Italy: Criminalising victims of racist attacks
01 July 1997
Over the summer the "emergenza immigrati"(immigrant emergency), an expression widely used by the Italian media, has once again came into fashion following several episodes of violence against immigrants and another in which they the alleged perpetrators.
On the night of 19 July 19 at the "Murazzi", the river front with pubs and discos on the river Po in the city of Turin, a group of Italian "bravi ragazzi" (nice kids) exchanged insults with some Moroccans. A fight ensued which led to Abdellah Doumi, a 26 years old Moroccan, falling into the river and drowning. An eye-witness said it was clear he could not swim and as he vainly tried to get of the water he was hit by several bottles, cans and other object thrown by the Italian gang watching and laughing at him.
The case brought comments from the main newspapers (La Republica and La Stampa, 20.7.97) in the following way: great emphasis was placed on the allegation that the victim was a drug dealer; the area where the episode occurred was described as being plagued by petty criminals (mostly immigrants), and the interpretation that what had happened was simply put down to a drunken skirmish between two groups (Italians and Moroccans) which had nothing to do with racism. Although the prosecution is still under way and one of the "bravi ragazzi" is in prison accused of homicide, the death of Abdellah has attracted little attention. A march against racism organised by the Council of Immigrants Communities of Turin went almost unnoticed in the media.
Just few days later in "La Barona" on the outskirts of Milan, on the night of 23 July, three young Moroccans (17, 19 and 23 years old) were attacked by a group of six or seven Italian youngsters on scooters who threw Molotov cocktails at them. The three Moroccans were taken to the hospital with serious injuries. Again there was an unwillingness to talk about racism in the press. Great emphasis was placed on the notion that the "La Barona" neighbourhood was a rough area now suffering from high numbers of undocumented migrants. The newly-elected mayor of Milan Gabriele Albertini, who had stressed in his election campaign his intention to clean the streets of the city of undocumented immigrant street vendors and petty criminal, expressed a formal condemnation but did not waste the chance of singling out undocumented migrants as the most important cause for the attack (La Republica, 25.7.97). Comment in the press quickly petered out.
There was a completely different reaction in the press in the middle of August when, between the 9th and the 11th, in the well known tourist resort of Rimini four young women (two Italian, one Swiss and one French) were victims of rape or attempted rape by some Moroccans. An anti-immigration campaign was started by local politicians and later picked up at the national level by the opposition forcing Prime Minister Romano Prodi to interrupt his vacation and meet the Minister of Interior Giorgio Napolitano and address the "emergenza immigrati". This time the topic made the headlines in the press and on TV for four days.
The reasons why the Rimini accident had this impact was because the Mayor of the city, Giuseppe Chicchi, had called for a regional passport to be introduced for immigrants in order to protect towns like his during the summer. Mayor Chicchi belongs to the Partito democratico della sinistra (Pds, the democratic party of the left, descendent of the Italian Communist Party). His views encouraged the mayors of cities administered by the centre-right such as Albertini of Milan who proposed a common front by all mayors to press the government for more severe anti-immigration measures, especially expulsion. Protest against Rimini?s mayor have come from groups such as La rete anti-razzista(the Anti-racism network) whose leader Dino Frisulli has called on the head of the Pds, Massimo D?Alema, to expel Chicchi from the party.
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