Articles by: Judith Harris

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    The EU Too is Asleep on the Rocks


    ROME – Like any drowsy three-year-old, she curls up and hugs a somewhat grubby teddy bear. She sleeps, not in a bed, but on the well-trodden floor of a train station, for she is one of the hundred or so very young children and women who spent the night – today their fourth – at the Ventimiglia train station, close to the border with France, whose police are denying entry to migrants. Another hundred or so migrants, all males, have nowhere better to sleep, wrapped in hand-out aluminum blankets, than on the huge rocks at the seashore at nearby Ponte San Ludovico.


    Not all the locals are indifferent. The Italian state railway Trenitalia allowed Ventimiglia use of a waiting room for the women and children migrants. Catholic charity volunteers are doing their best to provide food and clothing. Local mothers have brought toys and their own children down to the train station to help the migrant toddlers pass the time. And a day of crash-mob solidarity is planned, with music, to bring together both locals and emigres.


    Besides the war in Syria, youth migration from Africa is also being fostered by the fact that the Eritrean government has decreed obligatory military conscription for an indefinite period beginning at age fourteen. To avoid their underage sons being sent into the ongoing war with Ethiopia, parents prefer to send very young Eritreans over the dangerous crossings of first the desert and then the Mediterranean. Last year, some 4,000 Eritreans fled that country each month, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). The figure is on the rise, with 5,000 crossing the Mediterranean last October.


    The Italians are calling for a “humanitarian corridor” for those migrants trying to rejoin family members in the North of Europe, and blame France for blocking the border. “It is the duty of European countries to address the problem of migration all together, but the muscular attitude of certain ministers from foreign countries is heading in exactly the opposite direction,” said Premier Matteo Renzi bluntly during a press conference Monday. “The EU is at a crossroads: either it reasons like a community, and accepts the responsibility for resolving the problem all together (and this is Plan A). If no solutions are found, we must act alone (our Plan B), which means that this great country that is Italy will address the problem.”


    The French deny they are blocking the border. As spelled out in a radio interview by Bernard Caseneuve, Interior Minister, “Since the first of the year we have had 8,000 entries and had to send 6,000 back to Italy. The Schengen rules must be respected, and Italy has to agree to create centers in which the irregular economic migrants, who must be sent back home immediately, can be separated out from [political] refugees.” A confrontation on this between Renzi and Francois Hollande is expected Sunday, when the French president arrives for a visit to Milan’s Expo, in the wake of British Premier David Cameron and of Michelle Obama.


    A certain number of outraged British tourists are meanwhile complaining (so says the Daily Mail and its ilk) that the tawdry sight of the migrants on beaches and train stations is a blight on their holidays. The migrants are moreover dangerous: “Parts of Rome are being turned into a 'no-go area' because of concerns about security and sanitation linked to the huge surge of migrants in the city, local businesses have claimed,” the Daily Mail reported June 15. “Migrants camping near Rome's Tiburtina station have been forcibly cleared by police amid protests by local businesses. As the build-up of refugees at the Italian capital's train station increased, it led to ugly clashes with police, an outcry from the right and fresh calls from Rome for EU help.”


    For their party, Italians complain that the European Union has left Italy alone to deal with the expected summer flux of a half million migrants, while the EU is agreeing to allow just 85,000 to apply for asylum. Together with the fraying financial situation of Greece, anti-EU sentiment in Italy is on the rise, and not only from those like Matteo Salvini of the (now not only) Northern League, who oppose the Euro on monetary grounds. Salvini, in truth, denies he opposes the Euro; “It’s the Euro which is anti-Italian,” he said last week while speaking to Confindustria, the national association of manufacturers. Anti-migrant sentiment is politically easy, and elsewhere Salvini has accused the migrants of enjoying luxurious stays in four-star hotels, “thanks to Renzi and [Interior Minister Angelino] Alfano,” who included the towns of Sestri Levante, Rapallo and Santa Margherita, beloved of posh tourists, on the list of places where migrants are to be given hospitality.


    The crisis of the migrants, which plays into the hands of the Le Pen-style rhetoric on the right, makes life ever harder for Premier Renzi, whose Partito Democratico has just come out of a series of widespread local elections significantly weakened. The working word is “territory:” the PD, once anchored in regions which traditionally voted left, no longer does. Although the PD more or less skimmed by in recent regional elections, it has taken a shellacking in local elections this past week. The worst was in once traditionally center-left Venice, where former magistrate Felice Casson, the PD candidate, lost the race for mayor, 47% to 53%, to conservative Luigi Brugnaro, backed by Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia. “I didn’t lose – the party did,” said Renzi lamely.


    Renzi’s PD is further weakened by the widening revelations of corruption and criminal ties within the Rome city administration. No one considers Rome Mayor Ignazio Marino, a doctor, involved in the scandal, but he is under fire for failing to have noticed anything untoward in his entourage during his past year of governing the capital of Italy. Dozens have been arrested.


    By contrast, Beppe Grillo’s Movimento Cinque Stelle (M5S), which had been losing consensus, appeared revived. Having presented candidates in five towns scattered throughout Sicily (Gela and Augusta in Sicily, Port Torres in Sardegna, Quarto in Campania and Venaria in Piedmont), the M5S showed new muscle, winning, in each case, no less than 65% of the ballot and, in Augusta, 78%.


