Feature Article

‘They hadn’t a crust of bread’

Naples' Cardinal Sepe has clashed with the city's mayor over the plight of the Roma, whose camps have been torched during a wave of intolerance that crashed over them. As anger erupted against them throughout Italy, the new prime minister announced an immigration crackdown

An unholy alliance between organised crime and the disaffected residents of Naples has exploded into television images of intolerance, xenophobia and unprecedented urban degradation that have circulated around the world this month.

At Ponticelli on the outskirts of Naples, angry crowds of youths last week torched two camps of Roma people - called "nomads" by the Italians - elsewhere a 16-year-old Gypsy girl was almost lynched. She had been arrested while allegedly trying to kidnap a baby in broad daylight from the home of a young Neapolitan couple. This week, the Roma are gradually moving back into the camps, and new torching incidents are reported. Intolerance towards Roma people has also erupted in other parts of Italy. Nine women are reported by police to have been raped by men suspected to be Roma in the Milan area alone this month. "This is war," was the comment of the deputy mayor, Riccardo De Corato.

In Rome last year the murder of an Italian woman was blamed on a Roma of Romanian origin. Several Roma camps have been emptied by police, and quickly re-established by their occupants, who have nowhere else to go.

Italy's new Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, this week unveiled controversial new legislation making illegal entry into the country a crime punishable by up to four years' imprisonment, and would create at least 10 new temporary detention centres for immigrants in disused army barracks in various parts of the country. Joint army and police patrols are also planned to beef up security in some cities. But opposition leader Walter Veltroni says that such measures infringe basic human rights.

Mr Berlusconi, however, can justifiably argue that he had been given a mandate by Italian voters in April's general election to crack down on city crime, much of which is commonly perceived to be committed by foreigners.

Mr Berlusconi has also been served notice by the Spanish Government and by the European Union in Brussels that interfering with the free movement of EU citizens (and Romanians and many Roma people from that country are in fact EU citizens) may infringe basic EU rules. The Vatican is also worried about the possibility of policies of zero tolerance being imposed upon defenceless immigrants to Italy whose only fault is that they are escaping poverty in their home countries.

At the local level in Naples there is tension between the Catholic mayor, Rosa Russo Jervolino, and the city's Cardinal Archbishop, Crescenzio Sepe, who do not always see eye to eye on what to do about the plight of the thousands of illegal immigrants from developing countries drawn to Italy by reports of lax policing policies.

"Although the cardinal has expressed solidarity with the immigrants, we at City Hall have had to deal with the actual problem of finding accommodation for ‘nomads'," she said caustically.

Mrs Jervolino is the daughter of two prestigious Catholic cabinet ministers who served in Christian Democrat-led governments after the Second World War, and who had an honourable record of opposition to the fascist regime. The cardinal countered by stressing that his priests had bought milk for the children and food for their parents as they "hadn't a crust of bread".

Viktoria Mohacsi, an MEP from Hungary of Roma origin, told reporters after an inspection of Roma camps in Italy that conditions were the worst she had seen in Europe and that some camp residents have lived for as long as 50 years in Italy and are still illegal.

Rome's new right-wing mayor, Gianni Alemanno, said after visiting a gypsy camp that he saw "on the doorstep of Rome, images from the Third World, things beyond my imagination", the Italian newsagency ANSA has reported. Many of the shacks in the camps have no water or gas. He called for major efforts "so that Rome doesn't become a city split in two between the haves and the have-nots".

Last week, the European Roma Rights Centre sent a letter to several Italian government officials, including Interior Minister Roberto Maroni, condemning what it called anti-Roma "pogroms" in Naples. The Budapest- based advocacy group asked the Italian Government to provide protection to all Roma in Italy and to investigate what had happened in Naples.

There are an estimated 7,000 Gypsies in Rome, a metropolis of 2.7 million people. In Naples, a city of three million, their numbers are believed to be in excess of 10,000. The total number of Roma people resident in Italy is estimated at 160,000, or about 0.2 per cent of the population. Sixty per cent are under the age of 18. Many arrived from the Balkans in the early 1990s when ethnic conflict raged there, but other Roma families have lived in Italy for generations.

The people of Naples, however, are not simply revolting at the new and uncontrolled influx of Roma people, and other legal (and illegal) immigrants from Eastern Europe and Africa, now competing with them to earn their daily crust of bread. The city that used to be one of the tourist jewels of the Mediterranean has been turned this year into a stinking wasteland of uncollected rubbish, despite the best efforts of Gianni Di Gennaro, the "rubbish commissioner", a former national police chief drafted in from Rome six months ago to try to clear up the mess.

Tourists have been packing their bags and leaving again almost as soon as they arrive, after smelling the acrid fumes of the bonfires of uncollected rubbish, which hang heavy in the fetid air. The luxury hotels along the waterfront are deserted and report massive cancellations of summer bookings.

Mr Berlusconi held his first cabinet meeting here this week amid a blaze of publicity that he was coming to "clean up the city". But the best he could suggest was to prolong the mission of the unfortunate Di Gennaro, and to set up a call centre from which the enraged citizenry can receive such obvious advice as to stay indoors so as not to risk slipping on the waste-strewn pavements, and to tell children to wash their hands when they come home. But even Mr Berlusconi can't tell them where they should put their uncollected bags of household rubbish.

The long arm of the local mafia, the Camorra, is, naturally, also present. It appears that one of the rubbish commissioner's principal solutions to the crisis, to send a daily freight train loaded with 1,000 tons of Neapolitan garbage to Germany for treatment in an incinerator in Lower Saxony, has ground to a halt for obscure reasons connected with Camorra interference. This is apparently why the garbage crisis has suddenly accelerated. Naples produces nearly 2,000 tons of new rubbish each day, and during the past month the outflow has diminished while new waste piles up.

Naples' parish priests are exhorting their congregations not only to show tolerance to the Roma people, but also to sort their rubbish. Fr Massimo Ghezzi, in charge of the Queen of Paradise parish, said: "I stood up in my pulpit last Sunday, which was Ecology Day here, and told my congregation that it is up to each one of us to produce less rubbish."

But trying to convince Neapolitans that they have to take the problems of their city in hand themselves is clearly an uphill task.