MEP Viktória Mohacsi and EveryOne Group have travelled throughout racist Italy collecting evidence and testimonies of a persecution
From 17-20 October, 2008 the Euro MP Viktoria Mohacsi – a Hungarian of Roma origin – inspected a number of Roma settlements in Italy, accompanied by a delegation of specialists in episodes of intolerance against the Roma ethnic group, and a troupe of Hungarian documentary makers here to film life inside the settlements and the testimonies of victims of racial hatred and violence.
Roberto Malini, Dario Picciau, Matteo Pegoraro and Nico Grancea of EveryOne worked side by side with Viktoria Mohacs to help her understand the phenomenon of racism in Italy, by visiting the inhospitable and derelict places the Roma families - victims of discrimination and hunted down by the authorities daily - have been forced to take refuge in.
The delegation was able to see for itself the situation already reported by EveryOne, published in the Spanish newspaper El Pais and publicly acknowledge by the Minister of the Interior: the Roma who had taken refuge in Italy in search of a means of survival, have been kicked out through the persecutory measures set up by the Italian central government and carried out by local authorities throughout the country.
Camp clearances, the removal of children from their families “due to a lack of fixed address and means of support”, threats, violence, incitement to racial hatred, propaganda by the media, implied support of racist groups, police and judicial abuse,
invented stories in order to criminalize citizens of the Rome ethnic group: all instruments that have led to a tragic ethnic purge right under the nose of the European Union, which has reacted timidly through resolutions (useless documents seeing they are “guidelines” and not obligations directed at Member States who have broken EU regulations), warnings and mild antiracist statements.
If in the spring of 2007 there were about 40-45,000 Romanian Roma in Italy, in July 2008 only about 5,000 remained, and today they number just over 3,000: families in such poor health and conditions of poverty that they are unable to return to Romania or head for Spain, France and other countries that, at least in part, respect the EU laws on free movement of citizens of Member States and desegregation.
Viktoria Mohacsi and her collaborators visited the places where the last remaining Romanian Roma in Italy live, some Italian Roma and Sinti communities, and some settlements of Roma families from the former Yugoslavia.
From Padua to Bologna, from Pesaro to Florence, from Sesto San Giovanni to Milan, the delegation gathered information on the conditions of the “nomads” in Italy and interviewed dozens of witnesses to the persecution, filming the places where the Roma people live, among mice, parasites and desperation.
EveryOne Group is making up a report, complete with photographs to document the stages of this dramatic journey through Italy carried out by a courageous Euro MP who has been battling for fifteen years against the tragedy of racism which is wiping out her people.
They are stages in an itinerary of civilization, a difficult itinerary beset by danger, that unites a small group of people, a handful of “just citizens” whose numbers, fortunately, are growing by the day, and who every day - running serious risks – continue to remind Europe that “union” means brotherhood and that the culture of racial hatred can only lead to horror and endless divisions: a real spectre of the moral, civil and concrete failure of the European Union.
All Photographs by Steed Gamero
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