    In addition, a re-galvanized Berlusconi announced a forthcoming political swing through Italy to relaunch his party. “The winds up North have changed, and days like this prove that Matteo Renzi is losing ground,” said Berlusconi after the election results were counted Sunday, showing that especially in Lombardy the PD lost ground. “And here they’d said that we were dying.|”


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    Michelangelo and Food for Thought

    NAPLES – After the Japanese, Italians live longer than citizens of any nation in the world, according to a United Nations report released last month. It gave two reasons: the national health system and the quality of Italian food – diet, produce, tradition. Hardly surprising, then, that the theme of the ongoing world’s fair in Milan, Expo, is “Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life.”

    Expo’s menu of ideas stretches into the past as well as the future. Just this week a group ofItalian geologists with a passion for their country’s history are donning aprons to present the foods eaten by Michelangelo and others during the Renaissance. At their pavilion at Fuori dall'Expo on Via Puntaccio 8, in the Brera district, they will lecture to visitors on links between food and the Italian countryside in history, and also offer a taste of foods from history, from spelt to chicken.

    “Leonardo da Vinci had a vineyard in Milan, and Michelangelo had farmland at Casteldurante, where cheeses were produced for him,” Prof. Rodolfo Coccioni said in a telephone interview. A geologist with the University of Urbino’s Department of Earth Sciences, Cultural Heritage and Landscape Analysis, Coccioni managed to retrace the pastureland on three poderi (farms) and the house near Casteldurante which Michelangelo had rented near today’s Urbania. There sheep and cow milk was blended to create the soft, delicate “Casciotta di Urbino.”

    “Michelangelo passionately liked this fresh and sweet-tasting cheese, today called caciotta. The animals were nourished on a particularly tender grass that grows after the first mowing of a field.” Such was his fondness for the caciotto from Urbino that, as Coccioni points out, Michelangelo penned this rhyme: “L’anima mia dal corpo ha tal vantaggio, che se stasat’ allentasse l’odore, seco non la terre’ ‘lpan e ‘l formaggio.’” (The sense is that “My soul has such advantage over the body, that the very odor is sweetened by the earth, with bread and cheese.”)

    Michelangelo was hard at work on both the Capitoline Hill in Rome and the cupola of St. Peter’s Basilica when he rented the pastureland and house from his butler and collaborator, Francesco Amatori. According to a notarial document dated Feb. 12, 1554, found by Coccioni, Michelangelo promised to pay Amatori twenty-five lire worth of the cheese to ensure that “the beasts” were kept in good condition; their wool was to be used to stuff mattresses. The pasture lands located are known today as Campi Resi, C. (for Cornelia) Colonnelli and La Ricciola, and have particular “geological and geomorphological characteristics, steep, and prevalently sandy and hence light and dry. At one point Cornelia Colonelli sent to Michelangelo in Rome six “casciotte” plus a 13-pound prosciutto.

    Is it therefore any surprise that food still matters in Italy, and that its cheeses and prosciuttos are sought worldwide? The extraordinary success story of Italian foods is food for thought. According to a new report by the Centro Studi Investimenti Sociali foundation (Censis), Italian food and wine exports earned the nation over $30 billion in 2014, or almost one-third (30.1% over 2009) more than just five years before. Parmigiano is a major export product, but so are such lesser known Italian products as bread from Altamura, whose sometimes giant loaves made from durum wheat flour are slow-baked in wood-burning ovens for as many as 24 hours, and maintain their freshness for a week. (I know: I buy Altamura bread whenever I can find it.)

    Germany imports more Italian foods and wines than any other country (around $5.2 billion, up 17.3% over 2009). Gourmet France is second at $3.7 billion, up 20.5% in five years. Far outweighing the advantage of the lowered value of the euro versus the dollar, the U.S. is the third largest importer of Italian foods, earning Italy $3.4 billion a year, an increase of almost 38% over the previous five years. The European Union officially recognizes 876 alimentary products, including 273 foods and 603 wines.

    As for the Italians themselves, Censis reports that they actually eat healthier foods than even a few years ago, and that the number of strict vegetarians (presently 5 million) is on the rise, as are its 46,000 biological farms, an area where Italy is the European leader.
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    In Regional Elections, Renzi Resists




    ROME – Driven to a last-minute rally at Segrate in Milan, where he was to speak, former Premier Silvio Berlusconi, 78, asked the name of the candidate. “Paolo,” came the smiling response. “Hey, guys, on Sunday get out and vote for Paolo!” Berlusconi shouted. But by then his handlers had learned that this was the wrong piazza and that Berlusconi was touting the wrong candidate, Paolo Micheli of the PD. Tugged back into his car, Berlusconi was whisked to the right piazza. (Berlusconi has since denied that this widely reported incident took place.)



    Otherwise Sunday’s elections were no laughing matter. Up for election were governors of seven regions and city counselors for 742 townships, including 17 large cities representing altogether 23 million citizens. Among the cities were Venice, Mantua, Arezzo, Chieti and Agrigento. At 52.2%, the turnout was slightly lower than in the last regional vote, which took place in 2010, but took place over two days; this, just one day.



