Romanian Premier Tries to Calm Italy After a Killing

Romania’s prime minister visited Italy on Wednesday to try to defuse a week of anger here, after the arrest of a Romanian in the killing of an Italian woman exploded into a national debate on immigration and crime. Some three dozen immigrants have been expelled since then, with calls from the center-right opposition for many more expulsions.

“Romania does not want in any way to export criminality,” the Romanian prime minister, Calin Popescu Tariceanu, told reporters here after a two-hour meeting with his Italian counterpart, Romano Prodi. “I cannot permit any transgressions of the law by Romanians either at home or abroad.”

The two men agreed to find ways to better integrate the large numbers of Romanians who have come to Italy since the nation joined the European Union this year. In recent days, Romanians — and more specifically Roma, also known as Gypsies — have been accused of committing a disproportionate number of violent crimes here.

The killing of Giovanna Reggiani, 47, who was molested and beaten to death at a train station in Rome last week, and the arrest of a Romanian man in the attack, uncorked a surge of emotion and uncertainty here.

According to the Roman Catholic charity Caritas, there are some 3.7 million immigrants in Italy, making up 6.2 percent of the population and providing much needed labor in a rapidly aging nation. An estimated 560,000 of the immigrants are from Romania.

“Nobody could expect that,” Mr. Prodi said in an interview published in The Financial Times on Wednesday. “Psychologically and socially, the speed, the impact is incredible,” he added.

After the killing, Mr. Prodi’s government enacted an emergency decree permitting local authorities to expel immigrants deemed dangerous, and a reported three dozen people, mostly Romanian, were forced out.

But amid a debate on making that decree permanent, anger and the potential for violence remain high. On Friday night, three Romanians were wounded, one seriously, after being attacked in Rome by a mob armed with knives and metal bars.

While the beating shocked many Italians, the killing seemed to underscore a larger fear and unease about immigration.

“It’s not a problem of Romanians, but of foreigners,” said Annalisa Menciassi, a hotel worker in the Tuscan town of Casciana Terme. “Because you hear so many bad things, people are just afraid.

“I don’t discriminate because of race or color or ethnic background,” she said. “But it is also true that just as we accept them, they also have to accept us and abide by our rules.”

While apologizing for crimes committed by Romanians, Mr. Tariceanu said he had come to Italy to “ensure safety for the Romanians who work and lead an honest life in Italy and who represent the vast majority of Romanians there.” He said he was worried about a rising xenophobia here.

He and Mr. Prodi agreed to a packet of measures, including more Romanian police officers in Italy, better border controls and new ways to integrate immigrants. The two men also wrote a letter to the European Commission asking for help for nations that receive immigrants from other European countries and for a strategy for integrating the Roma in Europe.

“The destination member states don’t have on their own the means to confront the difficulties that face them,” the letter read.

The issue is also sending tremors through Mr. Prodi’s fragile center-left government. While he has pledged that there will be no “mass deportations,” the center-right opposition is calling for tough measures, including the right to expel immigrants who have not been proved to be a threat.

After the killing, Gianfranco Fini, leader of the opposition National Alliance, directly took on the delicate question of criminality among the Roma, saying that they “are not able to be integrated into our society.”

But even politicians who are more centrist have expressed worries about criminality, particularly among Romanians. Walter Veltroni, Rome’s mayor and the leader of the centrist Democratic Party, said that three-quarters of all arrests in the city last year involved Romanians. The Italian police have reportedly been rousting illegal encampments of Roma around the city.

Nazareno Guarnieri, a Romany who leads an Italian Gypsy advocacy group, said that the Roma were being scapegoated and that criminals made up only a small part of the estimated 160,000 Gypsies in Italy, while 90,000 of them were Italian citizens. The real problem is that Italy has not figured out how to deal with the changes caused by the arrival of so many immigrants, he said.

“It is a society that has changed very rapidly,” he said. “The shame, the fear,” he said, “is that we have a political class that instead of managing this change are pandering to voters. And the people who don’t understand the problem say, ‘Bravo!’ It is a kind of search for votes. This is propaganda.”