In Memory of the Gypsy People

Italy: The Red Cross describes the conditions the Roma people are living in as “worse than those in Uganda”

Italy: The Red Cross describes the conditions the Roma people are living in as “worse than those in Uganda”

http://www.tolerance.ca/Article.aspx?ID=19922&L=fr

Rome – The hot weather has had drastic effects on the Roma settlements in Italy, encouraging the spread of mycotic and bacterial infections, and aggravating diseases of the respiratory and digestive tracts, and creating heart and neurological problems. Health care for the Roma people is practically non-existent, they are denied essential medicines – which only in some cases are prescribed by doctors, but which the Roma have to pay for.

To relieve the symptoms of certain pathologies it is necessary to increase water consumption, but no measures have been taken by the authorities to supply the camps with sufficient drinking water. On the contrary, the Roma families are subjected to camp clearances from micro-settlements almost daily, which only makes the lack of clean water even more serious. And without water, and food and medicines, the children, elderly and the weakest members of the community often fall seriously ill and even die.

Massimo Barra, the president of the Italian Red Cross (an organization that very rarely gives out information that would damage the image of the racist institutions) declared that the conditions the Roma people in the capital are forced to live in are worse than those in the poor villages of Uganda: “I recently went to see a group of HIV positive women who live in the suburbs of Kampala, in Uganda, and I found them living in better conditions.” Italy, however, is continuing a persecution that does not take into consideration the “nomads’” basic human rights.

Instead of adopting health and welfare measures (in front of a rapid increase in the death rate and the appearance and aggravation of pathologies) the Italian authorities are continuing to eat up considerable resources in carrying out camp clearances (without the offer of alternative lodgings); police and military operations; and the pointless, superficial fingerprinting of communities that are being driven away from one place to the next.

The presence of the Red Cross gives the illusion that there is a welfare programme for the Roma people underway, but no project of this type exists. It is intolerable that the European Union and United Nations (in spite of all the words and declarations, and in spite of the resolutions and warnings condemning racism in Italy) are just looking on – like seventy years ago – at the destruction of a people, and the model of civilization respectful of human rights that Europe would like to embody.

Gruppo EveryOne

Tel: (+ 39) 334-8429527 – (+ 39) 331-3585406

www.everyonegroup.com

“The shameful history of anti-Gypsism is forgotten – and repeated”

18//08/08

Thomas Hammarberg, Human Rights Commissioner, Council of Europe

Only a few thousand Roma in Germany survived the Holocaust and the concentration camps. They faced enormous difficulties when trying to build up their lives again, having lost so many of their family members and relatives, and having had their properties destroyed or confiscated. Many of them had their health ruined. When some of them tried to obtain compensation, their claims were rejected for years.

http://www.coe.int/t/commissioner/Viewpoints/Default_en.asp

For these survivors no justice came with the post-Hitler era. Significantly, the mass killing of the Roma people was not an issue at the Nürnberg trial. The genocide of the Roma – Samudaripe or Porrajmos – was hardly recognised in the public discourse.

This passive denial of the grim facts could not have been surprising to the Roma themselves, as for generations they had been treated as a people without history. The violations they had suffered were quickly forgotten, if even recognised.

Sadly, this same pattern is repeated even today.

That is why it is particularly valuable that the Council of Europe has produced a series of fact sheets on Roma History. These are intended for teachers, pupils, political and other decision makers and every one else interested in knowing the facts about what this people have gone through.

Readers of these fact sheets may learn about 500 years of shameful repression in Europe of the various Roma groups since their arrival following the long migration from India. The methods have varied between enslavement, enforced assimilation, expulsion, internment and mass killings.

The ‘reasons’ for these policies have, however, been similar. The Roma were seen as unreliable, dangerous, criminal, and undesirable. They were the outsiders who could easily be used as scapegoats when things went wrong and the locals did not want to take responsibility.

In Wallachia and Moldavia (today’s Romania) the Roma lived in slavery and bondage for centuries up to 1855 when the last Roma slaves were finally emancipated.

In Spain more than ten thousand Roma were rounded up in a well planned military-police action one day in 1749. The purpose according to a leading clergyman who advised the government was to ‘root out this bad race, which is hateful to God and pernicious to man’. The result was devastating to the Roma community – the deportations, detentions, forced labour and killings destroyed much of the original Roma culture.

In the Austro-Hungarian Empire during the 18th century the rulers applied a policy of enforced assimilation. Roma children were taken from their parents and instructions went out that no Roma was allowed to marry another Roma. Furthermore, the Romani language was banned. This policy was brutally enforced. For instance, the use of the ‘Gypsy’ language was to be punishable by flogging.

Fascists in the 20th century turned also against the Roma. In Italy a circular went out in 1926 which ordered the expulsion of all foreign Roma in order to ‘cleanse the country of Gypsy caravans which needless to recall, constitute a risk to safety and public health by virtue of the characteristic Gypsy lifestyle’.

The order made clear that the aim was to ‘strike at the heart of the Gypsy organism’. What followed in fascist Italy for the Roma was discrimination and persecution. Many were detained in special camps; others were sent to Germany or Austria and later exterminated.

