For Romani families in Italy, racism has worsened during Covid-19
Émilie Herbert-Pontonnier
“We need help. In Piedmont (Italy) the situation of Roma and Sinti is very critical, there is a real ethnic cleansing underway in the city of Turin,” declares Sveta.
Chiara Pelosin – better known under her Romani name Sveta – shared this cry for help on the social media platform Instagram in February 2021. The Sinti are a subgroup of Roma people who are mainly living in Germany, France and Italy. The Italian activist, who is Roma herself, simply didn’t know where else to turn: in her hometown of Turin, racism towards Roma people has dangerously increased and official authorities are turning a blind eye.
On the ground, Sveta is helping Romani families who have been the victims of violence at the hands of neo-fascist political groups such as CasaPound and Lega. Sveta says that Lega’s members have been seizing caravans in illegal Romani settlements, evicting entire families and forcing them out onto the street. Without alternative accommodation, people with small children – some infected with Covid-19 – have been seeking refuge wherever they could, returning to the camps and creating improvised dwellings with old sunshades and pieces of plastic.
With the money raised online, Sveta has already been able to buy food, water, school supplies, warm clothes, sanitising hand gel and masks for the community. But structural change has become vital to address the humanitarian needs resulting from decades of violence and right-wing rhetoric.
Roma families living in informal settlements are often evicted without any alternative housing solution. They then return to the camps and create improvised shelters such as this one. Photograph: © Chiara Pelosin.
Antigypsyism, the “historically constructed, persistent complex of customary racism against social groups identified under the stigma ‘gypsy’ or other related terms”, is not a recent phenomenon in Italy. Despite the presence of Roma people in the country since the early 15th century – and although they account for only 0.23% of the Italian population according to the Council of Europe – anti-Roma racism is still deeply ingrained in Italian society.
Its most visible manifestation has been the discriminatory and ongoing destruction of Roma camps – the first expulsions taking place in 1926, under Benito Mussolini. Between 2013 and 2015, there were 168 forced evictions of Roma in Rome alone, according to Amnesty International. And in 2015, a poll conducted by Pew Research found that 86% of Italians had unfavourable views of the Roma community.
The party Lega, which was founded in 1991 by Umberto Bossi and is now under the leadership of former Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, has benefited from the support of this large percentage of the population and largely used antigypsyism to boost its voter base. With its strong anti-immigration stance and anti-Roma rhetoric, Lega has trivialised hate speech towards Roma people, particularly those living in unofficial settlements.
Salvini has made no secret of his dream to see those disappear before the end of his mandate. In 2019, he even ordered local authorities to map out the camps, ahead of a campaign to bulldoze every one of them. Now, the 122,000 members of Lega are continuing Salvini’s work, proceeding in what is undoubtedly a violation of the fundamental human rights of the Roma people in the region.
60% of Italian Roma who live in informal settlements are children under the age of 18. Photograph: © Chiara Pelosin.
It is estimated that around 40,000 Roma are living in informal settlements across Italy, 60% of whom are minors. Children in these camps grow up without running water, toilets, sewers, garbage disposal or proper heating and cooking facilities: they are thus more likely to be exposed to health hazards such as respiratory toxins, pollution or contaminated water. Ivana Nikolic is a 30-year-old Italian Romani dancer and activist. Born in Yugoslavia, her family escaped the Balkan war and migrated to Italy in 1995, when Ivana was only 4. She remembers vividly their arrival in one of the Roma camps in Turin: “I still remember the fence around us. Barbed wire. And the feeling it gave me of being in there. Not to have a name or a surname, not to have rights. To be invisible”.
Navigating the Italian bureaucracy was a challenge. As war refugees, it was difficult for the family to obtain documents from Serbia or Bosnia to prove their status, and Ivana's parents did not benefit from administrative support to understand the intricacies of Italy’s refugee policies. This meant that for many years Ivana’s family remained, in her words, “in limbo”.
Ivana Nikolic with her family at their arrival in Italy in the mid-1990s. Photograph: © Ivana Nikolic.
