will go to all lengths to protect such they are happy that Gypsies are being targeted by government and vigilante actions alike.

The fingerprinting and the other measures, such as the bulldozing of the “illegal” camps are 'not discriminatory' and the census is in line with European Union law, the EC said. Jesus wept! It is? What chance have our People got then for protection? None, let's face it.

We, the Rom, must learn to protect ourselves. But then again, the problem is that those in trouble there just could not possibly get off their butts to do anything themselves.

While I, in general, do not have much time for any of the churches it must be said though that, after initial silence, the Vatican seems to have found its voice.

The Vatican urged the EU to carry through on the public commitments they had made to safeguard ethnic minorities like Gypsies.

EU states should treat Gypsy communities as they would other institutions, Msgr Agostino Marchetto, head of the Vatican department that deals with migrant and traveler issues, told Vatican daily l'Osservatore Romano.

''This 'institutionalisation' brings with it the advantage of spurring EU states to become aware of the EU programmes that have been approved,'' Marchetto said at the end of the World Congress on the Pastoral Care of Gypsies in Freising, Germany.

While the Cardinal's statements are very heartening there is a problem with them and that is that the EU commitments are on paper only and they have no intention of honoring them as far as we, the Rom, the Gypsy, are concerned. In fact, everything points to just the opposite, namely that we are being targeted yet again for some assimilation program with which they hope to eliminate the “Gypsy menace”.

We would do well to remember that the police offices for the combating of the Gypsy menace still exist under a variety of guises in a number of European Union member police forces and also the over-regional and international units. Not much has changed in Europe for we, the Rom, since the time of German and Italian Fascism.

Time we did things ourselves.

AVA! Ame Shai!

© M Smith (Veshengro), September 2008
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Fingerprinting of Gypsies legal and not racist, says Italian government

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

The Italian government, despite mounting “pressure”, on an international level, has declared that the fingerprinting of all Roma and Sinti in the various camps in Italy is not racist and the it is well within the law.

Whatever the world opinion may be, as far as Italy and the Berlusconi regime are concerned they do no wrong.

What we must consider here is that, in all honesty, under the Italian laws it appears to be not illegal, nor racist, now, to do his fingerprinting of all Gypsies, as Italy's highest court has, on Berlusconi's behest, declared that all Roma and Sinti to be criminal elements, regardless of age, and has nigh on declared them “outlaws”, much as the German term of “vogelfrei”.

The Berlusconi government invokes that court decision and refers to it and stands by it, no matter what.

The Italian Red Cross continues with its cooperation in this fingerprinting and data collection exercise. Much akin to the actions of the German Red Cross in the time of the Third Reich.

The entire affair smacks so much of what the Nazis did to the German Gypsies, and those in the occupied territories, that it is extremely worrying, in such a way in that I, as a Veshtike Rom of whose family many members have been murdered in Auschwitz and other extermination camps, for no other reason than that of Race, of being Gypsy, am very concerned as to our People in the EU.

Are we headed in the same direction, yet again, in today's Europe, especially the Europe under the European Union “control”? It would appear to be so and no one really is going to do anything about it – so, at least it would appear – and this simply, as far as I see it, because it is “just” Gypsies that are the victims here. Were it Jews or Moslems I am certain things would have been done a long time ago.

Alas, we know anyway, we are but dirty Gyppos and according to the Italians (and other countries in the EU?) we are nothing but criminal elements, including the children, in the same way as our People were regarded by the fascist Germany. Obviously nothing has changed.

It is time that the Romani People worldwide realized that the Gadje bodies, in the main, are going to do nothing whatsoever that will really benefit us, as individuals and especially as a People, as a Nation. All they do is what will benefit them in controlling us. Time, and I know I keep saying this, that we did things for ourselves. Ourselves Alone!

Ava! Ame Shai!

© M Smith (Veshengro)
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Current plight of the Gypsy in Italy has strong echoes of Mussolini and Hitler

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

The compulsory fingerprinting of Italy's Gypsy population is the latest example of the country's increasingly repressive attitude towards minorities, especially the Roma and Sinti, the Gypsy People and are an ominous reminder of the policies of the former Fascist dictator.

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, 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, all Gypsy – 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."

In one camp 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 Gypsy by the name of Giorgio. "This was an ethnic register."

According to information the police numbers in the big cities have been augmented by up to 3,000 troops for this “security emergency”. All I am seeing here, however, is what I predicted some years back; government operated anti-Gypsy pogroms with unofficial backing of the European Union while on the surface the lawmakers speek out against it.

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.

I also have to add to that that our People, I am sure, have all the right to be frightened with regards to this ethnic profiling and register that is going on in Italy, and by force. What next and where next is my question.

Some 1.6 million Gypsies died in Germany and elsewhere during the Holocaust, a proportionately greater genocide than that suffered by the Jews.

