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Racist crackdown in Italy

All Italians will now rue the consequences of having elected a coalition led by the extreme right-wing plutocrat Silvio Berlusconi in April this year. Mr. Berlusconi’s landslide victory was based on a promise to “get tough” on crime, an implied threat to adopt harsh laws towards Italy’s immigrant community. The Italian premier’s various moves including the fingerprinting of children of the Roma community have evoked sharp international critici sm. One particularly unedifying moment in this neo-fascist climate was the shocking incident in which Italian sunbathers near Naples carried on playing Frisbees and eating lunch on the beach, ignoring the dead bodies of two Roma girls who had just drowned offshore. Italy is a founder-member of the Council of Europe, the body which created and enforces the European Convention on Human Rights. Yet the picture of cruelty towards the Roma community, which lives in squalid conditions, exemplifies the hypocrisy of the Italian government’s attitude.

Italian politicians and the judiciary are part of the problem. Interior minister Roberto Maroni has justified fingerprinting Roma children by saying it will protect them from adults who use them to commit crimes. He appears to have no compunctions in typecasting all Roma people as criminals. The Italian judiciary appears equally susceptible to this sort of racist stereotyping, so typical of a fascist mindset. The scapegoating of the Roma community is an alarming sign of a resurgence of the fascism of the 1930s. While the Catholic Church and Italian Jewish bodies have been forthright in their condemnation of the current national climate, the world cannot and must not ignore the unpleasant reality that fascism is once again rearing its ugly head in Berlusconi’s Italy.

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