Ivana remembers the violence of eviction too, and explained to me that the police would relentlessly come to the camps to destroy everything and send the Roma away, without any alternative housing solution. So the family would go from one place to the other, her father always making sure that, despite the precarity of their everyday life, Ivana and her brother would regularly attend school: “we had to walk kilometres, kilometres, kilometres... but dad never gave up taking us to school. Dad always said that ‘the only way you can save us from decay is education’”.
It was only when Ivana turned 15 years old that the family was finally offered to live in a small apartment. Now, Ivana is a respected artist and educator, helping other refugees to find their place in Italian society and fight for their rights. She has some good memories from her childhood in the camps. Like that time when an Italian woman gave her a VHS of Disney's The Little Mermaid and all the adults organised themselves to find a television so the little ones could watch the film together – a moment that Ivana describes today as “magical”. But there are many bad memories too: the begging, the cold, the feeling of hunger and, above all, the fear of having to move to a new camp again.
Roma dancer and activist Ivana Nikolic is now helping other refugees to find their place in Italian society. Photograph: © Ivana Nikolic.
Decades of prejudice have now led to a reality in which entire communities of Roma lack access to basic public utilities, such as clean water and sanitation. The structural problems which have forced many of them to live in overcrowded, unsanitary and segregated neighbourhoods have even been exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic.
The monitoring institute SWG researched the impact of the pandemic on those living in Roma camps across the country. They found out that these communities had very poor access to information and felt completely abandoned by the authorities. Lack of access to running water makes it difficult for those living in impoverished areas to wash their hands and sanitise their living spaces. Limited food and medical supplies have worsened the health status of both adults and children and increased their vulnerability to the pandemic. Schools operating online or remotely also means that many Roma children stopped attending classes altogether.
Furthermore, Roma people have been persistently blamed for spreading or causing Covid-19. For example, in early 2021, false rumours about a supposed coronavirus outbreak in the Roma camp of Castel Romano, in the south of Rome, provoked an alarming rise of hate speech and anti-Roma sentiment in the country. “A stronghold of petty criminality”, according to local far-right politician and anti-vax supporter Simone Carabella, Castel Romano has been partly emptied in March 2021, under the orders of Rome mayor Virginia Raggi. Only 15 individuals (out of the 550 inhabitants of the camp) have been able to access public housing – which, however, caused outrage among the population, who saw this as a privileged treatment.
Sveta told me that the situation is more complex than ever: “We try to give them [Roma evictees] documents and help them find an apartment. But if that was hard before Covid, now it's really impossible. Covid plus government, that's not a good match.”
In fact, instead of seeking additional ways to protect vulnerable Roma as the coronavirus spreads, some politicians have actively fuelled antigypsyism and ignored their plight. In 2019, Amnesty International Italy submitted a collective complaint to the Council of Europe, underlining that “it is scandalous that in the 21st century, in one of Europe’s biggest economies, some of the most marginalised individuals and families continue to experience such appalling living conditions and endemic discrimination”. But, when contacted, the organisation was unable to say if new measures had been taken since the beginning of the pandemic. It appeared to be the same for the National Office Against Discrimination (UNAR), which has not implemented any comprehensive social, economic or health measures to face the Covid-19 crisis.
Ivana is emphatic on this topic: “If you ask me if the situation in Italy has changed, I will tell you the truth: from 1994 to today, the situation in Italy has not changed and the NGOs and associations and the Italian state do not help to solve the problem, they only continue with this schizophrenic system and discriminate.”
With the implementation of a new lockdown in the country, it has been even more difficult to reach the most vulnerable. “Now in one of the camps, there are some Roma who have Covid and no one helps them”, explains Sveta, “we are in lockdown so it’s complicated to help people because we can't move. In Piedmont, no one cares about us anymore. Some time ago we had other kinds of politicians so it was better, but now Roma are evicted again.”
Until meaningful political measures are put in place, the endemic, institutional discrimination against Roma people will most certainly continue to grow in Italy. In the meantime, grassroots activists like Sveta have no choice but to work harder to address one emergency situation after the other.
A Romani woman crying after a recent eviction. Photograph: © Chiara Pelosin.
Without running water and electricity, living conditions within Roma camps can be difficult. Photograph: © Chiara Pelosin.