    With the results counted (or most of them), Premier Matteo Renzi is under fire. “Goodby Mr. 40% of the vote,” trumped right-winger Brunetta. Nevertheless Renzi’s Partito Democratico (PD) nevertheless fared better than predicted. The center-left coalition, which included the Renzi PD, came first in five of the seven regions. A decline after a term in office is almost inevitable, but, while copping over 40% in elections two years ago, in this vote the average win of the PD coalitions across the seven regions came close to winning 37%.



    The center-right triumphed in two regions, the Veneto and Liguria, where the battle was particularly hard fought. Across the board Berlusconi’s Forza Italia (FI) made a feeble showing, outperformed by Beppe Grillo’s Movimento Cinque Stelle (M5S). Despite that party’s bad press of recent months, the M5S claimed an average of almost 17% in the seven regions and, in Liguria, a surprising one out of four voters. Here is the bean count:
    Tuscany:  PD 46.3; Lega 16.1%; M5S 15.1%; FI 8%
    Umbria: PD 42.78%; center-right 39.27%; M5S 14.3%
    Campania: PD 41.4%; center-right 38.35%; M5S 14.5%
    Puglia: Center-left 47.1%; center-right 38.35%; M5S 18.4%
    Marches: Center-left 41.07% (of which the PD was 35%); M5S 19%; FI 14%, Lega 13%
    Liguria: Center-right 34.4%; center-left 28% (of this, 26% PD); M5S 25%; Lega 20%
    Veneto: Right 50.4% (Luca Zaia); Lega, 17.5%; PD 16.6%; M5S 10.3%; Forza Italia, 5.8%



    The walkup to the election continues was particularly fraught, and continues to cast a shadow over the results, however. For Renzi, the polls had been discouraging, and he was rightly concerned not only about the extent to which his breach with the PD left would weaken the party, but also about which of the intractable opponents would surge ahead to put at risk his centrist coalition: Grillo’s M5S or the Northern League of Matteo Salvini. For this reason some here argued that Renzi was keeping fingers crossed for, guess who, Berlusconi in hopes of avoiding M5S or Lega demands for a greater governing role.  And just in case his PD took the poll-predicted shellacking, Renzi had declared ahead of time that, “I am not being tested.”



    No less seriously, only two days before the vote, Senator Rosi Bindi of the left wing of the PD presented to the public a list of candidates whom the parliamentary Anti-Mafia Commission considered officially  “unpresentable.” Bindi happens to chair that Commission, and was hotly criticized by, among others, author-journalist Roberto Saviano, who argued against the list – not because some of the candidates named are crooks, but because the criteria for determining that a candidate is “unpresentable” has never been defined.



    Although the decision of the Anti-Mafia Commission is legal, candidates who consider themselves innocent had insufficient time for rebuttal. The media had every opportunity, in the months prior to the election, to let readers consider the validity of possible judicial proceedings of candidates. “Bindi wrecked the election campaign on the last useful day. Is this normal?” demanded MP Fabrizio Cicchitto, of the rightist party Area Popolare/



    And did Commission decisions reflect political bias? For Raffaele Cantone, head of the national anti-corruption commission, “I’m uncomfortable with certain choices” because they were made by a group of politicians. At least a few of the decisions about candidates were debatable because they are from rival factions of Commission members, including in Bindi’s own party. Other critics charged that, because presenting the list generated such a massive protest, it in effect has undermined the work of the Anti-Mafia Commission itself.



    “I feel bitter about the polemics raised by the Commission,” said Don Luigi Ciotti, the priest whose organization, Libera, has done seminal work in combatting the Mafia. “For years we have been fighting for political renewal and to clean up bad business, fighting against corruption and the people who flank organized crime. And now the Antimafia Commission, using its functions to the full, reduces itself to being a player in a power struggle among party factions.”
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    If a Terrorist Hides Among Migrants. What of the Mass of Innocents Fleeing War?

    ROME – On March 18 this year Islamic State (ISIS) gunmen opened fire at the Bardo Museum in Tunis. In the attack a local security guard, a cleaning woman and 17 European tourists, among them four Italians, were killed, along with two of the terrorists. With its fabulous horde of ancient Roman mosaics, the Bardo is a favorite tourist site, and Tunisia is considered Western friendly. Not surprisingly, therefore, of the 24 injured, all but two were foreign visitors.

     

    Last week a 22-year-old Moroccan youth who lives in Milan was arrested by Italian police after Tunisian authorities issued a warrant for his extradition on grounds of his participation in that heinous terrorist attack. Abdel Majid Touil was placed for three days in solitary confinement while his mother loudly protested that he had been at home and in her presence on the day of the attack on the Bardo. Touil himself denies ever having set foot in Tunisia, and puzzled Italian police have asked if this is possibly a case of mistaken identity.

    From Tunis this weekend came a leak from their investigators, hinting that, while Touil was not directly involved in the shootings, he allegedly gave his own passport to one of the gunmen to use for a speedy get-away, and then he himself returned, clandestinely, aboard one of the boats bringing migrants out via Libya to Italy. Italian investigators say that he arrived on Feb. 17 on a 45-foot-long boat together with no less than 600 other migrants.

