Boycott Italy! Ban Apartheid! – The Petition Site

Quoted from http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/boycottItaly:

Boycott Italy! Ban Apartheid! – The Petition Site

petition overview | letter

Boycott Italy! Ban Apartheid!

Target: Silvio Berlusconi Sponsoredby: The Romani Way

The bodies of Cristina, 12, and Viola, 11, were left on the sand after they drowned in rough seas as holidaymakers carry on sunbathing nearby. It was the week%u2019s most shocking picture: gipsy girls dead on a beach ignored by sunbathers%u2026 Now there is more chilling evidence of how Italy%u2019s brutal crackdown on the Roma has sick echoes of the country%u2019s fascist past.

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.

Italy’s brutal crackdown on Gypsies echoes country’s fascist past

Italian Government’s ‘Mussolini methods’ anger human rights groups David Charter in Brussels

Italy%u2019s plan to fingerprint Roma children is being challenged by human rights organisations.

Italian MPs are coming under pressure from international agencies to refuse to confirm the state of emergency being used by the Berlusconi Government to bring in the fingerprinting. Amnesty International believes that the measures break at least two articles of the European Convention of Human Rights %u2014 the right to a private life and the right to non-discrimination.

But a case at the European Court of Human Rights would take years to reach a conclusion and the only immediate way of stopping the fingerprinting campaign would be to persuade Italian MPs to reject the Government%u2019s security package when it is debated in parliament this month.

The most outspoken pressure has come from the Council of Europe, the rights body set up after the Second World War, which runs the human rights court in Strasbourg. Thomas Hammerberg, its commissioner for human rights, visited a Roma camp in Rome last month and said that the authorities were using the same methods as Mussolini in the 1930s. %u201CThese are methods which recall measures adopted in the past and which led to the repression of Roma people,%u201D he said. %u201CThe problem of Roma is widespread in Europe: housing, health, education, employment, political representation . . . But for a long time in Italy the Roma have been a symbol of something that is unwanted.%u201D

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article4272453.ece

“I would kill them all,” said Virginia Cristell, a mother in her forties who screwed up her face when asked about her Gipsy neighbours.

“Send them to the country – or send them somewhere. They are very dirty and there are lots of problems with burglary and thieving. They make toxic smoke. This is no place for them.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/2529024/Italians-applaud-as-troops-quash-Gipsy-crimewave.html

Stop the Italian campaign of ethnic violence and hatred against the Roma (Gypsy) people! Boycott Italian goods and services! Nothing from Italia! It worked with South Africa. It can work again with Italy!

Silvio Berlusconi

Premier’s Office

Palazzo Chigi

Piazza Colonna

Rome 00187

Italy

Prime Minister Berlusconi:

We the Undersigned decry in the strongest possible terms Italy’s descent from the vanguard of civilized nations for two thousand years down the dark path, that they chose for such a short time of fascism, racism and ethnic hatred, that resulted in the humilation and defeat of the Italian nation. Surely the lessons of this path have not been so soon forgotten by the Italian people?

The appalling and unjustified human rights abuses, state sponsored violence and apartheid against the Roma (gypsy) people must cease immediately. Every major human rights organization such as Amnesty International and such bodies as the Council of Europe have decried this horrifying return to the practices that served Italy so awfully before.

We demand that the Italian government and people rescind the laws, practices and abuse that are being perpetrated against the Roma under the most thinly disguised veils of law and order. We demand that the same practices, the whipping up of ill informed hysterical public opinion to foster violence and hatred against the Roma to distract from Italy’s more pressing societal woes; the targeting of the Roma as the cause of Italy’s many social problems; the vilifying of the Roma as the only and most serious cause of crime as pathetic attempt to foster the kind of nationalism that Italy has eschewed since her ignoble ruin in World War 2, immediately cease and that the Italian government and people not only restore the Rome’s civil and human rights but apologize for this appalling return to the same practices that with Italy’s full complicity led to the Holocaust.

Until the Italian government and people return to their senses, we must regretfully institute a full boycott of Italy, all her products, commerce and services. Italy has instituted the ugliest kind of apartheid against the Roma and much like the apartheid in South Africa we must shun Italy as she has chosen to place herself outside the boundaries of civilized nations. We pledge to boycott all products and services that are made or originated in Italy, to refrain from travel to, within and from Italy and to hold ourselves apart from the practitioners of ethnic hatred and apartheid.

We can only hope that the great nation of Italy views the blood on its hands from the Holocaust and its fascist horrors of World War 2 in the deepest repugnance and will soon awaken from the nightmare they are perpetrating against the Roma lest they also fail to recall the ignoble end it last lead them to.