It is a fact that there were concentration camps for Gypsies in Italy during the Fascist period, and it is also a fact that thousands of Gypsies died in them of hunger, cold and over work. Now Italy is about to repeat the performance, it seems.

Camps have also bee proposed not so long ago for the Romani People of Italy. They were called “solidarity villages” and I am sure, seeing how they help with the fingerprinting and profiling, the Italian Red Cross would certainly help there too.

Time w edid a few things ourselves, methinks.

AVA! Ame Shai!

© M Smith (Veshengro), July 2008

European Parliamentarians give their fingerprints in protest of Italy's Anti-Gypsy crackdown

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

More than 100 members of the European Parliament - including party group leaders – added their own fingerprints to a petition protesting against Italy's policy against Gypsies.

While this may be a very nice gesture initiated by Italian Communist MEP Giusto Catania what does he and there others think to achieve with this. This is nothing, really, but a gimmick as most of those parliamentarians are not of the Romani People and it, therefore, is nothing but a publicity stunt to be seen to do something.

The European Parliament has adopted a resolution that asks the Italian government to halt its plans. Euro MPs say it is unacceptable "to violate fundamental rights of the Gypsy People and to criminalise them."

This resolution was, however, passed on such a small margin – with 52 to 48 votes, so we understand – that all it needs is some more EU states, and this surely is going to happen in the not too distant future, to swing to the right and the Romani are once again in real deep trouble.

While no one dares to speak against Jews anymore – and probably rightly so – the Gypsy is still free and fair game to the politicians of that persuasion and the general public at large, and not just in Italy.

Should, as I said, we get a swing of two or three more politicians in the European Parliament and – as that does not really count much – the parliament, I mean – more importantly in the European Commission, that unelected body which is the real power of the European Union and the Council of Europe, then things could really, once again, turn out nasty for the Romani-Gypsy of Europe.

We must prepare to stand against this as a Nation and to this end we must, properly, unite as a Nation, and the medium of the Internet and such can be out greatest asset here. And no, we do not need a standardized Romani Language for this.

Ava! Ame Shai! (Yes! We Can!)

© M Smith (Veshengro), July 2008

Italian Red Cross collaborates in ethnic profiling of Roma in Italy

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

Massimo Barra, the head of the Italian Red Cross, insisted that the aim was to integrate Roma people into Italian society. If children were fingerprinted, it would be done "as a game", he said. Mr Barra said the Red Cross "always respects human rights. We are building bridges, not walls."

Who is he trying to kid. The Red Cross, now why should we not be surprised, helping yet another fascist regime.

Europe should but condemn in the strongest possible terms the involvement of the Italian Red Cross in assisting the Italian Government in the ethnic registration and profiling of Roma in Italy, as I do here and I am sure as will many of our readers. However, it is not going to make one iota of a difference to this. All I am seeing, I am afraid to say, is that my predictions and fears are becoming reality.

But then, as I indicated above, why precisely should that surprise us; the involvement of the Red Cross in this. Were they not culpable enough in the Third Reich. They indeed were.

Members of European Civil Society should condemn this action of the Italian Red Cross in the strongest possible terms and apply pressure on the ICRC, the International Committee of the Red Cross to demand that their Italian division withdraw from this involvement.

Not that this is going to happen but.. the inaction shows where they all really stand. As far as we, the Romani, the Gypsy, of Europe, and the world, are concerned, civil society and all its bodies always will stand against us.

The registration of minorities is contrary to European Data and Minority Protection legislation in Italy, and yesterday, the European Parliament itself passed a Resolution against the fingerprinting of Roma in Italy. The only problem with this resolution is that it is about as binding as a raft tied together with rotten ropes which will dissolve in the water.

The announcement that the Red Cross will assist the Italian police in the registration and fingerprinting of Roma in Rome, Naples and Milan was made by Massimo Barra, Head of the Italian Red Cross, in an interview published in The Times on July 5. This was confirmed in a statement by the Italian Minister of the Interior, Mr. Roberto Maroni, published in the Südtiroler Zeitung on July 10, that the government of Silvio Berlusconi is proud of the participation of the Red Cross in the ethnic registration and fingerprinting of Roma.

The fact of the Italian Red Cross assisting a neo-fascistic government in singling out the Romani-Gypsy, for it will not just remain with the Roma – the Sinti of Italy, I am sure, will be the next targets – for registration and profiling is chillingly reminiscent of Red Cross collaboration with the Hitler's Black Legions during WWII in the registration, deportations and destruction of Gypsy life.

The most chilling factor of this, undoubtedly, is that today these actions are being validated by the self-same arguments as those of Nazi Germany, namely that Sinti and Roma, that Romani-Gypsy People, need to be controlled as a measure of “crime-prevention”.

© M Smith (Veshengro), July 2008