The world was shocked by Italian sunbathers ignoring dead gipsy girls... But now Italy is showing a chilling interest in Roma children

It was the week’s most shocking picture: gipsy girls dead on a beach ignored by sunbathers… Now there is more chilling evidence of how Italy’s brutal crackdown on the Roma has sick echoes of the country’s fascist past.

She looks like any teenager the world over. Wearing a denim skirt, pink designer T-shirt, and with long hair tied back from her face, Samantha is a child who would make any parent proud.

Yet just a few days ago, this bubbly 14-year-old found herself taking part in an excercise that would seem unthinkable in a modern, civilised European country.

She was ordered to line up at the local community hall near her home in Naples, Italy, and dab her right forefinger in black ink before placing it on a government census form.

Samantha was photographed and given an identity code – F43 – as officials asked for her full name, address, age, religion and where she was born.

Most controversially of all, she was told to state her ethnic background.

Every detail, including the fact that her parents are immigrant Roma gipsies from Serbia, was catalogued and put on a national computer system.

She was mortified. Her eyes bright with anger, Samantha said she felt like a villain in the only country she has ever known.

‘That same day, the Italian kids started calling me "gyppo" in the streets.

They pointed at me and laughed. I felt like shouting back and saying: ‘I am Italian just like you. I was born here too.

‘But I didn’t dare, in case I started a riot.’

Samantha was taking part in a compulsory new census of Italy’s 160,000 Roma people, promised by the inflammatory Right-wing premier Silvio Berlusconi in the run-up to his successful election this spring.

Anyone with a sense of the past would be forgiven for a strong feeling of foreboding about what is happening.

Thousands of migrants, many of them Roma gipsies from the old communist bloc and racially troubled Balkans, have poured into the country since the dismantling of border controls across a greatly expanded European Union in 2004.

The huge diaspora was political good fortune for 73-year-old Berlusconi.

In a country where fascism under dictator Benito Mussolini thrived until the end of World War II, Berlusconi warned of a ‘Roma emergency’ in big cities and produced a dossier of dubious figures alleging foreigners were involved in half of Italy’s attempted murders, muggings and robberies.

The interior minister went further. Roberto Maroni, a leader of the anti-immigrant Northern League aligned with Berlusconi’s nationalist Forza Italia party, claimed the controversial census and fingerprinting was essential to discover ‘who is entitled to be here and who is not’.

It would stop anonymous armies of Roma children being sent out begging or stealing by their families, 60 per cent of whom have no identity papers or passports, he claimed.

Gipsy people with the right to stay would be re-housed in ‘decent conditions rather than with rats’. The remainder, Maroni made clear, could expect deportation.

Many observers, including the Roman Catholic Church, the United Nations, Roma and Jewish leaders, condemned Berlusconi’s actions. Comparisons were made with the Nazi registration of Jews and gipsies introduced by Adolf Hitler with the support of Mussolini.

Only this week, the Italian parliament authorised six-year prison sentences for immigrants who lie about their identity, and instigated the deportation of foreigners who have been given any prison sentence of two years or more.

For the first time, simply living in Italy illegally is punishable by up to four years in prison.

But where will Berlusconi stop? Italy’s pledge to the EU that the census would not include a question about ethnicity has been blatantly breached, even for children such as Samantha.

While fingerprinting children under 14 has been abandoned (they are photographed instead) following international disquiet, there are now whisperings that gipsy camps not sanctioned by the authorities – and there are 50 of these in Rome alone – will be destroyed by the authorities.

Border controls are expected to be reintroduced to staunch the flow of migrants from Italy’s neighbours.

No wonder there is a growing sense of unease at the huge – and illegal – Rotunda gipsy camp in Naples, where Samantha Jevremovic underwent fingerprinting.

She lives there with her parents, two younger brothers and a toddler sister in a small white wooden hut.

The family share one bedroom and eat at a table outside, whatever the weather.

Samantha goes to school and hopes to train as a hairdresser. Her 32-year-old mother and itinerant metalworker father, 33, have no citizenship in Italy or anywhere else.

On the census form they declared themselves ‘Ethnic Serbs’, who slipped into the country illegally in 1993, just before their eldest daughter was born.

Her mother, Dani, says: ‘We didn’t want to co-operate. We are afraid.

‘But we hope by giving the information it will stop us being thrown out of Italy, which our children think of as home.’

The camp has 700 residents and was first established 25 years ago. It’s the size of a sprawling village under a four-lane expressway to the north of the city.

By any standards, it is a shabby place where potholes are filled with fetid water, toddlers run half-naked chased by cats around the alleys, and burnt-out cars outnumber brick houses.

Most of the residents live in corrugated shacks without either a tap or a lavatory, with only a towel or a duvet pinned up to serve as a front door.

Here, only two-thirds of the 300 children go to school, a pink-roofed building nearby. Their parents say they are afraid to send them because the appalling facilities in the camp mean they cannot wash the boys and girls each day.

‘They are scared that the Italian pupils will jeer at their dirty sons and daughters,’ explains 48-year-old Nihad Sajovic, one of the gipsy elders.

‘Would you send your child to class if that was going to happen?’

At a table in the community hall, where the census took place, he added: ‘No one can imagine our situation during the past few months.

‘There is a witch-hunt under way and people now believe that we are the only ones who commit crimes in Italy.

‘It is not easy for us. There have been incriminations and accusations against our community. We no longer know what the future holds.

‘We want to put down roots; we want to stop fleeing because our people have been doing that since the War began in 1939.

‘At the end, the Jews were given money and a new land. We still have nothing.’