Italy remember your past and think of your future. Until then we must turn our face away from you and all your commerce.

signature
goal: 100,000
4
signatures!

Kal The Rom Sound and Fury

Quoted from http://www.voiceofroma.com/kal/kal.htm:

Kal The Rom Sound and Fury

 

 

 

 

KAL
September – October 2008

Romani Routes

Presents:Kal
Rom sound & Fury (the sequel)
Fall 2008 U.S. Tour

Kal, a young Romani (Gypsy) band whose self-titled album topped the European world music charts in April 2006, will be making its second tour of the United States in September/October 2008. Playing music from Bosnia, Croatia, Bulgaria, Macedonia and their home base in Serbia, the 7-piece band features a “dynamic blend of traditional instruments, rock’n’roll in attitude, fuelled on dance beats and rooted in the Balkan blues. In their wit, imagination, ability to throw disparate sounds together and refusal to play by “folkloric” rules, Kal mark themselves as both part of Balkan Gypsy tradition and 21st Century Roma cultural activists.” (Garth Cartwright, author of Princes Among Men: Journeys with Gypsy Musicians)

The disparate sounds of Kal’s music describe a new, post-modern Roma identity that confronts romantic Gypsy clichés. Dragan Ristic, who founded the band with his brother Dushan, says, “We are not living in the past… I’m an urban person; belong to the modern world, [and] go to rave parties… so mixing traditional and urban elements is the best way of presenting our culture.”

Ristic’s family were beneficiaries of Yugoslavia’s President Tito’s desire to involve the Roma in Yugoslav, and their father encouraged Dragan and Dusan to take pride in their heritage while getting an education. Now, they are among the fortunate few able to cross between Rom (Gypsy) and Gadje (non-Rom) society. “No one believed in the ideal of Yugoslavia more than the Roma,” Ristic says. “We so wanted to belong. The resulting collapse of the nation and all the nationalism has made us focus on what we are; not Yugoslavs, but Roma. Ironic that it takes war for us to push ourselves forward, huh? I ran Roma theatre companies in Belgrade and Budapest, achieved a lot, but realized that music remains a more powerful vehicle to articulate our culture.”

In 2006 Kal published a CD for the world-music label, Asphalt Tango, and instantly became a musical band with a worldwide reputation. In 2006 alone Kal performed approximately 100 concerts around the world in France, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, Germany, Iceland, the UK, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Croatia and the USA. Kal performed at the famous World Music Expo, “WOMEX” and in April 2006 this band captured first position on the “World Music Charts Europe” (www.wmce.de) and third position on the 2006 annual “World Music Charts Europe”. Since the establishment of this music chart, no Romani band or any band from the Balkans has captured any of the first five positions.

The members of Kal are Dragan Ristic (guitar & lead vocal), Dragan Mitrovic (accordion), Jovica Maric (accordion & vocals), Djordje Belkic (violin), Aleksandar Cvejic (electric bass), Goran Savic (Drum) and Aleksandar Radojicic (percussion).

Romani Routes is a project of Voice of Roma, a nonprofit organization based in Sebastopol, California. The aim of Romani Routes is to present the virtuosity of Romani musicians and the richness and depth of Romani music in a way that counteracts the hype of the mythologized “Gypsy”. It is routine for presenters of sensationalized “Gypsy” music and even traditional Romani music to surround those performances with half-truths and stereotypes about Roma and Romani culture. Furthermore, in an atmosphere of rampant prejudice and unfair discrimination against Roma, far too many presenters exploit Romani musicians unjustly. Voice of Roma, through Romani Routes, seeks to lead the way out of this situation by ensuring connections among the musicians, Romani culture, and the cause of Romani rights.

 

Tour information and bookings: Sani Rifati, P.O. Box 514, Sebastopol, CA 95473 Tel: (707) 823-7941 email: voiceofroma@comcast.net

Boycott Italy!

Boycott any and all Italian products and services until the Italian governemnt and people stope the abuse of the Roma (gypsy) people and  removes the state sponsored system of apartheid and ethnic abuse.

FItalians applaud as troops quash ‘Gipsy crimewave’

Roma_Daily_News@yahoogroups.com wrote:

[Roma Daily News] Digest Number 2016

Italians applaud as troops quash ‘Gipsy crimewave’

Posted by: “Roma Virtual Network” romale@zahav.net.il valery_novoselsky

Sat Aug9,2008 7:20am (PDT)

Italians applaud as troops quash ‘Gipsy crimewave’

When soldiers arrived with submachine guns to fight crime last week outside Rome’s Saxa Rubra metro station, residents of the quiet commuter suburb applauded and shouted “bravo”.

