George Bush's good friend, media magnate Silvio Berlusconi, is back in charge in Italy after a brief center-left interregnum. As a way of implementing the law-and-order platform upon which he regained power, he has dispatched Italian troops to Rome, Milan, Naples, Florence, Genoa, Bologna, Turin, Palermo, Bari and Venice. There are 1,000 soldiers in Rome alone.
One Italian mayor, a member of the anti-immigrant Northern League party that is part of Berlusconi's coalition, has issued a proclamation banning the gathering of three or more people. (Presumably, those huddled together in Jesus' name or playing bocce ball are exempted.)
(Photo of Italian paratrooper with automatic weapon on Rome street)
Why such extreme measures? Is Italy in the throes of an overwhelming crime wave? Not according to The Independent:
The most significant issue in the general election campaign this spring was what was called the "security emergency": the perception by Italians that violent crime was rapidly on the increase, and that it was the fault of foreigners. In fact crimes of violence are not soaring, but there has been a large rise in legal and illegal immigration in recent years.
Italy is in the midst of a xenophobic--even racist--reaction to the growing number of immigrants in the country. Most of it has been directed initially at Italy's Roma, sometimes called gypsies. At the beginning of the month, Berlusconi began fingerprinting Roma, even children. Both the EU and the UN have protested the program, but the Italian government has persisted, claiming it is part of a crime crackdown. Traditional Roma camps have been torn down throughout Italy, some by government officials and others by vigilante mobs armed with clubs and gasoline, and ten of thousands are being pushed out of the country entirely.
In July, even some Italians were outraged by an incident in which two young Roma girls drowned at a beach near Naples as hundreds of sunbathers looked on. When the girls' lifeless bodies were retrieved and lay covered on the beach, most of those nearby continued their activities with apparent indifference to what had happened. The Catholic archbishop of Naples commented:
Indifference is not an emotion for human beings. To turn the other way or to mind your own business can sometimes be more devastating than the events that occur.
As The Independent reports, Italy may be the worst, but it is certainly not the only European country caught up in anti-immigrant hysteria:
As in other parts of Europe this has been accompanied by a strong anti-immigrant groundswell which finds focus whenever a foreigner is accused of some heinous crime. Gypsies are not proportionately more to blame for these crimes than other groups.
Berlusconi's attitude toward crime is notably different when it comes to the Mafia. According to a key political ally, one goal of the new Berlusconi admininstration is to rewrite Italian schoolchildren's textbooks, so that so-called "heroes of the right," many of whom are Mafioso, receive more favorable treatment.