    Nothing here is proven, and Touil may never be extradited on grounds that that Tunisia has the death penalty. In Italy he was attending a course to learn Italian. According to his buddies, he was too poor to buy even a cigarette, and moreover had only an antique cell phone. But whether or not he is guilty (and he continues to deny that he ever set foot in Tunisia), this incident is part of the nightmare scenario: that among the migrants fleeing into the Southern European coast across the Mediterranean terrorists may lurk.

    The onslaught of migrants continues, moreover. On a single day, April 15, 677 migrants plus the body of a woman who was drowned were brought into the port at Reggio Calabria aboard the Italian navy ship “Orione,” after their own crafts sank. Migrants also arrive overland into Italy. And in the newest wrinkle, according to Italian press reports, the traffic now flows in two directions as ISIS sympathizers from Great Britain make their way through Italy to Sicily and onward, to join the combat in Syria.

    These horror stories overshadow the plight of the vast majority of migrants, “that 70% who are fleeing certain death while knowing that they risk a probable death while crossing the desert and the sea,” in the words of Monsignor Domenico Mogavero, who is bishop of Mazara del Vallo in Sicily. Mons. Mogavero knows of what he speaks: Mazara is one of Italy’s coastal towns closest to Libya, only 100 nautical miles distant, and is regularly flooded with migrants.

    Speaking May 21 with a small group of foreign journalists in Rome, he said that the Mediterranean is now a cemetery for perhaps 25,000 who died during the attempt at crossing. The Catholic church is in the forefront of those attempting to deal with the survivors, and church and other humanitarian volunteers are the first to have contact with those arriving. Police are also on hand but, so as not to frighten the migrants, “especially the women,” they wear plain clothes.

    “When the migrants arrive, they desperately need water, food, clothing and hygiene – they have been stuck for days one atop the other,” he said. “It is tristissimo – very sad. And then we must find a place to lodge them: church buildings, hotels, homes for the aged. Many arrive in a state of confusion, and some of the women are pregnant as a result of repeated rape. They have to find a reason to go on living.”

    According to Mogavero, some have been kept in a holding pattern there for 18 months, waiting for their requests for asylum to be accepted. “We have to find a way to keep them busy, or it’s a tinderbox, especially for the unaccompanied minors.” One Sicilian town alone, Augusta, is home to 180 minors, and each must have a formally named “tutor” to accompany him or her when leaving the camp for, say, dentist or doctor. “We organize Italian lessons, soccer games, a choir, meetings, so as to keep down their aggressive feelings,” he said. “They get frustrated.”

    One of the foreign journalists asked if it is true that the migrants take away jobs from Italians. In Sicily, Mogavero replied, the fishing boats have from 30% to 70% migrant labor, “but if they did not, the boat owners would not be able to work at all. The migrants are not stealing jobs, but make it possible for certain jobs to go ahead. They do the work the locals do not want to do—like picking grapes and olives.” Natality in Italy is 0.8% per woman, he added, “and if others did not come here to work, the jobs would simply not get done.”
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    Is Italy Turning Racist?


    ROME – Is Italy showing signs of turning racist? Two incidents show what is happening these days, when the pressure of migration brings new stresses to a country which has had until now a proud history of open-mindedness.

    It was morning on May 19, and, as usual, the Roman bus on the #61 line was crowded. Seated among the others was a family of five from the Republic of Cameroun in Central Africa, a country tormented these days by raids from the the bloodthirsty Boko Haram. On the bus, as one of the five later related to a reporter for the ADNKronos press agency, “We had just gotten onto the bus, and my young niece took a seat behind una signora [a lady]. Without any reason the woman began to hit the child with a sack she was holding, though luckily without hurting her. When we approached the woman to ask why she was doing this, she started to insult us and said, ‘You Africans, Negroes, what are you doing here?’ Then the old woman took a spray can out of her handbag and threatened to spray us with whatever it was, and started yelling that she had been attacked.”

     
    But others on the bus had witnessed the incident, and protested angrily at the woman’s behavior. Her reaction was to start insulting the passengers who had defended the family from Cameroun. The bus driver at that point asked her to get off, to which she retorted: “I’m not getting off – those Negroes have to get off.” The bus driver then stopped the bus and called the police as well as bus company officials, but before they arrived, the old woman had left the bus and disappeared. Said the man from the Cameroun: “I’ve been here since 1997, and never has anything similar happened.”

     
    On the same day while Romans were defending a black family, in Pisa a group of Italian students, age 14, sent handwritten notes of racist insults to a black fellow student, saying, “No one ever saw a a Negro getting a 10 in law class.” It happens that the girl from Senegal, whose name is given as ‘Aida’ (real names are not provided in cases like these), is Muslim and wears a headscarf to school. She is also a model student who intends to become a lawyer and outclassed, literally, at least some of her classmates; others defended her.

     
      To combat such attitudes, teachers in Aida’s school organized a discussion on racism, and one teacher had all students copy the letter of insults to see whose handwriting might be a match.
    Aida had done all her schooling in Pisa, and this was the first time that she had been a victim of racism, she told reporters. In an open letter, she wrote afterward to say that, “It’s not the fault of the school, this is racism by cowards. Today I returned to school as usual, and my classmates were very polite. Still, I consider myself deeply offended… I did not expect this sort of thing. It’s a shame that these people were not taught that what is inside us is more important than what is outside. I still plan to become a lawyer when I grow up, and I won’t let people like that stop me.”