By Nick Meo in Rome

9 Aug 2008

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/2529024/Italians-applaud-as-troops-quash-Gipsy-crimewave.html
“It’s great to see the Army here,” enthused Luigi Cabras, 60, a civil servant. “There used to be lots of petty stealing, but it’s much better now. And the Gipsies who were camped around here have gone, thank God.”

The station is hardly crime-plagued; a littering problem, some pick-pocketing, and annoying car park break-ins, all blamed on Gipsies from the squalid camp which used to be next to the station until bulldozers moved in a fortnight ago.

But everybody knows why combat veterans from Afghanistan and Iraq have been deployed, the first time the Army has been on the streets of Italy since anti-Mafia operations in the 1990s.

Mr Cabras gestured towards a nearby field and shook his head sadly. “Before things change, you have to have a dead body,” he said.

Where he pointed to was where an Italian admiral’s wife was raped and beaten to death last November, in one of Rome’s most shocking murders for years.

Giovanna Reggiano, a 47-year-old housewife and religious education teacher, was walking back to her car along a badly-lit road when she was attacked by an illegal immigrant from Romania.

Saxa Rubra’s Gipsy community claims that the man arrested for the crime, 24-year-old Nicolae Mailat, was not in fact a Gipsy, despite him being detained on one of their local camps. But the incident nonetheless provoked a nationwide backlash against Italy’s 150,000 strong Gipsy community, which has seen them portrayed as one of the biggest threats to the Eternal City since the Barbarian invasions.

Gipsies, also known as Roma, have been in Italy for centuries, ever since their ancestors arrived as metalsmiths and merchants from their native India. Many live in houses rather than itinerant camps and have married Italians, sending their children to school and gradually integrating into society.

But over the past decade, their numbers have been almost doubled by the arrival of poorer, uneducated Gipsies from Eastern Europe, some fleeing Balkan wars, others simply in search of a better life, creating addition strains with a host community that has never entirely accepted them.

Unlike many Rome intellectuals, who complain about authoritarianism, Saxa Rubra’s white collar workers are delighted to see the military fully-armed as they set off for work.

Fabio Monaci, 25, who has been giving the soldiers discounts at his sandwich shop and listening to their stories about Kabul, feels much safer.

“Crime is a real worry in Italy now,” he said gravely as he poured an expresso. “But it won’t be so bad if we get into a new era of discipline.”

That is exactly what is promised by new premier Silvio Berlusconi, a Right-wing populist who has just ridden into power for the third time with his ex-Fascist and xenophobic Northern League allies on a wave of popular fear about crime.

Sending out 3,000 troops to guard railway stations and tourist spots has been Mr Berlusconi’s boldest move yet, and judging from the mood in the suburbs, the soldiers have won the hearts and minds of the commuting classes, even if they have not struck much of a blow against crime. So far one pickpocket has been detained in the nationwide operation – the military has orders to arrest only suspects caught in the act.

British tourists, who are out in force in Rome’s piazzas and trattorias, were a little surprised to see them. “Has there been a coup?” was the bemused response of one pensioner from Scotland at the news that troops were on the streets.

But after the murder of Segnora Reggiana, most Italians are pleased to see them. The killing was particularly shocking for Romans because their city is considered relatively safe by the standards of other European cities – there is nothing comparable to London’s current knife crime epidemic, for example.

Mr Berlusconi declared a “Roma emergency”, produced a disputed dossier of alleged immigrant muggings, robberies and murders, and promised to dismantle illegal Gipsy camps. So far 700 have been identified.

Even more controversial in a nation whose Fascist rulers helped the Nazis deport Jews and Gipsies during World War Two, fingerprinting of Gipsies has started, despite the European Union saying the programme was encouraging xenophobia, and a Roman Catholic group describing it as racist. On the streets of northern Rome such reservations are hard to find.

“All our problems come from foreigners getting drunk, smashing windows and stealing,” said Anna Maria Mercure, who at 80 is old enough to remember an earlier era of Italian discipline. “Mussolini had his positive side. The streets were safe in his day.”

Whether they are genuinely more dangerous now is disputed, but even Left-wingers are as concerned as those on the Right and aware that there is no straightforward solution to a difficult and emotive social problem. And whatever the truth of the matter, Gipsy encampments up and down the country are the main target as long-simmering tensions erupt into open hostility. The residents of the Rome suburb of Cento Centocelle, a pleasant, tree-lined district of modest apartment blocks, finally lost patience last week with the Gipsies in a local camp called Casalina 900, a miniature shanty town where rats and naked children run amid piles of half-burned rubbish.

