Angry about crime, Italy zeroes in on foreigners

Alexandru Nekifor, a waiter, thinks it’s advisable these days not to tell anyone he’s Romanian. Laurentiu Apostal, a construction worker, has watched this last week as terrified friends packed up and fled Italy, headed back to Romania or to other lands.

A wave of violent crime blamed largely on foreigners, including the especially brutal killing of a naval commander’s wife, has pushed the center-left Italian government into deportations that human rights activists say are unprecedented in European Union history.

The Italian government Nov. 2 enacted an emergency decree that allows local authorities to swiftly expel foreign nationals from EU countries if they are deemed a threat to public health or security. So far, about 30 people have been rounded up and ordered deported, all of them thought to be Romanians and many of Roma, or Gypsy, background.

Untold numbers have left on their own, afraid of the backlash. And right-wing opposition leaders are demanding up to 20,000 expulsions.

Last weekend, numerous cars and trucks with Romanian license plates could be seen, hauling campers piled high with belongings, headed north on Italy’s A-1 motorway, which leads out of the country.

The decision to begin expulsions drew criticism from EU officials and human rights groups and fueled divisions within Prime Minister Romano Prodi’s governing coalition.

Although Italy receives sympathy for the string of brutal crimes, critics warn that a specific nationality should not be blamed and targeted for collective punishment.

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Fears of a witch hunt

Recent arrests of Romanian suspects “must not lead to a witch hunt of Romanians,” said Rene van der Linden, president of a key continental parliamentary body, the Council of Europe.

“The Italian government may well have the right to expel a number of persons on public safety grounds,” he added, “but all decisions must be subject to judicial review and taken on an individual basis rather than collectively.”

Italian officials insist that they are not singling out a nationality but resolving a law-and-order crisis.

Anti-immigrant sentiment has been on the rise in parts of Italy, a once-homogenous society that has seen a large influx of foreign-born workers in the last decade. Crime also has increased, authorities say, and often the alleged culprits are foreigners.

But the breaking point came late last month when Giovanna Reggiani, the 47-year-old wife of a naval commander, was accosted one evening in Rome as she left a Metro station. She was raped, beaten and left in a muddy ditch to die.

Reggiani languished in a coma for several days before succumbing. A Romany man originally from Romania was arrested and charged with murder.

The outcry was fierce, and the government acted quickly, approving the emergency decree and sending police and bulldozers into squalid camps where Gypsies and some non-Roma Romanians live. One of the first camps razed was home to the suspect in the Reggiani case.

On the night Reggiani died, a mob of masked men wielding clubs and knives stabbed and beat four Romanians outside a supermarket in Rome, leaving one in critical condition. The next day, Adrian Mutu, a Romanian native who plays for the Fiorentina soccer team, was called obscene and racist names at a game in Rome.

Interior Minister Giuliano Amato argued that the deportations were necessary to prevent such vigilantism.

“We must prevent this terrible tiger, which is xenophobic rage, the racist beast, from getting out of control,” Amato told La Repubblica newspaper.

What is unusual about the crackdown is the expulsion by one EU member of nationals from another. Italy’s previous use of “fast-track” expulsions, as they are known, targeted terrorism suspects who were sent primarily to North African and Middle Eastern countries. But targeting fellow Europeans is new, said Judith Sunderland, an Italian-based researcher with Human Rights Watch, which condemned Italy’s action.

Although the decree requires a judge to sign off on each deportation order, no criminal investigation is required. The person is barred from reentry into Italy for three years, and faces prison if he or she returns during that time.

Romania is one of the most recent, and poorest, members of the EU, having joined in January when the continental bloc expanded to include 27 nations.

Ever since, Romanians have been arriving in Italy in droves. By most estimates, Romanians now constitute the largest minority nationality in Italy, with 550,000 to 600,000 residents, or about 1% of the population.

Although other longtime EU members placed a moratorium on entry to their countries from the new member states, Italy did not. Some politicians argue that decision opened the floodgates to criminals taking advantage of Italy’s notoriously lax judicial system.

“They came to Italy because in Italy you don’t go to jail,” Flavio Tosi, mayor of the northern city of Verona, said in a televised debate. “The moment Italy opened its borders in such an indiscriminate way . . . the worst criminals came to Italy immediately.”

Walter Veltroni, the mayor of Rome and likely successor to Prodi as head of center-left political factions, took an especially hard line. Between January and September of this year, he said, Romanians were believed to be responsible for 75% of serious crimes, including rapes and killings, in the capital. (It was unclear how many of the suspects he was citing were also Roma.)

Immigration is a complex issue for Italy. With one of the world’s lowest birthrates and fastest-aging populations, the country desperately needs foreign-born workers. But integrating them and easing the inevitable cultural clashes have proved a tall order.

For the Romanians in Italy, the climate has been poisoned.

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‘Just not fair’

“This is just not fair; that’s how far racism goes,” said Nekifor, the waiter, who rattled off a litany of grievances about what Romanians face, including a lack of access to housing and abuse from employers who don’t pay fair wages.

Many of the alleged culprits in the recent crime wave are Roma, and they receive little sympathy from the majority of Italians, for whom the image of the Gypsy is beggar, pickpocket or thief.

It is not unusual to be on a public bus and hear, if a Gypsy boards, passengers shout out, “Zingaro!” -- a term for the Roma regarded by some as derogatory -- as women hold tight their purses.

In chats with a dozen Italians, it was impossible to find a kind word about Roma.

“The government should close all the Gypsy camps and send them away from Italy,” said Giacomo Bonanni, who works as a doorman in Rome’s Piazza di Spagna. “Since the first of January, there is an invasion of Romanians all over the place. Look at the Tiber River! There are thousands of them.”

Giorgio Bezzecchi, national secretary of Opera Nomadi, a Roma advocacy group, accused politicians of stirring antipathies for political gain.

“We have always been persecuted in the past, we still are, and we are the scapegoat for what happened,” he said in a telephone interview from the northern city of Pavia, where he works as a university researcher.

The Prodi government, in taking the emergency action, has incurred complaints from leftist parties within its coalition. But louder protests are coming from the right-wing opposition, demanding a harsher response. Analysts say that given the public anger, it was crucial for the government to appear tough in countering crime by foreigners.

Alarmed at the wave of antagonism, Romanian Prime Minister Calin Tariceanu called on Prodi this week. They agreed to ask for EU help in integrating immigrants and controlling immigration.

“No country wants to export criminality,” Tariceanu said. But he also implored the Italians to protect Romanians “who work and lead an honest life in Italy -- the vast majority of Romanians there.”

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wilkinson@latimes.com

Maria De Cristofaro of The Times’ Rome Bureau contributed to this report.