Daily Lesson from Life 13 March 2009

"Rape inquiry sheds light on racism in Italy

DNA tests have ruled out two Romanians who were accused and called "beasts". -> Fri, Mar 13, 2009 Reuters

ROME (Reuters) - When police arrested two Romanians for the rape of an Italian teenager in Rome, Il Giornale, a paper owned by the family of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, reported: "The Romanian beasts have been caught."

Three weeks later, prosecutors admitted the "beasts" could not be guilty -- DNA tests had ruled them out -- and Italians were left wondering whether growing anti-immigrant sentiment had played a role in a hurried investigation.


"The discovery that these two Romanians accused of rape are not guilty is a real slap in the face for our national conscience," wrote commentator Lucia Annunziata in an editorial in La Stampa newspaper.

"The whole country was duped on a path of hasty and crude racism," she wrote.

Xenophobic feelings have been brewing in pockets of Europe in recent months, fueled by economic downturn as locals and immigrants compete for fewer jobs and ever lower wages. There has been racist violence in the Czech Republic and Hungary, migrants who flocked to Russia looking for work in the boom have been threatened or abused, and tensions are mounting between immigrants and Spaniards competing for shelter and work.

In Italy, botched investigations are far from uncommon. But the Rome rape case triggered a media and political frenzy that is becoming increasingly frequent, in the homeland of the Mafia, when a crime is blamed on foreigners.


This is particularly evident in the case of Romanians, whose community in Italy has swelled to about one million since the country joined the European Union in 2007 and they were able to freely travel and find work in Italy.

"There is a presumption by big sectors of the society that all these foreigners -- and Romanians in particular -- are violent. It's starting to be a given," said James Walston, professor of Political Science at Rome's American University.


In the Rome area where the rape was committed at the Caffarella park on Valentine's Day, news that the two Romanians had been cleared provoked anger and disbelief.

"I'm angry. I'm not racist, my maid is Romanian. But Romanian men are bad, they are all bandits," said 65-year old Silvana Pallotti, who since the rape has joined a newly created neighborhood committee to protect women.


"The truth is, whether you are a communist or a fascist or anything in-between, when you see a Romanian getting on a bus at night you check your wallet," said 24-year old Alessandra Bruni, a barwoman who helped the rape victim after the attack."

This is a very real situation. When times are good, most 'rich' host countries welcome migrant-workers who perform jobs that the local does not want at lower cost. When times are bad, they simple let the migrant-workers go but they had nowhere to go! So, some may turn to crime. BUT not all of them! Some are poor but they are decent folks.

Lessons for me are:

1. planning for the country must be far sighted. If you invite migrant workers, you have to deal with the potential conflicts in local vs. migrant in the bad times since you cannot guarantee good times will go on forever!;

2. if you do plan for migrant-workers to convert to local citizenship, then you better be able to provide the social safety net too. Otherwise, when they have nowhere to go, things will get nasty eventually. A recipe for disaster really!;

3. as we look at Italy or Russia or any other countries that have prejudiced against migrant-workers, we must become aware of how Singapore and Singaporeans may have deal with similar situations. As it is, we are already running of space to house them just a few months back. And now we are worry about where to put them as they get retrenched!

4. while we must not let 'lack of jobs' and 'lack of economic progress' be the excuses for treating migrant-workers badly. We do have to recognize that if a country cannot afford to accommodate non-income bearing migrant-workers on a pro-longed period.

There is no easy solution. Just a series of adjustments... Keep at it. And stay cool! Don't jump to 'concussion'!!