The residents of the camp, mainly Gipsies who fled the Balkans, have co-existed uncomfortably with their Italian neighbours for more than a decade. Their children sporadically attend local schools and the camp’s men sometimes escape their families to watch football matches on the television of a local café, alongside Italian men doing the same thing.

That all came to an end last week when camp residents burned some old tyres instead of taking them to the dump, creating large clouds of acrid black smoke. Their neighbours might normally have shrugged it off as just routine nuisance, but in the current political climate, it became the catalyst for a near riot, with Centro Centocelle’s residents staging a large demonstration in the middle of a major highway.

“I would kill them all,” said Virginia Cristell, a mother in her forties who screwed up her face when asked about her Gipsy neighbours.

“Send them to the country – or send them somewhere. They are very dirty and there are lots of problems with burglary and thieving. They make toxic smoke. This is no place for them.”

Soon her second wish will come true. Rome’s new right-wing mayor, Gianni Alemanno, promised the middle-class troublemakers that if they gave up their road protest he would get rid of the camp.

For the inhabitants of Casalino 900, the bulldozers will be another of life’s frequent disasters. Afterwards they will scavenge what possessions they can, and move off to some other patch of unoccupied land. The camp has now been sealed off by police, but The Sunday Telegraph sneaked in through a hole in a chain link fence round the back.

Inside is dislike of Italy and fear of the future. But the teenage mothers suckling infants have grown up in Rome and most only speak Italian, making it difficult to contemplate returning to former homes in Eastern Europe.

Camp resident Najo Adzovic, 37, says he deserted the Federal Yugoslav Army and fled to Italy when he was ordered to slaughter 15 Muslims during the Balkans wars.

Over a thimble-like cup of Turkish coffee made for visiting guests he explained how the community feels.

“I don’t like the police outside our camp or the military presence on our streets,” he said. “There is some petty crime committed by Gipsies because our people are poor, it is true, but we are not all criminals.”

The fingerprint policy that has them so worried – and fearful that the Government is trying to drive them out of Italy – has been drawn up by the junior party in Mr Berlusconi’s coalition, Alleanza Nationale. Until it reinvented itself in the 1990s, it was a neo-fascist party.

National deputy Marco Marsilio is an amiable young politician with a neatly trimmed beard and fashionable jacket. He makes an articulate case for fingerprinting in order to help protect Gipsy children who he insists are bought and sold as beggars, although critics claim he is nothing but a myth peddler.

“The leftists aren’t able to understand this fear of crime because they have an ideological prejudice against law and order,” said Mr Marsilio. “The problem is that for too long in Italy there was a tolerant and permissive policy.”

Mr Marsilio bridles at the mention of the “New Fascist” nick-name for his party. “We are equivalent to David Cameron and the Conservative party in England,” he said. “We are very interested in the environment and we are democratic.”

Equally smooth is his colleague Alessandro Cochi, who asks nervously whether what is happening in Italy is seen from Britain as a wave of Fascism. He laughed off a 1930s-style propaganda poster in his office of a wild-eyed young man giving a stiff-arm salute – he is not a Fascist, he says, nor is Italy suffering a Fascist wave.

That, however, is not the view of Goffredo Bezzecchi, 69, an Italian Gipsy who came close to death at the hands of the Nazis after Italian Fascists sent his family to a detention centre during the war. They escaped before they could be deported to the death camps in Germany, but Mr Bezzechi, who was fingerprinted by Italian officials at his home near Milan last month, feels history is now at risk of repeating itself.

“These things were done in the Fascist days when Gipsies were killed or sent to concentration camps,” he said. “These politicians should remember that we are human, not garbage.”

FRA incident report on violent attacks against Roma in Italy

Roma_Daily_News@yahoogroups.com wrote:

Posted by: "Roma Virtual Network" romale@zahav.net.il valery_novoselsky

Sat Aug9,2008 7:46am (PDT)

FRA incident report on violent attacks against Roma in Italy

This report by the European Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA) provides information on the impact of the recent events in the Ponticelli district of Naples on Roma, immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers in May-June 2008. Building on the former “rapid response” mechanism instituted by the EUMC, the Incident Report is the result of a situation which requires further examination to assess whether fundamental rights have not been respected for whatever reason and to identify the relevant information that may result in future action by the Agency or EU institutions. The report brings together the basic facts on these violent attacks as well as background information regarding the situation of Roma in Italy. It also describes efforts to address the situation by the Italian Authorities and the International Community, in particular the European Parliament, the Council of Europe, the OSCE, and civil society organisations.

Read more on http://fra.europa.eu/fra/index.php?fuseaction=content.dsp_cat_content&catid=3fb38ad3e22bb&contentid=4898692b6b22f

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