Rosarno in southern Italy had, by Sunday night, been turned into what one politician termed the world’s only entirely white town after “ethnic cleansing.”
As bulldozers got to work to obliterate shacks belonging to the itinerant crop-pickers who had fled, the last of more than 1,000 such workers were being removed from the area for their own protection.
After two days and nights of violence that began with the apparently motiveless shooting of two African workers, the number of injured stood at 53, comprising 18 police, 14 local people and 21 immigrants, eight of whom were in hospital.
Some of the crop-pickers had been shot; others had been beaten with metal bars or wooden clubs as local people took indiscriminate vengeance after a riot on Thursday in which more than 100 Africans caused extensive damage in the town to protest the shootings.
Those who fled included several hundred people who had agreed to be taken to government-run centers after reportedly being given assurances they would not be deported if found to be illegally in Italy.
But Italian Interior Minister, Roberto Maroni, said yesterday that they would, in fact, be expelled.
“The law is implemented and nothing else can be done,” Maroni said.
He criticized local authorities for turning a blind eye to the irregular use of immigrant labor, adding that they had created communities of foreigners that were “bombs primed to go off.”
A junior minister in the previous, center-left government, Luigi Manconi, commented ironically that Rosarno was now “the only wholly white town in the world. Not even South African apartheid obtained such a result.” And he asked: “Who now will pick the oranges?”
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