Extraordinarily, the Red Cross of Italy has been persuaded by Berlusconi to help count gipsy heads and gather data on hundreds of families at 70 camps in Rome, an operation that will last until September.

Massimo Barra, the charity’s president, this week visited one pitiful group of gipsies who have been living under a dripping railway arch near international Leonardo Da Vinci airport for six years.

It can be reached only by a perilous walk along the main railway line between central Rome and the air terminus, then down a narrow gully.

On the brick walls hang a few pots and pans. Tents take up most of the floor space.

There is an acrid smell, and at night the rats come out. Surely this can’t be better than living in Romania, from where the 15 gipsies and their children had fled?

‘Yes it is,’ said Maria, mother of six. ‘There, we were accused and persecuted for being gipsies.

‘Up to now, we have lived in Italy in peace.’

The Red Cross’s Mr Barra said: ‘We know that people are pointing and saying that this is reminiscent of the Nazis. But that is collective paranoia.

‘We want to get these children vaccinated, give them health checks and medical cards.

‘That is all this census is about. We are building bridges and not walls.’

Whatever the truth of this, Italy’s history cannot be forgotten. It was as early as 1926 that Mussolini first expelled gipsies, calling them ‘sub humans’.

It is thought that in the next 20 years, more than one million Roma people were killed in the extermination camps of Europe, alongside the Jews.

The current wave of Italian xenophobia was given new impetus last November when an Italian admiral’s wife, a religious education teacher, was beaten with a rock in a sex attack by a Romanian migrant.

Dreadfully injured, she was dumped in a ditch in a suburb of northern Rome. She died two days later and suspect Nicolae Mailat, 24, from Transylvania, was arrested in a nearby gipsy camp.

National outrage followed.

Soon afterwards came a story of baby-snatching when a teenage Roma girl was alleged to have tried to kidnap a baby from its mother in a local apartment in Ponticelli, near Naples.

The girl is now in custody awaiting trial. But the case sparked an extraordinary backlash.

In May, several hundred local residents besieged the nearby Roma camp, hurling missiles and abuse.

Eventually, the police evacuated the gipsy residents. Within a short time, the shanty town was in flames.

The response of the Berlusconi government? ‘This is what happens when gipsies steal babies,’ shrugged Maroni of the Northern League.

Sporadic vigilante attacks on gipsies have continued. Only this week there was another mysterious fire at an encampment on the outskirts of Rome.

At 10pm on Tuesday, a swathe of trees surrounding the officially sanctioned site, again near the airport, suddenly burst into flames.

As police investigated, the Roma residents said that they heard three loud bangs as if Molotov cocktails had been hurled into the undergrowth.

‘What do you expect us to think? We are scared and dispirited,’ said Lordache Cortizon, a 40-year-old who came to live in Italy from Romania six years ago.

‘We came to escape racism. Yet in the past few months since the government changed, we have lived in fear. On the streets we are given filthy looks.

‘The census is nothing short of racism. If they come here and ask that my four children are fingerprinted I will say no.’

He looked over to his friend, Stoica Cifrian, 21, who comes from the same Romanian village and has two youngsters born in Italy.

‘I agree,’ added the young man in near perfect English. ‘We don’t want much, only to be treated like equals.’

A quarter-of-a-mile away is another camp of 50 Roma people. It is small and hidden down a track.

Two fair-haired boys, who have spent the morning playing with sticks and a bucket of water, sit under a tree.

The Red Cross have already been to visit and the details of these brothers, Alexander, aged five, and Daniel, 12, have been documented.

In a chair nearby, 41-year-old Gafadar Dancit watches the children with an air of resignation. He and the rest of his group came to Italy a year ago from Romania by bus.

‘We never expected Italy to turn against us,’ he says sadly. ‘It has happened so quickly. But we had to come. We could not afford to feed the children back home.

‘Here I am a painter and decorator. I can do metalwork, too.

‘If I work in the black economy I can earn 1,000 euros a month (about £800). In Romania, it would be 100 euros, if I was lucky.’

The gipsies blame discrimination for the fact that few have legal jobs. And without work they, inevitably, turn to other things.

Recently, eight gipsy men and women of Croatian origin were arrested for using children in hundreds of robberies throughout northern Italy.

The head of police in Verona, Marco Odoriosio, said that one of the arrested women had a record of 123 detentions for theft in different towns, using 93 aliases.

The adults were caught when their mobile phone calls to the children giving them instructions on what to steal, and where, were intercepted by detectives.

Unfortunately, it is just this kind of crime for which the gipsy community is renowned.

So what will happen next? Amid growing controversy, Italy insists the census and fingerprinting is making the country a better place for its citizens.

‘We are not talking about raids against Roma people, only an attempt to identify those living in our country,’ said the Foreign Minister, Franco Frattini.

Five days ago, the bodies of two gipsy children lay on a beach near Naples while Italian holidaymakers carried on sunbathing and playing football nearby.

The Ibramovitc cousins, Cristina, 12, and Viola, 11, were left on the sand for an hour after drowning in rough seas.

They had been sent there to beg and sell trinkets by their parents, but suddenly ran into the water and under a huge wave.

The children were pulled from the sea dead. Someone covered their bodies with a towel. Finally, they were taken away by police.

As Laura Boldrini, a spokeswoman for the UN High Commission for Refugees, was to comment later: ‘Even in death there seemed to be total indifference to these children.

‘I wonder if people would have behaved in the same way if the girls in question were Italian and not Roma?’

The answer to that question in today’s race-torn Italy is certainly no.

Sadly, a country which played such a significant role in the extreme racism of the 1930s seems to have learnt little from history.