Bloody clashes between African migrants and other residents in one of Italy’s poorest regions over the last few days have brought home a national dilemma: Many Italians don’t want to pick crops in the south or toil in the north’s factories, but resent the desperate foreigners who will work for a pittance.
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi last year dismissed any notion of a “multiethnic Italy.” His conservative coalition, which includes the anti-immigrant Northern League party, has repeatedly cracked down on illegal immigration, sometimes drawing the ire of human rights advocates, UN officials and the Vatican.
With opinion surveys showing that many Italians blame immigrants for crime, tensions persist between citizens and foreigners — and sometimes erupt into violence, as they did these past days in Rosarno, a town in an underdeveloped southern agricultural region with chronic unemployment.
PHOTO: EPA
At least 38 people were wounded in the violence, which began on Thursday night when two migrants were shot with a pellet gun in an attack the migrants blamed on racism. Violence continued on Friday with clashes involving Africans, Rosarno residents and police. Among the more seriously wounded were three migrants beaten with metal rods.
By Saturday, the violence had largely subsided, except for a pellet-gun shooting that wounded a migrant on the outskirts of town, police said, and authorities began busing out some of the hundreds of frightened and angry migrants.
Others, lugging suitcases or tossing duffel bags over shoulders, headed for train stations or left in cars, said Laura Boldrini, an official from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Italy.
Perhaps half the 1,000 or so migrants — from Ghana, Nigeria and other African nations — chose to stay for now, many sleeping in tents or cardboard “rooms” in a dilapidated, abandoned former cheese factory on the outskirts of town.
Some have work permits, many are clandestine workers and others have refugee status, said Boldrini.
Just more than a year ago, two migrants were shot in Rosarno, one losing his spleen, Boldrini said. Then, the migrants reacted with a “peaceful march.”
This time “the immigrants reacted with violence, and this in turn triggered a spiral of violence,” the UN official said.
Although unemployment runs some 20 percent in the south — and at least double that among youth — few locals are willing to work so hard for so little: The kiwi, mandarin oranges and other citrus fruits are harvested by the migrants.
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