The fascist ‘Iron Guard’ regime in Romania started deportations in 1942. Like many Jews, about 30.00 Roma were brought across the river Dniester where they suffered hunger, disease and death. Only about half of them managed to survive the two years of extreme hardship before the policy changed.

In France about 6,000 Roma were interned during the war, the majority of them in the occupied zone. Unlike other victims, the Roma were not systematically released upon the German retreat. The new French authorities saw internment as a means of forcing them to settle.
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In the Baltic States a large number of the Roma inhabitants were killed by the German invasion forces and their local supporters within the police. Only 5-10 per cent of the Roma in Estonia survived. In Latvia about half of the Roma were shot while it is estimated that a vast majority of those in Lithuania were also killed.

In fact, all countries in Europe were affected by the racist ideas of the time. In the neutral Sweden the authorities had encouraged a sterilisation program already in the twenties which primarily targeted the Roma (and which continued up to the seventies). Also in Norway pressure was exerted on Roma to sterilise.

The Nazi regime defined the Roma (including the Sinti) as ‘racially inferior’ with an ‘asocial behaviour’ which was deemed hereditary. This, in fact, was a development of old and widespread prejudices in both Germany and Austria. The so-called Nürnberg race laws of 1935 deprived the Roma of their nationality and citizen’s rights. It was demanded that they should be interned into labour camps and sterilised by force.

An earlier plan of Nazi racists to keep some of the ‘racially pure’ Roma in a sort of anthropological museum was forgotten, while some Roma, not least children, were singled out for Josef Mengele’s cruel medical experiments. A policy of forced sterilisation was implemented, often without anaesthesia.

The systematic murder of Roma started in the summer 1941 when German troops attacked the Soviet Union. They were seen as spies (like many Jews) for the ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ and were shot by the German army and the SS in mass executions. Indeed, in all areas occupied by the Nazis there were executions of Roma people.

Figures are uncertain, but it is estimated that far more than hundred thousand were executed in those situations, including in the Balkans where the killings were supported by local fascists. The Ustascha militia in Croatia ran camps but also organised deportations and carried out mass executions.

In December 1942, the Nazi regime decided that all Roma in the ‘German Reich’ should be deported to Auschwitz. There they had to wear a dark triangle and a Z was tattooed to their arm. Of all camp inmates they had the highest death rate: 19,300 lost their lives there. Of them 5,600 were gassed and 13,700 died from hunger, disease or following medical experiments.

It is still not known how many Roma in total fell victim to the Nazi persecution. Not all Roma were registered as Roma and the records are incomplete. The fact that there was no reliable statistics about the number of Roma in these areas before the mass killings makes it even more difficult to estimate the actual number of casualties. The Council of Europe fact sheets state that it is highly probable that the number was at least 250,000. Other credible studies indicate that more than 500,000 Roma lost their lives, perhaps many more.

The fact sheets underline that there is a need of further research on the Roma history. The Roma themselves have had little possibility of recording events and the authorities have had little interest in doing so. Still there are Roma and other scholars whose work should be encouraged (several of them have been drawn upon by the authors of the fact sheets, for instance Ian Hancock and Grattan Puxon).

However, already the published fact sheets do make a difference. My hope is that many people will read them and that governments in Europe will support and facilitate this through translating these texts into national languages and disseminating them to teachers, politicians and others. Roma organisations should be assisted in circulating them widely within their communities.

There are a number of conclusions that will have to be drawn by a serious reader. One is that it is not surprising that there is a lack of trust amongst many Roma towards the majority society and that some of them see the authorities as a threat. When told to register or to be fingerprinted they fear the worst.

Indeed, there has still not been any recognition in several countries that this minority has been repressed in the past and no official apology has been given. One good example to the contrary was the decision by the government Bucharest in 2003 to establish a commission on the Holocaust which later published an important report on the repression and killings in Romania during the fascist period.

The fact sheets illustrate that the Roma have not migrated for devious reasons or because travelling is “in their blood”. When it has been possible they have indeed settled but for long they have had to move between or within countries to avoid repression or simply because they were not allowed to stay. The other main reason was that the kind of employment or jobs which were open to them required their moving.

There are lessons from history on how to handle the present spread of anti-Gypsism in some countries. The rhetoric from some politicians and xenophobic media has revived age-old stereotypes about the Roma and this in turn has ‘legitimised’ actions, sometimes violent, against Roma individuals. Again, they are made scapegoats.

Today’s rhetoric against the Roma is very similar to the one used by Nazis and fascists before the mass killings started in the thirties and forties. Once more, it is argued that the Roma is a threat to safety and public health. No distinction is made between a few criminals and the overwhelming majority of the Roma population. This is shameful and dangerous.

