Black MP in Warning to ‘Racist’ Italy
The spectre of fascism is ‘haunting the country’ after a spate of attacks on African immigrants
Italy’s only black MP has warned of growing racism after a surge in attacks on immigrants across the country.
‘Immigrants are becoming the enemy,’ said Jean-Léonard Touadi, 49, who was born in Congo and went to Italy in 1979. ‘With an economic crisis under way, Italy has found a scapegoat to blame its woes on.’
Touadi, a member of the opposition Values party, spoke out after a spate of assaults on immigrants. In Milan last month Abdul William Guibre, 19, originally from Burkina Faso, was beaten to death in an attack which made headlines across Italy. After accusing Guibre of stealing a packet of biscuits, a bar owner and his son called him a ‘dirty black’ and set on him with a metal pole.
A Senegalese man selling handbags in a Milan street market was beaten with a baseball bat after stallholders reportedly accused him of ‘stealing work from Italians’. Outside Naples, six African migrants were shot dead recently by the local mafia, while in Rome a Chinese immigrant was beaten up by boys as young as 15. A Somalian-born woman claimed that at Rome’s Ciampino airport she was strip-searched and verbally abused when going through customs. The government’s response to the alleged airport incident was swift. The Interior Minister, Roberto Maroni, said he would personally sue the woman for lying. ‘Between her version and that of the police I would have no doubt about believing the police,’ said Senate leader Maurizio Gasparri.
The attacks have come as Italy begins to come to terms with a new generation of black Italians, born to African immigrants who began to arrive in greater numbers towards the end of the 1980s. Milan residents expressed astonishment to reporters when the young blacks who demonstrated after Guibre’s murder shouted slogans in thick Milan accents…
Hat tip Gates of Vienna
