68% of Italians want Roma expelled - poll

Sixty-eight per cent of Italians, fuelled by often inflammatory attacks bythe new rightwing government, want to see all of the country’s 150,000Gypsies, many of them Italian citizens, expelled, according to an opinionpoll.

The survey, published as mobs in Naples burned down Gypsy camps this week,revealed that the majority also wanted all Gypsy camps in Italy to bedemolished .

About 70,000 Gypsies in Italy hold Italian passports, including about 30,000descended from 15th-century Gypsy settlers in the country. The remainderhave arrived since, many fleeing the Balkans during the 1990s.

Another 10,000 Gypsies came from Romania after it joined the European Unionin January 2007, according to an Italian human rights organisation,EveryOne, part of the approximately half million Romanians believed to be inItaly.

Romanians were among the 268 immigrants rounded up in a nationwide policecrackdown on prostitution and drug dealing this week, after new primeminister Silvio Berlusconi’s likening of foreign criminals to “an army ofevil”.

But Romanian officials have sought to distinguish between the Romanians andRomanian Gypsies entering Italy.Flavio Tosi, the mayor of Verona and a member of the anti-immigrant NorthernLeague party, said his city had the biggest Romanian community in Italy,7,000 strong, “working as builders, artisans and domestics. And theythemselves say the Roma are a problem,” he said.

In a second poll, 81% of Italian respondents said they found all Gypsies,Romanian or not, “barely likeable or not likeable at all”, a greater numberthan the 61% who said they felt the same way about non-Gypsy Romanians.

Young Neapolitans who threw Molotov cocktails into a Naples Gypsy camp thisweek, after a girl was accused of trying to abduct a baby, bragged that theywere undertaking “ethnic cleansing”. A UN spokeswoman compared the scenes tothe forced migration of Gypsies from the Balkans. “We never thought we’d seesuch images in Italy,” said Laura Boldrini.

“This hostility is a result of the generally inflammatory language of thecurrent government, as well as the previous one,” said EveryOne directorMatteo Pegoraro. “Italian football stars at Milan teams assumed to haveGypsy heritage, such as Andrea Pirlo, are now also the subject ofthreatening chants.”

Commenting on the attacks in Naples, Umberto Bossi, the head of the NorthernLeague party said: “People are going to do what the political class cannot.”

The defence minister, Ignazio La Russa, said yesterday he would considerdeploying soldiers to Italian streets to help fight crime, while a group ofBosnian Gypsies in Rome said they were mounting night guard patrols of theircamp to defend against vigilante attacks.

Europe’s leading human rights watchdog urged the government to preventattacks on Roma communities. Christian Strohal, head of Vienna-based OSCE’sOffice for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, said: “The currentstigmatisation of Roma and immigrant groups in Italy is dangerous as it …increases the potential for violence.”