Canadian Committee to Stop the Horvath Extradition

Canadian Committee to Stop the Horvath Extradition
PO Box 73620, 509 St. Clair Ave. West
Toronto, ON M6C 1C0
(416) 651-5800, tasc@…

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE AUGUST 20, 2008

Wife, Son of Roma Refugee In Hiding Make Youtube Plea to Canadian Justice Minister

TORONTO – After months of unsuccessful attempts to obtain a meeting with Canadian Justice Minister Rob Nicholson, Erika Horvath and her 13-year-old son, Adam, have made the rather unusual move of recording a personal youtube plea in an effort to get a response (available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPSKyU5t7h4)

The meeting would be to discuss the case of Roma refugee Adolf Horvath, a husband and father who disappeared in mid-March, fearing extradition to the country that Canada had found he needed protection from, Hungary. The Horvath family, which has experienced severe anti-Roma racism in their homeland, as well as physical violence at the hands of skinheads and national police forces, came to Canada as refugees in 1999.

“We have written to Mr. Nicholson so many times, I have called his office, we even went to Niagara Falls and tried to set up a meeting there,” says Erika. (Video of that trip is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-S_yvLC2Cg&feature=related)

“They told me that I had to live in the area to get a meeting with him, So what, now I have to move to Niagara Falls? Why can’t I get a meeting? We have so much evidence of my husband’s innocence, and it looks like the previous Justice Minister just ignored it in deciding to send my husband back to Hungary.”

The Horvath case has raised a number of eyebrows since he was found in 2004 to be a person in need of protection based on the life-threatening persecution he experienced in Hungary. Indeed, a Pre-Removal Risk Assessment Officer (PRRA) concluded: “Given the applicant’s past experiences with the police and judicial system, I am satisfied that state protection would not be forthcoming to this particular applicant.”

Despite this finding, which technically became the opinion of then Immigration Minister Monte Solberg, the minister was asked for a new opinion by then Justice Minister Victor Toews once the Hungarian extradition request was made. Although only 16 months had passed since the PRRA finding, Solberg’s new opinion was completely different, with nothing to show why, suddenly, it would be considered safe to forcibly return Mr. Horvath.

The case is also complicated by the fact that the two complainants in the case against Mr. Horvath recanted their allegations almost ten years ago in a Hungarian court proceeding, leading Horvath and his supporters to ask how the case could have gotten as far as it has in Canada.

Erika and Adam Horvath wish to speak with Nicholson because they feel a grave mistake has been made in committing Mr. Horvath to extradition.

“We have news reports, expert human rights reports, all kinds of things that show that this extradition is dangerous for my husband,” says Erika. “Why can’t they just meet with us and see that a big mistake has been made? Is it because they don’t want to embarrass the Hungarian government because they are a NATO partner?”

A year after Mr. Solberg’s opinion that state protection for a Roma like Mr. Horvath was adequate, the United Nations Committee Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment and Punishment, in its concluding observations on Hungary released February 6, 2007, concluded, “The Committee is deeply concerned at reports of a disproportionately high number of the Roma in prisons and ill-treatment of and discrimination against the Roma by law enforcement officials, especially the police.”

Amnesty International points out in an assessment of anti-Roma discrimination in Europe released October 25, 2007, Roma are “often the victims of torture or other ill-treatment by law enforcement officers across the region. Roma were also [in the previous year] the victims of racist attacks during which they were not adequately protected by the police. The authorities in many countries failed to fulfil their domestic and international obligations towards the Roma community.”

Canada claims the presence of monitoring bodies would prevent harm from coming to Mr. Horvath, but such bodies are not in the physical jail with detainees, and can only respond once a complaint has been made. They cannot prevent harm from coming to an individual who has already been targetted.

Mr. Horvath, who was repeatedly a target of attacks (including a near-fatal stabbing witnessed by his wife and young son) before coming to Canada, would face additional risk now, supporters believe, given the high profile of his case. Indeed, web coverage of his case has drawn vicious anti-Roma and anti-Horvath comments on right-wing websites in Hungary.

When a Canadian Press article outlining Horvath’s plight was posted on the Hungarian website http://www.kuruc.info, scores of hateful and racist screeds aimed at Horvath and his family were posted.

Referring to Horvath as “an atrociously filthy Hungarian Roma-Gypsy killer,” the website features dozens of references that are insulting to Roma, including a shot at Canadian Press reporter who is characterized as a “racialist, Gypsy sympathizer.”

Various writers describe Roma as “atrociously filthy creatures” and, in one chilling comment, predict a time when vengeance is likely to be wreaked upon the Roma. “I have no future without my Dad. I cannot live without him. If he goes to Hungary, he might be killed and I do not want that,” 13-year-old Adam Horvath is quoted as saying, drawing this chilling response: “Well, yes, this is a shameless brazen lie and an example of the humbling, filthy Gypsy mendacity that discredits Hungary 100%. These are the lies that seriously humble and discredit our home country for which we will act as we have to act when the pendulum will swing backwards, and our time will come.”

Erika Horvath has collected scores of recent news stories from Hungary, as well as across Europe, illustrating the ongoing deterioration of human rights faced by the Roma, from proposed finger printing in Italy to physical attacks and broad daylight murders and home invasions against Roma in Hungary.

