Sixty-eight percent of Italians, fueled by often inflammatory attacks by the new rightwing government, want to see all of the country's 150,000 Gypsies — many of them Italian citizens — expelled, an opinion poll showed.
The survey, published as mobs in Naples burned down Gypsy camps last week, revealed that the majority also wanted all Gypsy camps in Italy to be demolished.
About 70,000 Gypsies in Italy hold Italian passports, including about 30,000 descended from 15th-century Gypsy settlers in the country. The remainder have arrived since, many fleeing the Balkans during the 1990s.
Another 10,000 Gypsies came from Romania after it joined the EU in January last year, said EveryOne, an Italian human-rights organization.
Romanians were among the 268 immigrants rounded up in a nationwide police crackdown on prostitution and drug dealing this week, after new Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s likening of foreign criminals to “an army of evil.”
But Romanian officials have sought to distinguish between the Romanians and Romanian Gypsies entering Italy.
Flavio Tosi, the mayor of Verona and a member of the anti- immigrant Northern League party, said his city had the biggest Romanian community in Italy, 7,000 strong, “working as builders, artisans and domestics. And they themselves say the Roma [Gypsies] are a problem,” he said.
In a second poll, 81 percent of Italian respondents said they found all Gypsies, Romanian or not, “barely likeable or not likeable at all,” a greater number than the 61 percent who said they felt the same way about non-Gypsy Romanians.
Young Neapolitans who threw Molotov cocktails into a Naples Gypsy camp last week, after a girl was accused of trying to abduct a baby, bragged that they were undertaking “ethnic cleansing.” A UN spokeswoman compared the scenes to the forced migration of Gypsies from the Balkans. “We never thought we’d see such images in Italy,” Laura Boldrini said.
“This hostility is a result of the generally inflammatory language of the current government, as well as the previous one,” said EveryOne director Matteo Pegoraro. “Italian football stars at Milan teams assumed to have Gypsy heritage, such as Andrea Pirlo, are now also the subject of threatening chants.”
Commenting on the attacks in Naples, Umberto Bossi, the head of the Northern League party said: “People are going to do what the political class cannot.”
Defense Minister Ignazio La Russa said yesterday he would consider deploying soldiers to the streets to help fight crime, while a group of Bosnian Gypsies in Rome said they were mounting night guard patrols of their camp to defend against vigilante attacks.
Europe’s leading human rights watchdog urged the government to prevent attacks on Roma communities.
With much pomp and circumstance, Cairo is today to inaugurate the long-awaited Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM), widely presented as the crowning jewel on authorities’ efforts to overhaul the country’s vital tourism industry. With a panoramic view of the Giza pyramids plateau, the museum houses thousands of artifacts spanning more than 5,000 years of Egyptian antiquity at a whopping cost of more than US$1 billion. More than two decades in the making, the ultra-modern museum anticipates 5 million visitors annually, with never-before-seen relics on display. In the run-up to the grand opening, Egyptian media and official statements have hailed the “historic moment,” describing the
SECRETIVE SECT: Tetsuya Yamagami was said to have held a grudge against the Unification Church for bankrupting his family after his mother donated about ￥100m The gunman accused of killing former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe yesterday pleaded guilty, three years after the assassination in broad daylight shocked the world. The slaying forced a reckoning in a nation with little experience of gun violence, and ignited scrutiny of alleged ties between prominent conservative lawmakers and a secretive sect, the Unification Church. “Everything is true,” Tetsuya Yamagami said at a court in the western city of Nara, admitting to murdering the nation’s longest-serving leader in July 2022. The 45-year-old was led into the room by four security officials. When the judge asked him to state his name, Yamagami, who
‘CHILD PORNOGRAPHY’: The doll on Shein’s Web site measure about 80cm in height, and it was holding a teddy bear in a photo published by a daily newspaper France’s anti-fraud unit on Saturday said it had reported Asian e-commerce giant Shein (希音) for selling what it described as “sex dolls with a childlike appearance.” The French Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF) said in a statement that the “description and categorization” of the items on Shein’s Web site “make it difficult to doubt the child pornography nature of the content.” Shortly after the statement, Shein announced that the dolls in question had been withdrawn from its platform and that it had launched an internal inquiry. On its Web site, Le Parisien daily published a
DEADLY PREDATORS: In New South Wales, smart drumlines — anchored buoys with baited hooks — send an alert when a shark bites, allowing the sharks to be tagged High above Sydney’s beaches, drones seek one of the world’s deadliest predators, scanning for the flick of a tail, the swish of a fin or a shadow slipping through the swell. Australia’s oceans are teeming with sharks, with great whites topping the list of species that might fatally chomp a human. Undeterred, Australians flock to the sea in huge numbers — with a survey last year showing that nearly two-thirds of the population made a total of 650 million coastal visits in a single year. Many beach lovers accept the risks. When a shark killed surfer Mercury Psillakis off a northern Sydney beach last
RSS