     
    In fairness, one can understand the resentment of the little Alpine communities in the far north of Italy, when foreigners – including someone like me, from Ohio – barge into their tiny, hitherto isolated proud worlds.


    While hiking above Santa Cristina, I met a group of young men wearing wreaths of flowers on their hair. One was to be married the next day, and their culture called for an all-boy pre-marital hike. Who can blame them when, in Italian territories like this, where townspeople have lived in the ice and snow for centuries, they desire to protect their ways, their culture, their traditions?
    But they cannot, and the avalanche of newcomers is not about to be stopped – nor are racist reactions. This is one of the toughest challenges Italy the government of Premier Matteo Renzi, as well as the rest of Europe, faces today. Never since World War II has there been such an exodus of refugees, and never have the costs of maintaining them been so high. Managing, or attempting to manage, the situation is another huge expense, with some 8,600 Italians paid for their care, and countless others – including in the Catholic church – contributing voluntary efforts.

     
    Even the dead are an expense. Some twenty-five thousand bodies of migrants, drowned as their boats sank, lie in the Mediterranean. Sending a robot deep underwater to film only the latest disaster, the Italian Navy found devastating evidence of over 500 bodies. To bring them to the surface for possible identification and burial is estimated to cost over $15 million.

     
    The funds arriving from international organizations, including the European Union, are plainly insufficient, and their plans include military action approaching the shores of Libya, the primary point of departure for the Italian shores. What is to be done? Laura Boldrini, president of the Chamber of Deputies, has a unique history of experience in the field, having worked with refugees in Jordan, Albania, Afghanistan and Italy. From 1998 through 2012 she was the official spokesperson for the United Nations high commission on refugees (UNHCR).

     
    Her sensible suggestion: rather than join in a military action that would reach into Libyan territory, Italy should propose an international conference on Libya in hopes of finding a peaceful solution to the rival governments tormenting that turbulent country and “formation in Libya of a government of national unity.”
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    Is Italy Turning Racist?


    ROME – Is Italy showing signs of turning racist? Two incidents show what is happening these days, when the pressure of migration brings new stresses to a country which has had until now a proud history of open-mindedness.

    It was morning on May 19, and, as usual, the Roman bus on the #61 line was crowded. Seated among the others was a family of five from the Republic of Cameroun in Central Africa, a country tormented these days by raids from the the bloodthirsty Boko Haram. On the bus, as one of the five later related to a reporter for the ADNKronos press agency, “We had just gotten onto the bus, and my young niece took a seat behind una signora [a lady]. Without any reason the woman began to hit the child with a sack she was holding, though luckily without hurting her. When we approached the woman to ask why she was doing this, she started to insult us and said, ‘You Africans, Negroes, what are you doing here?’ Then the old woman took a spray can out of her handbag and threatened to spray us with whatever it was, and started yelling that she had been attacked.”

     
    But others on the bus had witnessed the incident, and protested angrily at the woman’s behavior. Her reaction was to start insulting the passengers who had defended the family from Cameroun. The bus driver at that point asked her to get off, to which she retorted: “I’m not getting off – those Negroes have to get off.” The bus driver then stopped the bus and called the police as well as bus company officials, but before they arrived, the old woman had left the bus and disappeared. Said the man from the Cameroun: “I’ve been here since 1997, and never has anything similar happened.”

     
    On the same day while Romans were defending a black family, in Pisa a group of Italian students, age 14, sent handwritten notes of racist insults to a black fellow student, saying, “No one ever saw a a Negro getting a 10 in law class.” It happens that the girl from Senegal, whose name is given as ‘Aida’ (real names are not provided in cases like these), is Muslim and wears a headscarf to school. She is also a model student who intends to become a lawyer and outclassed, literally, at least some of her classmates; others defended her.

     
      To combat such attitudes, teachers in Aida’s school organized a discussion on racism, and one teacher had all students copy the letter of insults to see whose handwriting might be a match.
    Aida had done all her schooling in Pisa, and this was the first time that she had been a victim of racism, she told reporters. In an open letter, she wrote afterward to say that, “It’s not the fault of the school, this is racism by cowards. Today I returned to school as usual, and my classmates were very polite. Still, I consider myself deeply offended… I did not expect this sort of thing. It’s a shame that these people were not taught that what is inside us is more important than what is outside. I still plan to become a lawyer when I grow up, and I won’t let people like that stop me.”
    In fairness, one can understand the resentment of the little Alpine communities in the far north of Italy, when foreigners – including someone like me, from Ohio – barge into their tiny, hitherto isolated proud worlds.


    While hiking above Santa Cristina, I met a group of young men wearing wreaths of flowers on their hair. One was to be married the next day, and their culture called for an all-boy pre-marital hike. Who can blame them when, in Italian territories like this, where townspeople have lived in the ice and snow for centuries, they desire to protect their ways, their culture, their traditions?
    But they cannot, and the avalanche of newcomers is not about to be stopped – nor are racist reactions. This is one of the toughest challenges Italy the government of Premier Matteo Renzi, as well as the rest of Europe, faces today. Never since World War II has there been such an exodus of refugees, and never have the costs of maintaining them been so high. Managing, or attempting to manage, the situation is another huge expense, with some 8,600 Italians paid for their care, and countless others – including in the Catholic church – contributing voluntary efforts.

