Human Rights Watch has recently alerted the world of the institutional discrimination against gypsies in Italy and the illegality of the expulsion orders and camp clearances. There are those who believe it is up to the individual country to solve its internal problems without any outside interference, but this opinion goes against the reasons the European Union was founded for in the first place.

Human Rights Watch has published the hard facts, based on incontestable information and data, much of which was supplied to HRW by Gruppo EveryOne which is now acting as an international observatory. The “European view” allows us to go beyond the different forms of national propaganda, at times enlightening, but at other times totally unjust and oppressive towards minorities.

Hitler’s Nazi propaganda in Germany led the German people to believe that Jews, gypsies and homosexuals were problems of public order - that they were not to be protected but instead rounded up and put together in rehabilitation centres. Rehabilitation that was to be achieved through work (the work that “makes one free”) and medical treatment (like that of Dr Mengele).

But what the regime was really doing was wiping out, torturing, stripping its victims of all their possessions (including hair and gold dental crowns) and then eliminating them as though they were insects. The propaganda of those in power in Italy is creating the same situation, it is leading the Italian people to believe there is nothing wrong and wicked about throwing women and poor, sickly children out into the street.

Their poverty is described as “illegality” and the last activities they resort to in an attempt to survive (begging and minor services) are considered crimes. The truth is far different, and every innocent person (forced not only to live in conditions of hardship, but to suffer further torment through enforced camp clearances and being discriminated against) represents another tile in the mosaic of the second Porrajmos (the Gypsy Holocaust). A situation we hope in a few decades - or even before that - will be remembered as a crime against humanity.

There are no subtleties of ideology or interpretations: a woman, child, an innocent person forced to suffer from hunger and cold, humiliated, or even merely ignored, is a shameful crime. The persecution of the gypsies in Italy is leading to the deaths of hundreds of people, most of them children, bringing down the average life-expectancy of a Roma to just 47 years!

The Nazi leaders and the butchers in Armenia were clean, tidy, smiling, friendly and well-dressed, like many of our rulers, mayors, councillors and police prefects. The fact is that they, like those who went before them in the oppression of minorities, are like torturers, racists of the worst kind, cruel men and women, unscrupulous killers.

roberto.malini@annesdoor.com

www.everyonegroup.com