On July 21, for example, Hungarian press reported that about 30 gunfire shots were aimed at Roma houses at 12:30 am. “Local Romas have asked for police protection,” the report states, but the report later notes that in a similar anti-Roma incident in June, a Roma family was forcibly removed from the village of Galgagyörk by at least 30 members of the right-wing Hungarian Guards “with a police presence.”

On July 18, the Hungarian news outlet Magyar Nemzet reported in an article entitled “Proper Action? They forced the family to get down on their knees for hours,” that armed police commando units stormed into the homes of a number of Roma families in Soroksar and that “weapons were aimed at kids, women, ill individuals, and seniors and forced them to kneel down for hours with their hands up in the yard. According to the Budapest Police Headquarters the police response was appropriate.” The commandos did not say what they were looking for nor did they provide a search warrant.

“How can they say it is safe for my husband to go back? And if he is found and forced to go back, we would want to be with him, he is our life, so we would be exposed to this discrimination and violence too,” Erika says. “All of this could be solved if the Justice Minister contacted his counterpart in Hungary and asked about, for example, the fact that this whole case is based on two individuals, the alleged victims, who recanted their evidence in open court almost ten years ago.”

Erika and her son have been joined in a series of vigils for the past five months in Niagara Falls, at the Hungarian Consulate in Toronto, and outside the offices of various MPs. She vows they will continue to demonstrate until the extradition case is dropped.

“I am not a political person. I just want us to live our life in peace, and we really don’t understand why the Canadian government would allow its courts to be used by the Hungarians to persecute my husband.”

Refugee rights organizations are similarly concerned, and in May, the Canadian Council for Refugees passed the following resolution:

WHEREAS:

1. The Canadian government has proceeded with extradition requests against Protected Persons, putting them at risk of return to the country where they have a well-founded fear of persecution;

2. In some cases the extradition request seems to be based on evidence that may be motivated by racism;

THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED that the CCR ask the Government of Canada to give full respect to obligations under the Convention relating to the Status of Refugees and the Convention Against Torture, and not to proceed with extradition requests against Protected Persons unless status has been vacated or extradition would be justified under the Conventions.”

More information, or to arrange an interview with Erika and Adam, (416) 651-5800 ext. 1.

Those who wish to support the Horvath family are being asked to contact Nicholson’s office and ask that he meet with the family as a first step towards ending the extradition. His office can be reached at (613) 995-1547, email: Nichor@…

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Pope Joins Growing Chorus of Berlusconi Critics

August 19, 2008 6:00 PM

by Chris Coats

http://www.findingdulcinea.com/news/international/Aug-08/Pope-Joins-Growing-Chorus-of-Berlusconi-Critics.html

The Italian government’s immigration and crime policies come under fire for xenophobic undertones by Italy’s guiding moral voice.

Papal Response to Italy’s Xenophobia

Italy’s Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s controversial immigration policies have found a new and vocal critic in Pope Benedict XVI, signaling a possible backlash to the prime minister’s hard line on immigration.

Already under fire from the wider European community for a series of measures aimed at Italy’s Roma and immigrant populations, Berlusconi found himself at the receiving end of pointed comments from the Church.

After winning a third term on a platform of fighting the country’s rising crime rates, Berlusconi launched a number of efforts that targeted Italy’s Roma population at the urging of far right political allies.

Italy’s Roma population hovers around 150,000.

Critics have argued that the efforts, coupled with comments from administration officials ranging from ambivalent to supportive, have bred an environment of prejudice and encouraged acts of racial violence against immigrants.

The Berlusconi government’s more controversial measures have included a move to expel large groups of immigrants from Italy, an effort to close the borders to all Romanians, and recently, a program that would require the registration and fingerprinting of all Roma, including children.

Directly addressing the government’s mix of aggressive legislation and ambivalence toward the violent acts aimed at the Roma population in Rome and Naples, the Catholic weekly Famiglia Cristiana (In Italian) warned of “new forms of fascism.”

While the Catholic Church first responded to criticism from the government by saying the publication, operated by a separate Catholic order, did not speak for the Papacy, Benedict did not back away from the comments. Instead, the Pope used his Sunday address to comment on the rise of racism in countries across the world, citing the Old Testament gospel of Jesus’s encounter with a pagan woman and his ability to overcome initial misgivings to perform a miracle for her daughter.

“One of humanity’s great conquests is indeed the overcoming of racism. Unfortunately, however, there are new and worrying examples of this in various countries, often linked to social and economic problems that nonetheless can never justify contempt or racial discrimination,” Benedict said.

While the Church remarked that Benedict’s comments were intended for the entire world, not just Italy, their timing was seen by many as a declaration of support for Famiglia Cristiana.

On Berlusconi’s behalf, the government replied that the Pope was not talking about them.
The Pope’s comments come amid a noticeable public shift against the government’s hard line policies following the death of two Roma girls, aged 10 and 11, on a beach outside of Naples.

After drowning, the two bodies were left for hours in the sand, ignored by a large number of visitors at the beach. The reaction to photos of the bodies and the apathetic crowd resulted in a public outcry across Europe.

