Italy: The Resurfacing of Facism

Italy's brutal crackdown on the Roma has echoes of the country's fascist past.

Compulsory new census of Italy's 160,000 Roma people, promised by the inflammatory Right-wing premier Silvio Berlusconi in the run-up to his successful election this spring. 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.

In a country where fascism under dictator Benito Mussolini thrived until the end of World War II, Berlusconi warned of a 'Roma emergency' in big cities and produced a dossier of dubious figures alleging foreigners were involved in half of Italy's attempted murders, muggings and robberies. The interior minister  Roberto Maroni, claimed the controversial census and fingerprinting was essential to discover 'who is entitled to be here and who is not'. Gipsy people with the right to stay would be re-housed in 'decent conditions rather than with rats'. The remainder, Maroni made clear, could expect deportation.

Many observers, including the Roman Catholic Church, the United Nations, Roma and Jewish leaders, condemned Berlusconi's actions. Comparisons were made with the Nazi registration of Jews and gipsies introduced by Adolf Hitler with the support of Mussolini.It was as early as 1926 that Mussolini first expelled gipsies, calling them 'sub humans'.In the next 20 years, more than one million Roma people were killed in the extermination camps of Europe, alongside the Jews.

The current wave of Italian xenophobia was given new impetus last November when an Italian admiral's wife, a religious education teacher, was beaten with a rock in a sex attack by a Romanian migrant. Dreadfully injured, she was dumped in a ditch in a suburb of northern Rome. She died two days later and a suspect was arrested in a nearby gipsy camp.