People of Naples burn down gypsy encampment, with support of authorities

Karen writes from England:

As you said in the story about the Islamic center being removed, there is life in Italy! The Italians have also deported many Romanian immigrants who were committing a lot of crime in the area around Rome. An incident where a Romanian tried to steal a young Italian child a few days ago sparked off a series of incidents where the Italian Mafia organised and Romanian slums around the city were burnt down. This left a large number of Romanian immigrants homeless and the Italian government promptly removed them. Similar action needs to be taken against the Moslems. But the Italians may do this, yet.

Karen sent the following articles, which I’ve copied in their entirety below. The first is from The Independent-Europe. Notice the editorializing. “Correct” opinion says you let illegal, criminal, and dangerou aliens inhabit your country forever. But the people and the local authorities, backed by the new government of Berlusconi, aren’t listening. Fine, let the liberals complain. I look forward to the day when the same thing happens on a much larger scale throughout the West, and the liberals lament the “cruel and unusual” behavior, but as long as they don’t stop what needs to be done, they can complain all they want.

Italian tolerance goes up in smoke as Gypsy camp is burnt to ground

By Peter Popham in Rome
Friday, 16 May 2008

In cruel and unusual concert, Italy’s new government, its police and paramilitary carabinieri, and even its gangsters, have turned their joint might against the nation’s enemy number one: the Gypsies.

Yesterday Pope Benedict XVI and a small number of left-wingers raised lonely voices in central Naples against the national hardening of hearts towards Europe’s perennial outsiders. To little avail: the Pope’s appeal for a spirit of welcome and acceptance was met with a hail of angry rejection in blogged comments on news websites.

But what will remain scorched in the nation’s memory—as a mark of shame, or a beacon pointing the way forward, depending on how you see it—are the flaming structures of the Gypsy camp burnt in the Ponticelli district of Naples on Wednesday. [Emphasis added.] [LA replies: Yes—I see it as a beacon pointing the way forward.]

Residents of the former communist stronghold on the northern outskirts of Naples have been raising hell about the camp since Saturday, when a woman claimed a Gypsy girl had entered her flat and tried to steal her baby. [LA notes: See below story from the Times of London which gives more details on this and shows that it was not just one woman “claiming” that something had happened but an event experienced by a neighborhood.]

The first Molotov cocktails descended on the improvised huts and cabins on Tuesday evening, after which the 800-odd inhabitants began moving out of the area in groups. On Wednesday the fire-raisers, said to belong to the Camorra, the Neapolitan equivalent of the Mafia, burnt the camp in earnest, watched by applauding local people and unchallenged by the police. When firefighters showed up to douse the blaze, local people taunted and whistled at them. The last Roma moved out under police protection.

Only then did local politicians shed a few crocodile tears: Antonio Bassolino, governor of the Campania region, declaring: “We must stop with the greatest determination these disturbing episodes against the Roma.” Rosa Russo Iervolino, the Mayor of Naples, chimed in: “It is unthinkable that anyone could imagine that I could justify reprisals against the Roma.”

But the first act of ethnic cleansing in the new Italy passed off with little fuss. Flora Martinelli, the woman who reported the alleged kidnap attempt on her baby, said: “I’m very sorry for what’s happening, I didn’t want it to come to this. But the Gypsies had to go.”

Roma have been living in Italy for seven centuries, and 70,000 of the 160,000-strong population have Italian citizenship. They amount to less than 0.3 per cent of the population, one of the lowest proportions in Europe. But their poverty and resistance to integration have made them far more conspicuous than other communities. And the influx of thousands more from Romania in the past year has confirmed the view of many Italians that the Gypsies and their eyesore encampments are the source of all their problems.

The forces of law and order took up the struggle yesterday. In Rome, some 50 Roma without identification and living in the city’s biggest Gypsy camp were arrested as part of a crackdown on illegal immigration which resulted in more than 400 arrests nationwide.

Meanwhile, the government announced that its new diktat on security is almost ready and will be approved at its first cabinet meeting in Naples, as announced by Mr Berlusconi, to symbolise his determination to crack the city’s chronic refuse problem.