Critics, including Naples’ most senior Catholic, Cardinal Crescenzio Sepe, decried the girls’ deaths and public indifference, remarking that they “had faced nothing but prejudice in life and indifference in death; an unforgivable truth.”

Since then, negative public reaction to Berlusconi has grown increasingly louder, with some comparing his efforts to actions taken by Benito Mussolini toward Gypsies in 1926.

Coincidently, Mussolini’s political heirs, the National Alliance and Northern League, have become necessary political allies to Berlusconi in his effort to create a cohesive, center-right party.

Why do the Italians Hate Us?

Roma_Daily_News@yahoogroups.com wrote:

[Roma Daily News] Digest Number 2024

 

‘Why do the Italians hate us?’
It is an image that shocked the world: two young Gypsy children lie dead for three hours on an Italian beach while, feet away, a carefree couple enjoy a leisurely picnic. Dan McDougall travels to the Roma camps of Naples to meet the dead girls’ mother and finds fear and bitterness – and a country in danger of forgetting its far-Right past
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/aug/17/familyandrelationships.roma

A young girl at an illegal Roma camp 10km outside of Pisa, Italy. The camp is made up mostly of Roma from Bosnia and Kosovo. Photograph: Robin Hammond
Pulling each other by the hair, the Roma children scrap as they take turns at flicking their skinny wrists over the flaming funeral candles. Before the same Orthodox Christian shrine, their grandmother recites the Lord’s Prayer in a gravelly Romany tongue.

‘Am Mora Dat con san ando cheri.’ The words leave her mouth in whispers as she crosses herself and kisses a gold crucifix around her neck. The smallest child, no older than four, runs towards me, sticks out her tongue, and gestures a V for vaffanculo – the ubiquitous Italian fuck off – and disappears outside.

The damp ceiling of the two-room prefabricated hut the Gypsies call home is on the verge of collapse. The plastic-film windows, looking out on to the drab exterior walls of Naples’s most infamous prison, are so flimsy they wobble in the faint breeze. There are mattresses everywhere: on the floor, propped up against the sink. Like the inhabitants, they are thin and threadbare. The only nod to modernity is a gigantic home entertainment consul in the corner, spewing out a DVD of distorted recordings of Balkan folk songs. The wake we are attending in Naples’s most notorious Romany camp has been going for 10 days. Alcohol is scattered around the room; clear, foul-smelling moonshine sits overflowing from plastic cups and reclaimed Peroni bottles; a half-blind mongrel sleeps fitfully among the detritus of a thousand hand-rolled cigarettes.

Alongside a sepia portrait of the revered Capuchin friar, Padre Pio, stand blurry digital prints of 13-year-old Cristina and 11-year-old Violetta Djeordsevic – two Roma sisters whose sudden deaths in the shallow waters of a public beach on Italy’s Amalfi Coast last month encapsulated the threat of racism in modern Europe. It is a tragedy that has focused international attention on the ragged edge of Italy’s most chaotic city. The teenagers’ youth and beauty in the photographs, strangely, comes as a shock. Up until now, like most of the world, I had only seen their prostrate bodies, covered by short beach towels, with just their feet left exposed, on the scruffy beach at Torregaveta, a decrepit seaside suburb on the outer edge of the Bay of Naples.

On the morning of 17 July, Cristina and Violetta, along with their cousins Manuela and Diana, had made the regular journey from the dismal camp we are sitting in to one of Naples’s most popular beaches. Walking two miles to the nearest public transport link, and skipping aboard the local train that skirts the coastal cliffs of the city, the girls planned to sell trinkets – small wooden turtles carved by Nigerian immigrants – to daytrippers along the bay. At Torregaveta, after a long hot day with no sales, the sisters dared each other to jump from rocks into the sea. Violetta went first and disappeared, swept beneath the waves. Cristina, the eldest, jumped in to save her. Both drowned, clinging on to each other.

What happened next shocked the world.

The girls were recovered from the sea by a passer-by and later declared dead by a lifeguard who called for help as Manuela and Diana wept, banging their tiny fists on the corpses.

As the police arrived, their cousins, distraught and in shock, were taken away to contact relatives. Two beach towels were used to cover the dead Roma girls. And then something extraordinary occurred.

Summer beach life resumed around the bodies for three hours until an ambulance finally showed up. In the most striking image of all, a couple nonchalantly ate a picnic while looking on at the scene. Another threw a frisbee nearby. The indifference, picked up by newspapers and TV stations across the world, was seen by the country’s liberal elite to be the final straw. The most senior Catholic in Naples, Cardinal Crescenzio Sepe, was the quickest to point out the coarsening of human sentiment which the behaviour in Torregaveta represented: ‘Cristina and Violetta,’ he told the Italian media, ‘had faced nothing but prejudice in life and indifference in death; an unforgivable truth.’

