Chronicles of ordinary racism 2011 - Cronache di ordinario razzismo

Many immigrants chose to leave immediately, but those without their own means of
transport were forced to leave the village under police protection: those who tried to
make their way alone on foot ran the risk of being lynched. 255 Even activists from local
associations who always tried to help immigrants were scared to show their faces. 256
According to the Interior Ministry, 748 immigrants were transferred in police buses to
centers in Crotone and Bari. Around 330 managed to leave by their own means. Most of
them without receiving the pay due to them. 257 The Africalabria watchdog estimated
that around 1200 immigrants either escaped or were sent away from Rosarno.
On 9 January some of the makeshift shacks around the former “la Rognetta” factory
were torn down, even though they still contained all the personal belongings of the
immigrants forced to hastily abandon them. Still not satisfied, on the 11 January, when
the ethnic cleansing had been brought to completion, Rosarno citizens organized a
demonstration to protest against the media for supposedly misrepresented Rosarno as a
racist town. Incidentally, the anti‐mafia banner sported by the local high‐school
students saying “hopefully one day we will be able to say: once upon a time the was the
Mafia”, was very badly received and they were forced to fold it up. The images of the
rioting in Rosarno traveled far and wide and “Le Monde” went so far as to publish a
piece entitled: “Racisme: le syndrome de Rosarno.” 258
Of course, the whole of Rosarno is not racist, but without doubt the insanity displayed in
the course of these few days is. 259 The theory of a “war of the disadvantaged” and of the
unsustainable state of social “decay”, advanced by some in order to play down or deny
the racist nature of the violence carried out by part, we must bear this in mind, of
Rosarno’s population, does not convince. The use of weapons, the people being
pursued in the streets, the beatings, the blockade around the structures where
immigrants live, the explicit public request for a mass deportation, and the
“bestialisation” of the enemy: what is all this if not racism 260 Evidently, the judges and
prosecutors involved in the trial against Giuseppe Ceravolo, Giuseppe Bono e Antonio
Bellocco, the only three people charged, to this day, in relation to the violent acts
committed in Rosarno, must have thought differently, as they ruled out racism as an
aggravating circumstance.. 261
255 A description of what happened to the immigrants during those days can be found in L. Boldrini, Tutti indietro, (Moving
backwards) Rizzoli, 2010 and in the archives of the Africalabria.org observatory available on www.terrelibere.org
256 Giuseppe Pugliese, contact for the local observatory Africalabria.org and well-known in Rosarno, is forced to hide in order to
avoid reprisals. Indeed, one of the many unfounded rumours circulating during those hours pins the blame on the observatory for
egging the rioters on.
257 Cf. The data is that given to the Parliament by the Interior minister. See: Senato della Repubblica, Legislature 16º - Main
room – Stenographic report of session n. 309 on 12 January 2010. Some of the immigrants manage to obtain what is due to them
thanks to the volunteers of Africalabria.org who contacted the employers before the workers left.
258 Cf. “Racisme: “La syndrome de Rosarno” (The Rosarno syndrome), 2 February 2010, “Le Monde”.
259 See, for example, some of statements gathered by Attilio Bolzoni among the Rosarno citizens who built a barricade on
highway 18, for il Corriere della Sera on 10 January 2010: “We are not racists, but they are beasts” , which is also the title of his
article. “Calabrian immigrants abroad have never behaved in such shocking way as these Bedouins are doing here”; “they ate cats
and dogs, and probably mice too” and so on.
260 Association Cir, usually very careful in its use of the language, also talks about racism and pogroms in a document that,
among other things, gets straight to the heart of the events of Rosarno: the feeling that people were entitled to “take the law into
their own hands”, in a place where nobody trusted institutions, partly thanks to Law 94/2009 that effectively institutionalised
“vigilante patrols”. See: Rosarno: capolinea dello stato di diritto, (Rosarno: here ends the rule of law) on www.cir.it
261
The first one was sentenced to 6 years for voluntarily knocking over an immigrant with his car (who luckily was not seriously
injured) on June 2010. The second, who drove a digger into a group of immigrants, was sentenced to 2 years, but only for
obstruction of justice, on March 2010. The third (the son of an ‘ndrangheta member) attacked an immigrant, after grazing him
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