The “decree law”, which will have immediate effect, is expected to make illegal immigration a criminal offence, punishable by up to four years in prison. The discussion of the draft of the law and the announcement that there will be no more amnesties have thrown the hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants who work informally as nurses and old people’s companions into a panic. Now the government is trying to fine tune the law so it only applies to criminally inclined clandestini—and Gypsies.

Here is a story from the Times of London, reprinted at Free Republic with the Freepers almost unanimously cheering:

Italian police began a nationwide round-up of nearly 400 illegal immigrants from the Balkans and North Africa yesterday in the midst of a series of arson attacks on Roma gypsy camps in the suburbs of Naples.

The first step in a drive on crime promised by the new centre-right government of Silvio Berlusconi targeted temporary encampments on the outskirts of cities from Naples to northern Italy. Some 118 people held in the operation were ordered to be expelled immediately for offences ranging from drug dealing and robbery to prostitution.

But in Naples local people have anticipated the new policy, taking the law into their own hands.

This week’s assaults on Roma shanty towns by scores of youths on scooters and motorbikes wielding iron bars and throwing Molotov cocktails were sparked off by the capture of a 17-year-old Roma girl who last weekend entered a flat in Ponticelli and tried to steal a 6-year-old girl. Chased by the mother and neighbours, she had to be rescued by police from being lynched. [LA replies: compare this detailed account to the vague account in the Independent, above.]

The city erupted in fury, with local women leading the marches on the Roma camps to the chant of “Fuori, fuori [Out, out]”. Night after night young men—allegedly acting on the orders of powerful local clans of the Camorra, the Naples Mafia—have set the sites ablaze, blocking attempts by the fire brigade to put out the fires, with exploding gas canisters completing the destruction. The women jeered at the firemen, shouting, “You put these fires out, we start them again”.

Plumes of smoke were still rising yesterday from the smouldering, blackened ruins of a Roma gypsy camp attacked and burnt to the ground by local vigilantes in Ponticelli, a rundown industrial suburb in the east of Naples in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius.

The charred remains of the makeshift wooden shacks at the site on Via Malibran crunch underfoot. The only sign of life is dogs scavenging through the neighbouring mountain of uncollected, rotting rubbish.

There are similar scenes of devastation at camps nearby, including one in the incongruously named Via Virginia Woolf. At one squalid “nomad camp” beneath a motorway flyover, intact but deserted, a policeman guarding the site said that the inhabitants had fled during the night to avoid being attacked.

The signs of hasty panic were everywhere, with doors to the shacks left open and the ground strewn with clothing, shoes, bicycles, plastic bottles, pots and pans and children’s toys.

Hundreds of Roma families have fled for their lives with their belongings piled on to small pick-up trucks or handcarts. Some have been taken under police protection to a former school used to house illegal immigrants in a northern Naples suburb. Others have found refuge at Roma camps elsewhere in the Campania region, while a few have been taken in by Naples residents shocked at this outbreak of “xenophobia”.

The Naples arson attacks, however, are the result of long-festering anger throughout Italy over rising crime levels and urban degradation, much of it blamed on Roma gypsies and the estimated half a million Romanians who have emigrated to Italy since Romania joined the European Union.

According to the Roma rights group, Opera Nomadi, there are 2,500 Roma in Naples, 1,000 from Romania and 1,500 from the Balkans. A spokesperson for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) drew parallels with Roma people forced to flee from the Balkans, saying: “We never thought we’d see such images in Italy.”

In Rome, where Gianni Alemanno, the new right-wing mayor, has vowed to dismantle “nomad camps” to reduce street crime, police raided a Roma camp, loading the inhabitants on to buses and taking them to detention centres. Mr Alemanno has promised to deport 20,000 illegal immigrants.

Today the Berlusconi Cabinet will approve an emergency “security package” drawn up by Robert Maroni, the new Interior Minister and deputy leader of the anti immigrant Northern League. It includes the dismantling of Roma camps, the appointment of “special commissioners” to deal with “the Roma problem” in Rome and Milan, the tightening of border controls and the speeded-up deportation of immigrants who cannot show they have a job or an “adequate” income. Mr Maroni also wants to make illegal immigration a criminal offence.

