Stephanie Kirchgaessner - Outcry over far-right Italian minister's call for Roma 'register'
On Monday Salvini
ordered the census and the removal of all non-Italian Roma – which he called an
“answer to the Roma question” – and said he wanted to know “who, and how many”
there were.
“Unfortunately we will
have to keep the Italian Roma because we can’t expel them,” Salvini said on
Telelombardia. Salvini is on record
as having praised Benito Mussolini, the Italian fascist leader, and his new
policy has sparked comparisons by the centre-left Democratic party to ethnic
cleansing rules introduced in the late 1920s that also targeted the
Roma.
“The interior minister
does not seem to know that a census on the basis of ethnicity is not permitted
by the law,” Carlo Stasolla, president of the Associazione 21 Luglio, which
supports Roma rights, told the Ansa news agency. “We also recall that
Italian Roma have been present in our country for at least half a century and
sometimes they are ‘more Italian’ than many of our fellow citizens.”
Francesco Palermo, a
former senator in Italy and human rights expert who has defended the rights of
Roma, said it would be legally impossible to pursue the creation of an
ethnic-specific census and expulsions as Salvini described, because the issue
had already been taken up by Italian courts in the past, where it was rejected. But he said the bigger
problem was that the reaction to Salvini was generally positive, and that his
popularity was growing despite the extreme nature of his positions.
“It is very simple and
very scary. Except for intellectuals and certain journalists, most people would
say there is nothing wrong with this, and that is the tricky point. Salvini
knows this. It is a just a means to get political support,” Palermo said.
He added that
reactions would be different if Salvini was targeting other groups of people
who face discrimination, but that racist views about the Roma are “innate”
among many people in Italy.
Up to 180,000 Roma
live in Italy, about 43% of whom are Italian citizens. About 4,000 Roma live
in state-sanctioned ghettos in Rome, according to a 2013
report by Amnesty International. These out-of-city ghettoes consist of
pre-fabricated containers or mobile homes in fenced-off areas, often without
adequate sanitation or clean drinking water. Inhabitants are excluded from
other social housing despite many having lived in Italy for generations. An Italian court in
2015 ordered the city of Rome to dismantle some of the state-sanctioned Roma
facilities, after it said the capital was guilty of ethnic discrimination... read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/19/italy-coalition-rift-roma-register-matteo-salvinisee also
