Roma Persecution in Italy
Debi Crow at The Corvid Diaries has three posts about this:
Against Fingerprinting of the Roma Community in Italy:
There is a Facebook group dedicated to fighting the fingerprinting of Italy’s Roma population which is currently being undertaken by the Italian government, under the guise of immigrant control and crime prevention. Here is the introduction to the group:
“Italy’s interior minister Roberto Maroni has proposed and begun implementing a policy of police fingerprinting of all members of the Italian Roma/Gypsy Community.
According to the Guardian newspaper, fingerprinting of Roma children has already begun. Moreover, Italy’s highest appeal court has ruled that it is acceptable to discriminate against Roma on the grounds that “all Gypsies were thieves”. In May 2008 rumours of an abduction of a baby girl by a Gypsy woman in Naples led to an outbreak of racist violence against Roma camps. The response by Minister Maroni to this was “that is what happens when gypsies steal babies”.
Two dead Roma girls treated as though they don’t exist:
The bodies of two Roma girls were disregarded by people on an Italian beach, who continued to sunbathe and enjoy themselves. The girls drowned in the sea, and their bodies were washed up on the shore. People nearby covered the bodies, but then carried on with their day as if nothing had happened, just as though the girls did not exist.
More on the persecution of Roma in Italy:
I Care is a really useful and informative website about the persecution of minorities in Europe, and particularly the difficulties faced by the Roma population of Italy. Please go to this page to see what you can do about the situation. There is a letter there which can be sent (emailed) from anywhere in the world, as there is international interest in this issue.
The third post has two videos.
There’s two posts from Debi Crow that are really important, both about the Roma people in Italy.
First, the Italian government has begun fingerprinting the Roma people-and only the Roma people as far as I can tell. As racism often is, it’s being framed as immigration control.
As well as being a massive human rights violation, I worry it’s a sign of much much worse things to come. When a specific group (racial, religious, sexual, whatever) is targeted for surveillance and control by a government, this is a sure sign that something seriously fucked is occurring.
And honestly, it’s part of the movement towards fascism, where a group is dehumanised, posited as an internal “antagonism” against which the whole community is formed (Italy’s Supreme Court ruled it was acceptable to discriminate against them, as “all gypsies are thieves”). It’s when a group starts to be outside of the rule of law, subject to different laws than everyone else, placed outside of human rights, that things get very very ugly.
It wasn’t that long ago that somewhere between two hundred thousand and one and a half million Roma were decimated in the Holocaust.
And this story, where two Roma girls drowned swimming, and sunbathers just lay blankets over their bodies after they washed up onshore and continued swimming, is as ugly and dehumanising as you can imagine. Two lives treated as though they were nothing, absolutely nothing. An inconvenience to be ignored. Jesus.
There’s a Facebook group here and Debi’s got a form letter if you’re in the UK you can send to your local MP in protest.
Thanks for spreading the word, Lisa xx
Debs
August 5, 2008 at 12:20 am
Racism against Roma is the second kind of bigotry I started speaking out against, after sexism and before biphobia, homophobia and more general racism.
Yes, that does mean transphobia ended up being second-to-last on the list, before ableism, so totally not a ranking of their importance in my life.
Lisa Harney
August 5, 2008 at 12:25 am
It all sounds so familiar, doesn’t it? I keep imagining that there’s some serious undercurrents behind any of this intolerance that need to be explored and exposed, but alas I don’t have the resources and time to investigate the common thread behind it all :(
z
August 5, 2008 at 12:40 am
It’s the kind of steps states take as they slip into fascism – identify and stigmatize an enemy. Doesn’t have to be a real enemy, just someone the citizens will believe could be an enemy.
But also, yes, there’s a depressing commonality in oppressive, bigoted behavior and language – even if the historical causes are different, the language people use is often the very same, because of course it’s based in privilege.
It’s why intersectionality is important and the woman who wrote about it on alternet was bluntly wrong about it being outmoded: intersectionality draws connections and describes how a gay white man experiencing homophobia can relate to and sympathize with a white woman (who may also be lesbian) who experiences sexism or a person of color (who may also be female and/or lesbian) who experiences racism.
Of course, it also describes how those intersecting oppressions and privileges position people within the kyriarchy, and may show how people who are not necessarily at the top (most privilege, least oppression) are responsible for a lot of oppression – again, like the white gay men who were trashing trans people as hard as possible during the ENDA debacle, or how radfems try to jealously guard the borders of womanhood from trans women. And how they all draw upon and use the same tactics to do this that are used against them.
Unless I totally misunderstood what you meant there.
Lisa Harney
August 5, 2008 at 12:48 am
The whole issue of Roma discrimination generally is very disturbing to me. I wrote about the Italian situation a while back because it has echoes of what is happening in Greece as well (http://deviousdiva.com/2008/07/24/roma-discrimination-continues/). If folks here are interested, I have also done a whole series on Roma on my blog. (Look under the Roma series).
I sincerely hope you don’t consider this trolling. I just see so little written about the Roma that I think it is a great thing to link up these posts.
deviousdiva
August 5, 2008 at 1:21 am
[...] worry for ALL our futures if we continue on this path. I make no apologies for that. UPDATE: Questioning Transphobia also has a post up on this subject. Technorati Tags: italy, drowning, roma, naples Spread the [...]
Roma Discrimination Continues at THIS IS NOT MY COUNTRY
August 5, 2008 at 1:24 am
Not trolling at all – thank you for dropping by – IME, people tend to be very uninformed about racism against Roma, so the more information the better.
Also, lots of stuff here:
http://www.romnews.com/community/index.php
Lisa Harney
August 5, 2008 at 1:32 am
Lisa: no misunderstandings. That’s just about right.
z
August 5, 2008 at 3:40 pm