     
    Even the dead are an expense. Some twenty-five thousand bodies of migrants, drowned as their boats sank, lie in the Mediterranean. Sending a robot deep underwater to film only the latest disaster, the Italian Navy found devastating evidence of over 500 bodies. To bring them to the surface for possible identification and burial is estimated to cost over $15 million.

     
    The funds arriving from international organizations, including the European Union, are plainly insufficient, and their plans include military action approaching the shores of Libya, the primary point of departure for the Italian shores. What is to be done? Laura Boldrini, president of the Chamber of Deputies, has a unique history of experience in the field, having worked with refugees in Jordan, Albania, Afghanistan and Italy. From 1998 through 2012 she was the official spokesperson for the United Nations high commission on refugees (UNHCR).

     
    Her sensible suggestion: rather than join in a military action that would reach into Libyan territory, Italy should propose an international conference on Libya in hopes of finding a peaceful solution to the rival governments tormenting that turbulent country and “formation in Libya of a government of national unity.”
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    Light at The End of the Economic Tunnel

    ROME – Italian economists and business leaders are finally shaking off some of their pessimism, to look at the brighter side. A report on May 13 issued by the national statistics-gathering agency ISTAT confirms that Italy has formally emerged from recession.
     

    After five consecutive quarters with no growth whatsoever, the Gross National Product (GNP, or PIL in Italian) surged upward during the first three months this year by 0.3%, or the same as Germany’s. “The results are better than the analysts had expected,” the ISTAT report acknowledged.

    The result was the best since the equivalent quarter back in 2011, when the GNP rose by 0.4%. “Italy has won the lottery, and in coming months we shall have other nice surprises,” predicts Luca Paolazzi, head the research center of the national manufacturers association Confindustria.

    Although Italy still lags, though only slightly, in the Eurozone, where GNP growth now averages 0.4%, the glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel sent Italian stock market prices rising by 1.06% today after the news was released. Behind the more positive outlook are three factors: the drop in energy prices, the stronger Euro and a reduction of interest rates. As a result, exports are leading the way, and are this year expected to rise by 4.5% over last year, Carlo Calenda, the deputy minister for economic development predicted today.

    Unemployment remains a gigantic problem. This March 52,000 new jobs were lost in just one month, over February; even so, at 13% unemployment is still lower than last November, when it peaked at 13.2%. Youth unemployment remains staggeringly high, at 43%. And deflation continues: during April the consumer price index rose by 0.2% -- better than the 0.3% the money wonks had predicted, but still slightly below that of the same period in 2014. For those who like statistics, out of a population of over 62 million, Italy has 24.6 million with regular employment, 3.4 million whose jobs are described as “precarious,” and 3,042,300 unemployed.

    Despite the signs of a more positive growth, many still suffer in the present economy. An insurance company executive informs us that car owners continue to overlook payment of their obligatory auto insurance. Deflation shows in a slight drop in housing prices and in communications, plus the fact that, with energy prices a down by around -6.5%, earnings from the transport sector continue to be low. On the other hand basic inflation is virtually stationary.

    On the negative side, corruption and an inept bureaucracy are both factors that continue to hinder growth, experts agree. Alberto Baban, who heads Confidustria’s small business section, says that if Italy reduced corruption to the level of that in Spain, its GDP could be increased considerably. “We’d be able to close half our growth differential with Spain,” said Baban. In fact, at 0.9%, Spain’s growth during the last three months was more than twice that of Italy. Moreover, the bad bureaucracy, Baban added, “costs us every year at least 4% of our GDP.”

    Lack of improvements in the education system is also taking heat from the manufacturers. The situation is chaotic at the moment, as thousands of teachers have walked out on strike, to march through city streets to show their opposition to an ambitious reform bill proposed by the government of Matteo Renzi.

    Among the teachers’ protests is that to oblige students to take a standardized test is unfair because, if results are compared school by school, the schools are pitted against each other in a competitive stance. As a result of the teachers unions’ opposition to these tests, which measure a student’s ability in math and sciences as well as in languages, almost one out of every four students (23%) walked out of school and refused to take the tests. By contrast, last year only a tiny percentage, 3%, played hookey.
  • Op-Eds

    Migrant Isle of Lampedusa

    ROME – When the gas tank in the wretched holding camp on the Libyan coast exploded, flames seared the face and back of a young mother from Eritrea. But never mind – camps for migrants have scant hospital facilities, and so, along with the others, the burn victim was hustled onto a plastic boat that was to bear her to Italy. Despite the pain she never let hold of the hand of her two-year-old son Samuel – or at least not until the migrants landed April 16 at the Italian isle of Lampedusa.

     

    At sight of her third- and fourth-degree burns, shocked rescuers had the woman rushed byhelicopter to the special burn unit in a hospital in Palermo, 185 air miles distant.

    In the rush little Samuel was left behind, pleading for eight days “Mam, Mam.”

