A racist pogrom in Italy

ATTACKS ON immigrants in the Italian town of Rosarno, in the southern region of Calabria, led to several days of rioting in early January--and Italy's far right is capitalizing on the violence.

As many as 1,300 African immigrants who work as agricultural workers were eventually loaded onto buses and trains, and deported from the Calabria region to immigrant detention centers, where their eventual fate at the hands of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's government was unclear. Many will likely be deported.

The violence was sparked when immigrant workers returning from work in a nearby town were fired on in a pellet-gun attack by a group of young white men. At least two workers were injured in the attack, which may have been orchestrated and carried out by members of the 'Ndrangheta--the local mafia, which exerts strong control in the region.

This attack, combined with longstanding racism, prompted dozens of immigrants to reportedly begin venting their frustrations in Rosarno. Initially, as many as 300 immigrants demonstrated in the street where the shooting happened. Police accused them of "put[ting] on an angry demonstration, hampering the free circulation in the streets, damaging garbage bins, hitting with sticks and rocks numerous passing cars."

Later, angry immigrants surrounded the home of one of the 'Ndrangheta heads. At another demonstration, an estimated 2,000 immigrants protested at the Rosarno town hall, shouting "We are not animals." Some held signs reading "Italians here are racist."

In three days of violence, some immigrants allegedly threw rocks at local residents and fought with police, and local residents reportedly responded by shooting or beating immigrants with sticks, in some cases going house-to-house attacking immigrants. At one point, a van driven around the town threatened over a loudspeaker: "Any Black person who is hiding in Rosarno should get out. If we catch you, we will kill you."

This eventually led to the removal of immigrants by the government in what it claimed was fears for their safety.

According to the New York Times, "More than 50 immigrants and police officers were wounded, none seriously, and 10 immigrants and locals were arrested before the authorities began sending the immigrants to detention centers elsewhere in southern Italy." Soon after, the government began bulldozing the workers' encampments.

By the end, only a small number of Arab and African immigrants were left in Rosarno, and, according to the Economist, "within 24 hours, one had his car torched."

THE TENSIONS leading to the violence in Rosarno have been building for years--and were made worse by Berlusconi's right-wing government.

African immigrants make up the bulk of agricultural workers in Calabria, the impoverished southern region where Rosarno is located. An estimated 8,000 immigrants are employed picking oranges, mandarins, olives and tomatoes in the region overall, with some 2,000 in Rosarno itself. Conditions for the workers are bad, with many picking fruit for 12 hours a day, for less than $30. They often live in abandoned buildings and factories with no running water or electricity, or in camps.

"This event pulled the lid off something that we who work in the sector know well, but no one talks about: That many Italian economic realities are based on the exploitation of low-cost foreign labor, living in subhuman conditions, without human rights," Flavio Di Giacomo, spokesperson for the International Organization for Migration in Italy, told the New York Times.

"The workers live in semi-slavery," Di Giacomo said. "It's shameful that this is happening in the heart of Italy."

According to Médicines San Frontières' Italian spokesperson Loris De Filippi, "These people, around 70 percent of whom are irregular migrants, are reduced to virtual slavery, and everyone knows about it but no one does anything."

Controlling these slave-like conditions is the 'Ndrangheta. Foremen of the local groves and fields are frequently affiliated with the mafia.

Some reports suggest that the mafia may have purposefully orchestrated the riots in order to push immigrants out of the area--because a relatively recent change to European Union agricultural subsidies may mean that it is more profitable to allow produce to rot than to pay immigrant workers to harvest it. An estimated 80 percent of the area's orange crop is rotting on the trees.

Although the violence in Rosarno was being labeled as some of the worst in Italy since the Second World War, it is certainly not the only example of anti-immigrant sentiment leading to an explosion of anger. According to the New York Times:

In September 2008, Italy sent 400 members of the National Guard to Castelvolturno, outside Naples, after violent protests broke out over the shooting deaths of six African immigrants in clashes with the Camorra, the Neapolitan Mafia. Last February, immigrants set fire to the detention center on the island of Lampedusa, where many had been held awaiting deportation.

In an interview with National Public Radio, John Hooper, the Italy correspondent for Britain's Guardian newspaper, explained, "Last year, almost exactly a year ago, there was an attack in which two other African immigrants were wounded in a gun attack. A book published last year speaks of how 'hunting the black' is a favorite pastime" among young men in Rosarno.

In an editorial, La Repubblica, one of Italy's leading newspapers, compared the anti-immigrant sentiment following the riot in Rosarno to KKK abuse and violence against Blacks in the southern U.S. during the 1960s. "We sought paradise," one worker told La Repubblica, "but we have found hell."

OUT OF some 60 million people in Italy, some 4 million are legal immigrants--and an unknown number more are undocumented.

In the midst of the economic crisis, tension between immigrant and native workers is being exacerbated, as immigrants are scapegoated for the lack of jobs. Unemployment rates stand at about 8 percent across Italy, but in the Southern region, joblessness has risen to approximately 20 percent.

As jobs are cut in the industrial North, the cuts hit immigrant workers hardest, since they often lack the union protections of other workers and are frequently employed on the basis of temporary contracts. In turn, unemployed immigrant workers often relocate to southern Italy, hoping for agricultural jobs.

Berlusconi's right-wing government has for years scapegoated immigrants and tried to tighten immigration controls--in some cases turning back boats of African immigrants at sea in dangerous conditions. Much like the Bush administration in the U.S., Berlusconi attempted through much of the last decade to link immigration to terrorism in order to call for stricter controls.

But as Italian activist Cinzia Arruzza said in an interview with SocialistWorker.org after a spate of attacks on Roma immigrants in September 2008, the center-left bears responsibility as well for creating a climate of hostility to immigrants:

The attacks on immigrants started not with the government of the right, but with the government of the center-left. The first party to start the attacks with a series of laws was the new Democratic Party. It tried to use the issue of security and public safety in order to win votes on the right...

The policies of the center-left government didn't answer the real social issues in Italy, especially the problem of salaries, which are low relative to inflation, and the problem of public services. The coalition government didn't offer solutions on these issues. It carried on a policy that favored the Italian bourgeoisie.

The disastrous collapse of the center-left government in the last election, which paved the way for Berlusconi to return to power, has only opened the door to further anti-immigrant scapegoating by the right.

Some of the staunchest anti-immigrant rhetoric comes from the Northern League (Lega Nord), a far-right political party that entered into coalition with Berlusconi's Forza Italia party prior to the last election. In the wake of the violence in Rosarno, the Northern League has called for a return to "jobs for Italians."

Ironically, the Northern League historically built itself up by attacking southern Italians for the prevalence of the mafia in the region. Now, the party is attempting to use the violence in Rosarno to further whip up an "Italians first" hysteria against immigrants.

Interior Minister Roberto Maroni, for example, a member of the Northern League, told the media that undocumented immigrants were a "bomb waiting to go off." He went on to cheer the removal of Rosarno's immigrant community, saying that the government had "brilliantly resolved the problem of public order" by expelling immigrants from Rosarno. Maroni went on to say in an interview that the violence in Rosarno was "the fruit of the wrong kind of tolerance."

In response to the riots in Rosarno, the Northern League introduced a proposal to cap the number of immigrant students in Italy's public school classes at 30 percent. "Sometimes they speak different languages, and there's no common balance in the classroom," Maroni was quoted as saying. Another Northern League minister, Roberto Calderoli, said in an interview that "work should go to the Italians...not to illegal immigrants."

Such rhetoric is depressingly familiar. As the Economist noted, "The true crime of Rosarno's crop-pickers was not being illegal, but expendable."