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Campaigns against 'nomads' sweep across Italy

By Liz Fekete

1 March 1995

Florence

The civil rights group, Senza Confine, are to issue a writ against Forza Italia MP, Umberto Cecchi, for incitement to racial hatred after he wrote an article in the Florence-based daily newspaper La Nazione attacking 'nomads'.

Cecchi does not seem to have missed any group out of his amazing diatribe. Moroccans are accused of running the drugs trade in Florence's historic city centre; Bosnian women of being 'whores whose every coitus is a bullet cartridge brought for their Muslim brothers'; 'miscellaneous Slavs' and north Africans had 'taken to smashing your car window and, if you are a lady, threatening you'. Finally, Cecchi called for Gypsies to be prevented from entering or travelling through Florence, and political refugees to be removed from city centres. Travellers camps on the outskirts of the city were little more than 'a gathering of thieves and prostitutes, muggers and rapists'.

Cecchi's outburst came amidst local campaigns against travellers camps and a directive by Florence city council that all 'nomads' who had not obtained refugee status by mid-September would be removed. The mayor of Florence, Morales, supported a petition signed by 22000 people, in favour of removing the 'Gypsy thieves' but, in the event, only 500 Italians turned up for a demonstration against the 'nomads'. Prior to this demonstration, the authorities had promised to expel the thousand or so Roma living in travellers' camps at Olmatello and Poderaccio.

The mayor of Florence is also the subject of a legal action brought against him by a group of Roma who accuse him of damaging property and failing to comply with public law when a travellers camp was bulldozed in 1992.

il Manifesto 23, 28, 31.8, 4, 7.9, 23.12.94

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