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A hasty decree?

In what has been described as unseemly haste, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s right wing government passed a decree on Friday that toughens measures against sexual crimes and illegal immigration. The decree came in response to a public outcry against a series of rapes that have been blamed on foreigners, mainly Romanians.

The new legislation goes into effect immediately but needs parliament’s approval within 60 days to become law. It increases jail sentences for rape, gives free legal counsel to victims of sexual violence and makes stalking a crime. It also allows town mayors to form unarmed volunteer citizens’ patrols to help police forces prevent further crimes, sets a mandatory life sentence for the rape of minors or attacks where the victim is killed. The decree also allows authorities to detain immigrants for six months, up from two months, while they work to identify them, process asylum requests and expel those not entitled to stay.

Several police unions issued a note of warning saying the government’s move would encourage vigilante justice and increase the already growing number of racist and anti-immigrant crimes in Italy. On February 15, a gang of about 20 masked men beat up four Romanians in a bar. This followed the rape of a 14 year old girl on Valentine’s Day (February 14), allegedly by two Romanians who have been arrested. In schools black children have been attacked and immigrants say they no longer feel safe in an Italy that is riding a wave of xenophobia.

Earlier this month an unemployed Indian, Navtej Singh Siddhu was attacked by three persons high on drugs and alcohol as he lay sleeping on a bench at a railway station in Rome. The fractured his skull with a bottle, punched him, sprayed him with metallic paint and petrol and set him alight. The attackers said they only wanted high jinks, not to commit a racist crime. But Balraj Singh, a spokesman for Italy’s Indian community scoffs at this claim. “Everyone knows only immigrants sleep in stations. Their crime was perfectly premeditated. Otherwise how did they possess spray paint and petrol at 3 a.m.? This crime is clearly racially motivated and it is not the first of its kind against the Indian community,” Mr. Singh told The Hindu. An Indian PhD student Bharat Gupta was also set upon by a gang of youths as he was walking home last August. He claims he did not know his attackers who picked on him only because he was obviously foreign.

Fuelling this wave of hatred is Mr. Berlusconi’s anti-immigrant and xenophobic coalition partner, the Lega Nord or the Northern League. Italy’s hardline interior minister Roberto Maroni belongs to the Lega which has made the fight against immigration and Italy’s poor south its major electoral plank. In the 1990s when the Lega first came to prominence, its slogans targeted the Albanians, boatloads of whom were fleeing chaos in their homeland to seek asylum in Italy. Their target then shifted to the Roma gypsies, Europe’s largest minority, with calls to fingerprint every Roma man, woman and child to “stop the thieving and the rapes.” In response to rabble rousing by Lega politicians mobs burnt down entire Roma camps after a Roma man was accused of raping an Italian woman in 2008. The Lega’s battlecry is now the fight against economic migrants, many of whom reach Italian shores after dangerous and gruelling boat crossings from black African nations.

The new measures have also been slammed by the Roman Catholic Chruch and human rights groups which say that the government is inciting the nation to hatred of foreigners and making immigrants the scapegoat for the country’s social and economic ills. Earlier this month Italy passed another law obliging doctors to denounce illegal immigrants coming to them for treatment. The medical profession said the law obliged doctors to betray their Hippocratic Oath. It would also encourage immigrants carrying deadly diseases such as drug resistant Tuberculosis to resist seeking treatment for fear of being denounced to the authorities.

Human rights groups say that Italy desperately needs immigrant labour and that the Lega is manipulating public sentiment for electoral gain. Mario Marazitti who works for the Christian charity Sant Egidio told The Hindu: “There are an estimated three to four hundred thousand illegal immigrants in Italy. The legal immigrant population is 3.2 million of which a little over 2 million are non-Europeans. Italy has a negative population growth rate and desperately needs immigrant labour. Take the case of the “Badanti” or the care givers for the elderly. If it weren’t for the immigrants, old people in this country would find themselves without support. The government has been encouraging the politics of hatred with immigrants and Roma gypsies being singled out as the source of all crime and social upheaval. Crimes against immigrants and the Roma have grown in recent years and Italy is fast losing its welcoming character to becoming a fortress nation suspicious of anyone foreign.”

His assessment was fully supported by Mr. Balraj Singh who said the bottom would fall out of Italy’s northern agricultural heartland if Indian farmers working illegally in Italy were forced to leave. An estimated 20,000 Indians work on farms in the right Po valley, most of them Punjabis or Sikhs. Many of them do not have work permits.

The rules governing legal immigration are skewed by an unrealistic “professional quota” system that has been deliberately put in place to stem the flood of unwanted foreigners. Most Italians do not wish to do the tough and often dirty jobs immigrants are willing to do. “But there is no quota for such jobs since theoretically, there are Italians aplenty capable of working in construction or garbage collection. So workers come in illegally on visitor visas or clandestinely with the help of human traffickers and they then attempt to legalise their situation by persuading their employers to give them contracts. The quotas for professionals are rarely filled — there are not enough doctors or computer engineers wishing to come to Italy. The government must recognise the situation for what it is and take corrective measures,” Paoli Ciani, a social worker told The Hindu.

The government says that 35 per cent of all crimes committed on Italian soil are the handiwork of foreigners. Statistics do not bear out this claim. “The government is really pointing fingers at the immigrant community. No a word is said about mafia killings or mafia related crimes where entire municipalities have been implicated. Money budgeted to fight clandestine immigration has been increased while there have been cutbacks in monies set aside for the fight against the mafia. Not having legal papers was never a “crime.” This government has made it one while ignoring the far worse, heinous crimes committed by organised crime,” said social psychologist Vittoria Natoli.

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