In Rome, the government winced. Masters of realpolitik, they knew that the deaths of Cristina and Violetta, both born in Italy but full-blood Roma, had come at a bad time for the nation, forced in recent months to defend itself to its European neighbours on charges of discrimination against Gypsies and immigrants. Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who swept to power for a third time on a thinly disguised anti-immigration ticket, was in the middle of a controversial yet populist programme of fingerprinting the country’s 150,000 Roma, some of whose families have been in Italy since the middle ages. According to critics it has become impossible to disguise the Fascist undertones of these actions, and they point to the fact that the first expulsions of Gypsies took place in 1926 under Benito Mussolini. The dictator’s political heirs, the ‘post-fascist’ National Alliance, are now coalition partners in Berlusconi’s government.

In May this year, rumours of an abduction of a baby girl by a Gypsy woman in Naples triggered an orgy of violence against Roma camps by thugs wielding iron bars, who torched caravans and drove Gypsies from their slum homes in dozens of assaults, orchestrated by the notoriously violent local mafia, the Camorra. The response of Berlusconi’s government? ‘That is what happens when Gypsies steal babies,’ shrugged Roberto Maroni, Italy’s interior minister and a key Berlusconi ally.

For the 10m Europeans all loosely labelled as Roma or Gypsies, life is an endless procession of marginalisation and prejudice. Corralled into settlements across the continent, 84 per cent of Roma in Europe are estimated to live below the poverty line. Perhaps even more shocking is the lack of a more detailed picture. Official indifference and reluctance on the part of the Roma themselves means data on life expectancy, infant mortality, employment and literacy rates are sparse. Yet all are likely to be lower than those of mainstream society.

The plight of the Roma has been a part of European life since their mysterious migration from Rajasthan around 1,000AD. Queen Elizabeth I was the first who sought to expel the Roma from England. German Emperor Karl VI ordered their extermination in 1721. In parts of the Balkans, Roma were traded as slaves until the middle of the 19th century. In the 20th century, hundreds of thousands of Roma perished in the Nazi Holocaust, known in Gypsy folklore as the Porrajmos or ‘The Devouring’. How Roma like Cristina and Violetta came to be born in Naples has more to do with the modern legacy of war in the Balkans. In the early Nineties, thousands of Gypsies crossed the Adriatic after the outbreak of fighting in Yugoslavia and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. For many of the Gypsies, the majority of whom were illegal immigants, lawless Naples was the place where they could disappear into the chaos.

It’s 6.30am in the graffiti-strewn centro storico of Old Naples. Two young priests whizz past on an ancient canary-yellow Vespa, the engine putt-putting through the silent streets. Running a red light and skirting the baroque entrance to the chapel of San Lorenzo Maggiore, the seminarians roughly scrape the kerb and abandon the scooter. They are late for morning prayers. Down through the narrow cobblestone streets, far below them, is the harbour and the azure Mediterranean.

Sparkling in the morning sunshine, the waters of the bay stretch west, out towards the dark mass of Vesuvius and Campi Flegrei, the ‘burning fields’, the volcanic plateau the Greeks once thought were the gates to hell.

Morning comes slowly here. Old men, their wrinkled faces as scorched and cracked as the dry earth, are the first to emerge, setting out white plastic chairs on the narrow streets outside their tenement homes as their wives clatter pans indoors and get on with their morning chores.

Armed with soapy water and sponges, a ragged group of municipal workers sets about removing hundreds of posters that have appeared across the city overnight. ‘Diritti per tutti’ (Rights for all). ‘White, black, yellow, red. Stop apartheid now,’ they proclaim beneath crude images of fingerprints. Beneath the new posters lie fading old ones calling for the mass deportation of Naples’s Roma Gypsies and immigrants.

‘Italy is divided on these girls, on the fate of the Roma. The conscience of the people has been pricked. You can see this on the walls of our city,’ says Francesca Saudino, our early morning guide and a campaigning Naples-based lawyer with Osservazione, a nationwide pressure group for Roma rights. ‘The reaction to the death of these children goes beyond anything that has happened before. The incident has exposed a long-held social realism in our country: that many working-class people think the Roma no better than animals, and the government is using this xenophobia to win votes and popularity. People are ashamed. The deaths of these girls has come to represent something more, perhaps a battle for Italy’s soul.’

We are heading to Scampia, the toughest and most lawless public housing estate in Europe. The taxi driver, reluctantly taking us there, isn’t pleased. He is charging us ‘treble’ and doesn’t tire of telling us, spitting out the demand at each traffic light between puffs of his cigarette.

Scampia is home of the infamous public housing towers known as Le Vele (the Sails), the place where Naples’s many drug addicts come to score the cheapest high-grade heroin and crack cocaine in the EU. A land of outsiders and lawbreakers living on the fringes of society, the district is also home to the majority of the city’s Roma. At the municipal entrance to the estate, with a nod to Dante’s Inferno, someone with a canister of red spray paint has written: ‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here.’

Our first sight is a string of burnt-out cars. It looks and feels like the Farza district of Kabul. The buildings appear as if they’ve been beset by a natural disaster. The elevators in most are gone. Broken pipes spew water everywhere and the forecourts are covered with knee-deep garbage. The air outside smells of burning tyres. From the drab high-rise flats, conspicuous lookouts scan the roads for undercover police or special drug enforcement teams. Scampia has long been a key base for the narcotics arm of the Camorra.