Mr Berlusconi vowed during last month’s election campaign to curb illegal immigrants, describing them as an “army of evil”. Mr Berlusconi has also pledged to hold a Cabinet meeting in Naples next Wednesday to resolve the continuing rubbish crisis amid fears of an epidemic as warmer weather arrives.

Yesterday Flora Martinelli, the mother who caught the Roma teenager trying to steal her baby at Ponticelli, said she was “very sorry for what has happened. I didn’t think it would come to this”.

But she said, “We have absolutely had it with the Roma, they have to go.” At one of the few remaining nomad camps, terrified Roma people were reluctant to speak. “We are not all criminals” insisted one thirty-year-old man. But at the market opposite the burnt-out Via Malibran camp, local people were unrepentant. “The gypsies don’t work, they don’t wash, and they steal” said one youth. “This is our version of ethnic cleansing.”

Cristian David, the Romanian Interior Minister, arrived in Rome yesterday for talks on the crisis. Calin Popeascu Tariceanu, the Romanian Prime Minister, said Italy should have followed the example of France and Germany in refusing to allow nomad encampments to spring up. He said a distinction must be drawn between “honest Romanians” with jobs and criminals who “have tainted the image of all Romanians working abroad”.

Giulio Riccio, head of social policy at the Naples council, condemned the “criminal aggression” at the Roma camps, adding “I am ashamed to be Italian”. Rosa Iervolino Russo, the Mayor of Naples, said she deplored “all violent and racist actions”.

Franco Frattini, the Foreign Minister and former EU Commissioner, denied the new Italian government was “xenophobic” but said the Schengen agreement on free movement across EU frontiers needed to be “updated”. It is estimated that there are at last 700,000 illegal immigrants in Italy.

Pietro Fusella, manager of a hotel in Via Chiaia, in Naples’ historic centre, said both the rubbish cisis and the attacks on Roma camps were unjustly damaging the city’s image. “Both problems are in the suburbs, not the centre” he said. He had put up a webcam on the hotel website to show that the street outside was “clean and safe”.

Last year the centre-left government of Romano Prodi expelled over 200 Romanians with criminal records after a Romanian was accused of murdering an Italian woman at a Rome railway station. However, the centre-right swept to power in elections last month, arguing that much tougher measures were needed.

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Jack S. writes:

The events in Italy are surprising. I didn’t think that the Italians had it in them. There may be some life left in Europe.

Would that we had American patriots like those Italians.

I want to correct something your correspondent Karen from England wrote. The “Roma” that committed the attacks that enraged Italy were not Romanians. Romanians are white Slavs who speak a Romance language very close to Italian. Gypsies are descendants of nomads who traveled or were brought as slaves from India centuries ago. There are many Gypsies in Romanian. They are about 10% of the population over twenty million. They also live throughout Europe. For example, In “For Whom The Bell Tolls” Hemingway wrote about Spanish Gypsies. Hemingway described the Gypsy attitude towards non-Gypsies in terms much the same as jihadists feel about infidels: non-Gypsies are prey. Pure bred gypsies are dark-skinned like a lower caste Indians. There has been much mixture (because of intermarriage and baby-stealing) so many gypsies are not very dark. Many are still nomads, living in encampments on the outskirts of towns, stealing,and engaging in petty crime and con games as the opportunity presents itself. They term “Roma” came into use some years ago as a PC term that lacked that derogatory implications of “Gypsy.” It is meant to imply that the Gypsies came from Constantinople, the new Rome of the Eastern Roman Empire. The term Gypsy originates in the belief by medieval Europeans that Gypsies were from Egypt. The Romanians have foolishly allowed gypsies to call themselves “Roma,” permitting confusion of the two by ignorant people. The Romanians are a brutish simple people,but no worse that their fellow Slavs. It is an injustice to conflate them with “Roma.” It would the same as describing acts of African American savagery as characteristic American behavior.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 21, 2008 11:01 PM | Send