    No one knew who his Mama was until a migrant, holding Samuel in his arms, told a social worker at Lampedusa that the child was not his.

    At that point the authorities, beginning with Lampedusa Mayor Giusi Nicolini, volunteer workers from Save the Children, and Dr. Pietro Bartolo, head of the island’s medical unit, launched a search for the child’s mother.

    The search was successful, and a smiling policewoman accompanied Samuel on a plane to Palermo to rejoin his mother April 24. (See >>> )
     

    This heart-warming tale shows the Italy that cares, despite the arrival May 2 and 3 of almost 6,000 migrants. Few care more, or are more hard pressed to handle what is literally a Biblical exodus, than the courageous, front-line mayor of tiny Lampedusa, Giuseppina (“Giusi”) Maria Nicolini.

    Formerly with  Legambiente as director of the island’s nature reserve, she was elected with a scant 26% of the vote, but brings to the island “what there is of its civil society,” in the words of Nando Della Chiesa, sociologist and the son of Mafia victim Gen. Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa.

    Writing in Il Fatto Quotidiano daily, Dalla Chiesa laid out the bleak situation which Nicolini had inherited from the island’s previous administrators: “A damaged territory, damaged environment, damaged legal system. At City Hall, the Guardie di Finanza [tax police] found that the previous administration’s documents had disappeared. That building sites had been opened without permits. Unlicensed establishments, including on beaches, had phony  permits.” Not least the, tax police found evidence of “ambiguous consultancies.”

    In an interview with the AdnKronos press agency Nicolini movingly spoke of the death of the Somalian Olympic athlete Samia Yusuf Omar, who died aboard one of the rickety boats while trying to reach Italy from Libya. More died than will ever be counted: “Over the years I’ve spoken with desperate Tunisian wives and mothers who are seeking news of loved ones who’ve simply disappeared. At Lampedusa we are not afraid of the migrants… For us they are not just numbers, but people. We see them when they arrive, we are in touch with them, and with their hopes and fears.”

    The question is to what extent the rest of Europe shares some of that awareness and will take serious steps to help. The Vatican has sharply criticized the European Union’s decision last month to bomb the boats on the coast of Libya so as (the EU presumes) to halt the human traffic. Cardinal Antonio Maria Veglio’, who is president of the Pontifical Council for Migrants, said that “To bomb the boats is a very strange idea: just what will they bomb? Only migrants boats? Who guarantees that they will not kill those nearby? International law exists, and to drop a bomb on a country is an act of war.”

    What Italy obviously needs, with the increased pressure from migrants arriving via land as well as sea routes, is more cooperation from the rest of Europe. In a meeting with the foreign press here last week Sandro Gozi, 46, who is Deputy Minister for Migration, made the point that for the first time the EU this month acknowledged that it had some responsibility toward Italy. “Public opinion in France and Germany was shocked at the drowning of hundreds of migrants,” said Gozi. “This helped to finally establish that the whole EU must take action. The tragedy has awakened the rest of Europe. It’s a positive sign that EU funding was inceased and that action against the traffickers is planned.” What is happening is a form of slavery, he added. “The migrants pay but then they are forced onto the boats with beatings and at gunpoint.”

    Just last year 122,000 migrants landed in Europe. In Italy, the total number of those requesting asylum was of  65,000 in 2014 (43% more than in 2013), and included some 10,000 from Nigeria and 9,800 from Somalia. The most besieged country was Germany, with 202,000 requesting asylum; among these were 41,000 from Syrian and 27,000 from Serbia. Germany was also the EU nation granting the most asylum permits, or almost 6,000 in 2014. By contrast, Sweden, where 81,000 requested asylum (they included 31,000 Syrians and 12,000 Eritreans), granted only 2, 375 permits that year.

    The United Nations Refugee agency UNHCR maintains that, “The number of refugees accepted by Italy remains comparative modest by comparison with other European countries and in the rest of the world.” Italy accepts only one refugee every 1,000 people. By contrast, Sweden has 11 refugees per thousand and France, 3.6.
  • Op-Eds

    It’s “Forward Ho!” for Renzi’s Ship



    ROME – Matteo Renzi, who is the president of the leading Italian party, Partito Democratico (and who also happens to be premier), sounded like a character from the movie “The Shipping News” Wednesday. When the controversial election reform bill known as the “Italicum” sailed through the Chamber of Deputies with a comfortable margin of, he declared, with obvious relief, that, “I don’t have everyone on board, but at this point the ship is sailing forward.”
     
    The voting came in three sections. The first, April 29, showed 352 in favor vs. 207 against. The two remaining sections were voted the following day, when again Renzi prevailed with 350 ayes to 193 nays and only one abstention. The next section commanded an even better resi;t, with 357 in favor, just 15 no’s and one abstention; the necessary majority was only 179.
    None of these three ballots were on the bill itself; given the strong opposition from Renzi’s own party’s left wing – those he called not “on board” – as a bill, it would most likely have flopped. To save it, Renzi called instead for a vote of confidence in his government, in what was akin to a kangaroo with the election reform bill tucked in its pocket. Earlier Renzi had warned that, “If the Italicum does not pass, I honestly believe the government will fall.” But it did not, and the latest is that a handful of parties opposing the Italiacum (and Renzi) are already threatening an abrogative referendum against the reform.
     