Our driver drops us in the middle of Via Cupa Perillo alongside the carcass of a Fiat Punto. It marks the entrance to Campo Autorizzato, Scampia’s only official Roma camp – a couple of hundred caravans and prefabs strung on a narrow spit of land overshadowed by the high walls of Naples’s notorious Carcere Di Secondigliano prison. It is the place where Cristina and Violetta were born and lived all their lives.

‘This is a reclaimed swamp,’ says Francesca. ‘Some 700 Roma live here without running water, toilets, sewers, garbage disposal or proper heating and cooking facilities.’

As we approach the entrance, children play beside a polluted creek amid excrement spewed by an open-air communal toilet. Standing waiting for us in the centre of the roughshod tarmac road is Miriana Djeordsevic, the mother of the two dead girls. Shrouded in black with thin silk slippers on her feet, she is clutching the last photograph of her dead daughters. The mood around her is tense. In the days since the girls died, Miriana’s extended family have been forced to give their fingerprints to the authorities. In recent weeks, Roma groups from here have demonstrated, wearing the black triangles Gypsies were forced to wear in the concentration camps.

Inside Miriana’s home, vodka is offered, poured by a tattooed man covered in gold chains and bracelets. Grinning through blackened teeth he offers no introduction. Most of the Roma women from this camp work as day labourers in agriculture, others, the elderly and the children, beg. But some of the men run one of the biggest car theft and stripping-down rackets in southern Italy. Others, living deeper in the shadows, earn their money from selling drugs and violence. Looking around the room it is clear this black economy does not produce wellbeing or health or luxury, only symbols of power, wealth and social advancement among the men. Their half-naked infants and wives look as unhealthy as some women and children in sub-Saharan Africa.

‘The girls drowned in the sea,’ Miriana tells me firmly. ‘There has been talk in the newspapers, lies, that they were murdered, that there was no postmortem. They drowned in the sea, playing like the innocents they were. The real crime was what happened around them. Those people by the water, they ignored the children, like they were dead dogs washed up in the Mediterranean. My daughters were not subhuman.’

Miriana hands me another photograph of Violetta. She is posing in a ruffled pink dress. ‘She wanted to be a dancer. She didn’t want to go to school. She only wanted to be beautiful. Cristina was a bad influence on Violetta. She didn’t like school. She hated living in the camp. Her grandmother said she was just trying to find her place somewhere, but she would’ve grown into a strong woman. She had the will and the determination. Above all she wanted to be able to walk into the shops in the city, look at the dresses without being chased by the police. She would cut dresses out of magazines and place a cut-out of her head on to them. It was her way of escaping. Violetta just watched. She worshipped her big sister.

‘In the days after the girls died a Catholic priest visited us and apologised for the local people on the beach, who he said had misunderstood the situation. I asked him why the Italians hated us, why they looked at the bodies of two dead children and smeared on sun cream and he had no answers. He wept and told me the Roma were still God’s children. I told him it doesn’t feel like it. We are the ones the Italians blame for the poverty outside the camp. That is their own making, not ours, not my children’s fault.’

Miriana is barely 30 but looks a decade older. Married at 14 and a mother of five by her early twenties, she escaped the Bosnian-Serbian border area as a teenager, hoping for a new life in Italy. All three of her surviving children are unschooled. The youngest don’t have birth certificates. They simply don’t exist and she wants to keep it that away. One of the last things Cristina and Violetta did was to be fingerprinted by the authorities. ‘Cristina and Violetta gave their fingerprints shortly before they died. Violetta was upset. She ran away and started crying. She thought the police were coming to take her away. Cristina was angry and scrubbed the ink from her thumb. She understood everything. She knew we were being treated like animals. She died knowing she had no real hope of a better life.’

Later, as we walk around the camp, we are faced down with intimidating glares. One man spits at my feet. The ethnic fingerprinting drive, part of a broader crackdown on Italy’s 3.5m recent economic immigrants and carried out in an atmosphere of hysterical rhetoric about crime and security, has left the Roma more bitter than ever. Catholic human rights organisations have damned the fingerprinting of Gypsies as ‘evoking painful memories’ of the Nazi persecution. The chief rabbi of Rome insisted this week that it ‘must be stopped now’. Amos Luzzatto, former head of the Italian Union of Jewish Communities, said that the policy of fingerprinting recalled ‘days when I could not go to school, and people would point at me saying: "Look Mummy, it’s a Jew." This is a country that has lost its memory.’

But Massimo Barra, head of the Italian Red Cross, which has been monitoring the process, insisted last week that the aim was to integrate Roma people into Italian society. If children were fingerprinted, it would be done ‘as a game’, he said. ‘We are building bridges, not walls.’

Officially, the reasons for the fingerprinting programme appear simple enough: to allow the government to compile accurate census data and ensure that Gypsy children go to school. But human rights groups are concerned. As part of sweeping anti-immigration measures the prime minister has also appointed special commissioners to ‘deal’ with Gypsies in the three major Italian cities – Naples, Milan and Rome.

According to Francesca Saudino, fingerprinting lies at the heart of the anguish and disenchantment felt by the Roma. ‘The Italian right blames much of the country’s street crime on the Roma, in particular on children sent out by adults to rob and steal,’ she said. ‘This is an hysterical inaccuracy. There are an estimated 152,000 Roma in 700 camps across Italy and the Interior Ministry hopes to dismantle them all. Thirty per cent have Italian citizenship, but the rest are immigrants, many from Romania and the Balkans. We suspect that the Gypsies are being identified only so that they can be expelled.’

She added: ‘A third of Neapolitan children don’t go to school at all or have to repeat years. Illiteracy here is at Third World levels. The children who live on the outskirts of Naples, in the Spanish quarters and in Piscinola, San Giovanni a Teduccio, Poggioreale, Secondigliano and Torre del Greco, they are all the same, they hate school, their teachers and the selectivity of the system. They hate Italy and the Italians, too. Many are the children of Russian immigrants, but they are not fingerprinted or treated as outlaws. You cannot have one law for the Roma and one law for everyone else.’

At the core of the issue, according to human rights groups, are several key politicians. One of them is Umberto Bossi, head of the Northern League, a small party of restyled former Fascists, anti-immigrant forces and traditional conservatives. Bossi has emerged as Italy’s kingmaker, the power player who was key in returning Silvio Berlusconi to office in the recent elections and who many believe will continue to call the shots. Bossi and three other members of his party were given choice seats in the new cabinet, including control of the Interior Ministry, which oversees police and most domestic security. Bossi is a man who once advocated shooting at boats bringing immigrants to Italy’s shores.

The Northern League emerged in the early Nineties as a party advocating the secession of Italy’s wealthier north from the rest of the country. The party these days has toned down the secession rhetoric. Instead, it campaigns for more autonomy and ‘devolution’ of central government powers to regional authorities. Bossi was named Minister for Reforms in the new government, an ideal platform for changing the law to give more autonomy to the north.

Another cabinet post went to the Northern League’s colourful Roberto Calderoli, best remembered for appearing on TV in a T-shirt emblazoned with a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad, and for planning to parade pigs on land where Muslims were attempting to build mosques. Berlusconi’s other main partner in government is the National Alliance, a party formed as a successor to Mussolini’s Fascists. Its leader, Gianfranco Fini, who has struggled to distance himself from his neofascist past, became speaker of the lower chamber of parliament.

Yet Giuliano Ferrara, formerly Berlusconi’s media spokesman and now a prominent editor and TV pundit, claims the rise of the right is a myth. ‘It was entirely predictable that once Berlusconi returned to power a Greek chorus would appear to warn us all that Italian democracy is in danger, that Italy is introducing mass deportations and concentration camps,’ he said. ‘In reality, violence against immigrants and Gypsies has been limited.’ The true problem, Ferrara says, is that Italy, more than any other country in Europe, has had to cope with an influx of immigrants who end up living in poverty on the edges of cities – the very margins in which Italy’s own poorest people live. ‘There is no ethnic persecution in Italy,’ Ferrara insists. ‘To draw broad comparisons with what happened to the Jews, who were exterminated, is irresponsible.’

Ironically, Europe is supposedly in the middle of a ‘Decade of Roma Inclusion’, a ˆ30bn project launched by the EU in 2005 when the governments of the countries with the largest Roma populations – Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Macedonia, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia and Slovakia – agreed to close the gap in education, employment, health and housing. Ask the Gypsies themselves and they will tell you it has had little effect on their lives. As the Open Society Institute, funded by billionaire George Soros, who has widely supported the Roma, said in a recent report, most governments see the answer to the Roma problem in terms of ‘sporadic measures’ rather than coherent policies. When asked what lay at the heart of the problem, one MEP said: ‘Look. We want to help them. We don’t lack the laws and we don’t lack the money. The problem is political will in countries like Italy and, ultimately, the Roma themselves – many don’t want to be part of society, even if society is trying to help them. There is no trust, only bitterness and scepticism. In the case of Italy, it is on both sides.’

‘My name is Veronica Selimovic and I am Italian,’ cries the barefoot Gypsy child as she skips nimbly through mud and oil-slicked puddles at Camp Nomadi Aurelia on the outskirts of Rome. Young men stand among graveyards of wrecked cars and rusting bodywork, smoking smuggled cigarettes. All around us are burnt tyres, cartridge cases, condoms. The Gypsies are restless. They look prepared to leave in the dead of night; they claim it is with good reason. The political figure now presiding over their camp is the National Alliance’s Gianni Alemanno, who was elected mayor of Rome in April. As he took office his supporters gave the Fascist salute, chanting ‘Duce, Duce’.

Clutching a black and white photograph of her father, 60-year-old Satka Selimovic’s glaucomic eyes water and droop as she recalls her life on the fringes of Italian society. ‘I was born in Italy, on the outskirts of Venice, after the Second World War. My family thought life would offer us a second chance. I told this to my own children, that life would turn out to be better and they say this to my granddaughter, Veronica. People may say we are bitter and to blame for our own isolation, but we tell each new generation of Roma they will be included and accepted and each time it feels like a betrayal.’