    Among these is Nichi Vendola’s Sinistra Ecologica Liberta’ (SEL), whose MPs wore black arm bands of mourning during the vote. Still, for now Italy itself is more victor than funeral parlor. Without this successful vote the government almost certainly would have collapsed, forcing new elections, not only three years ahead of schedule, but also under today’s election rules, so patently unjust that they are nicknamed “The Porcellum” (Pigsty Law) and have been publicly scorned by their very author, Roberto Calderoli. Showing how unpoular is this “Porcellum,” four years ago a petition, circulated in Italy to abolish that law, was signed by such illustrious Italians as author Umberto Eco, political commentator Giovanni Sartori, orchestra conductor Claudio Abbado and scientist Margherita Hack.
     
    The election reform bill is not yet definitive, but must face a final vote in mid-week. The ballot is secret, but few here expect surprises. However, given the opposition to it, a serious issue is whether or not the 38 Partito Democratico (PD) MPs from Renzi’s own party who refuse to follow the party line will abstain or actually desert the Parliamentary assembly. Such were tensions between PD majority and minority that in Parliament the two groups did not appear to be on speaking terms, according to reporters observing from the press tribunes.This is political theater, and one of their goals in flaunting their opposition to Renzi’s election law is to be rid of Renzi himself.
     
    However, Renzi is somewhat strengthened as party leader by having forced the rebels into the open, where they can be counted. When the dissidents, led by the party’s former president Pier Luigi Bersani, urged others among their fellow MPs to vote down the government, they were simply ignored. Renzi’s government is also strengthened, in the sense that, when the bill becomes law, he will have dodged early elections and forced through his most significant reform so far of this legislature.
     
    On the down side, although at the moment they deny this, some risk remains that the dissident PD left wing may quit the party altogether, further splintering an electorate already fragmented into tiny parties. Here the new Italicum law (when passed) may discourage some, for its bottom line is that to be represented in Parliament a party must win a minimum of 3% of the vote.
     
    But even passage of the Italicum will not end Renzi’s problems, and another serious battle already looms over his proposed renovation (destruction, some might call it) of the Senate. Here Renzi’s goal is to stop the back-and-forth, pingpong-bouncing of bills between the two houses of Parliament, which has brought inert governments after countless stalemated legislation. To combat this, Renzi would have the Senate not directly elected, but with a goodly number of representatives from regional governments.
     
    The PD dissidents, who protest that Renzi’s governing style is frontal collision rather than political discourse, will probably have more clout over the Senate reform bill, which involves constitutional law. To pass his version, Renzi may be forced embarrassingly to beg for reinforcements from within the ranks of Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia (FI) party, whose old agreement with Renzi to work together on major reforms, has long since been left at the wayside.
     
     
     
     
  • Facts & Stories

    Remembering the Liberation




    ROME – This is the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Italy from the Nazi-Fascist yoke, and the celebrations are everywhere. They begin, naturally, with the radio and TV, which has us all singing “Bella Ciao,” the beloved song of the partisans, all day long. The ranks of those remembering Liberation Day and those who were themselves part of it, as partigiani, begin to thin, and their recollections become all the more precious to those who came after.



    The most touching from my point of view was the account by Nunzia Cavarischia, who is now 86 but was just 15 years old when she had to flee with her grandparents from the bombing of Rome. She was the daughter of anti-Fascist working class parents, and, as she relates, once Mussolini passing by in Rome caressed her cheek. “Get the muriatic acid and wash her face,” her father shouted in rage. She did not and remained a sweet, shy, pretty girl, who would wave and call “Ciao!” from her bicycle to the German soldiers, who had no idea that in her book bag were partisan documents, letters and even weapons.



    On June 9, 1944, a group of partisan fighters set up a trap for two German trucks. They killed two Nazi soldiers, but a third, despite a leg injury, escaped. Nunzia set out to find him. Seeing a woman outside the door of her little house, Nunzia called softly, “Any German soldiers around here?” The woman froze, nodding her head slightly. Obviously there was.



    Nunzia dashed inside the house. Indeed there he was, a giant of a man, lying on a bed with his injured leg up. He was armed: machine gun, pistol, two grenades. Only half aware of what she was doing, Nunzia kicked the gun away. Grabbing it, she pointed at him even though she had no idea of how to use a gun. He gave a sigh and sank back in pain. In Italian he said: “Here we are, even the children are against us now.”



    When the real partisan fighters came to take him away, he muttered that Hitler had a “secret weapon.”



    That was the end of their relationship until almost half a century later, when she was invited to a partisan reunion. “You know, this year a German who fought in this neighborhood is coming.” In fact, it was he. They took one look at each other, recognized one another, and – embraced, weeping tears of regret and joy at meeting again. Nunzia learned that Erich, the giant she had arrested, was Austrian, not German, from Innsbruck, and that the day they met he had been 24 years old. While an Italian prisoner of war he had met Nunzia’s father. The two had spoken often and, Erich related, “your father helped me understand so many things.” Until Erich died a year ago they wrote each other affectionate letters, she relates, and saw each other twice a year.



    “We never spoke of the war. History wanted us enemies but we were friends.” –from La Repubblica, April 23, 2015

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