Cecile Kyenge – praag.org

17 EU ministers condemn ‘racism’ against black Italian minister

Cécile Kyenge with the Belgian Deputy Prime Minister, Joelle Milquet, to her right

Ministers from 17 EU member states on Monday (23 September) gathered in Rome to condemn the racism directed towards Italy’s integration minister Cecile Kyenge.

Ministers from 17 member states gathered in Rome to condemn racism.

The ministers called for a new pact to stamp out racism across Europe, which they see as on the rise.

“What has happened to the Italian minister is unacceptable but we’re talking about a widespread phenomenon,” Belgium’s deputy prime minster, Joelle Milquet, told reporters in Rome.

They signed a “Declaration of Rome,” which calls upon the EU to put together a plan for 2014-2020 on diversity and the fight against racism.

“Intolerance and discrimination, in whatever form, is reprehensible. We cannot ignore it and we cannot do nothing about it,” states the declaration.

The ministers want the European Commission to draft a report on racism before the European Parliament elections next May.

It notes that all member states should finalise the transposition of anti-discrimination legislation and put in place “judicial instruments” to help weed out attacks.

The declaration also condemns political movements with racist and xenophobic positions and notes that the economic crisis has reinforced populism and racism.

Speaking to reporters after the declaration, Kyenge thanked her counterparts for their support.

Kyenge, an eye doctor born in the Congo, has faced racial slurs and jeers in her first five months office from far right Italian politicians and others. She has also faced death threats.

Right-wing Northern League senator Roberto Calderoli compared her features to that of orangutan. Italian Northern League MEP Mario Borghezio, who is a member of the civil liberties committee, described the Italian government as a ‘bongo bongo’ administration because of Kyenge.

In early September, members of the far-right Forza Nuova movement smeared blood on mannequins, which they placed outside municipal buildings in Rome. The act was in protest of Kyenge’s proposal to extend citizenship to Italian-born children of immigrants.

“I have never said Italy is racist, every country needs to start building awareness of immigration and Italy has simply arrived very late,” Kyenge said following the mannequin incident.

In August, a member of separatist group Veneto State, threatened to kill Kyenge on his Facebook page.

In another incident over the summer, Italian Councillor Dolores Valandro, was given a 13-month suspended sentence, a €13,000 fine, and a three-year ban from holding public office after she suggested Kyenge should be raped. – euobserver.com

Bananas thrown at Italy’s black minister

Italy’s first black minister, a target of racist slurs since her appointment in April, has condemned a spectator who threw bananas towards her while she was making a speech at a party rally.

Integration minister Cecile Kyenge, who was born in Democratic Republic of Congo, has angered far-right groups with her campaign to make it easier for immigrants to gain Italian citizenship.

Shortly before the incident on Friday, members of the right-wing Forza Nuova group left mannequins covered in fake blood at the site of the rally in Cervia, central Italy, in protest against Kyenge’s proposal to make anyone born on Italian soil a citizen.

“Immigration kills,” was written on leaflets accompanying the dummies – a slogan Forza Nuova has previously used when referring to murders committed by immigrants in Italy.

Although the bananas missed the stage where Kyenge was speaking, she responded to the gesture on Twitter, calling it “sad” and a waste of food, considering the economic crisis.

“The courage and optimism to change things has to come above all from the bottom up to reach the institutions,” she added.

Kyenge has faced regular insults since becoming minister, often from other politicians. Earlier this month a senior parliamentarian in the anti-immigration Northern League party likened her to an orangutan and only apologized after a storm of criticism. – Reuters

‘Racist outbursts’ becoming common in Italy

Black footballer Balotelli on the cover of the Italian VanityFair

by Michele Leridon, Davide Lerner

From monkey chants in football stadiums to threats against the first black minister, racial outbursts in Italy reflect the profound social change taking place in a country relatively new to immigration.

Shocking episodes of racism have multiplied over the past few months, from hooligans taunting star striker Mario Balotelli with inflatable bananas to crude and vicious insults against the country’s Immigration Minister Cecile Kyenge, an Italian citizen born in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Kyenge, who refuses to write Italy off as racist, has taken the brunt of the abuse since her election in April, shrugging off derogatory nicknames or photograph montages online in which her head is superimposed onto the bodies of indigenous African women.

“Why does no one rape her, so she can understand what the victims of atrocious crime feel?” a party official with Italy’s anti-immigrant Northern League party wrote of her last month in a Facebook post, while last week the vice-president of the Senate compared her to an orangutan.

The former was given a 13-month suspended sentence and was banned from public office for three years, while senator Roberto Calderoli is being investigated for inciting racial hatred — though he refuses to resign, insisting he has done enough by apologising to Kyenge with a bunch of flowers.

Bizarrely, the probe against him was only opened after a consumers association, Condacons, launched a complaint. And despite a petition signed by 200,000 people calling for Calderoli’s removal, the League member has so far managed to hold on to his prestigious Senate post.

“Italy is no more racist than other European countries, but sensitivity to the issue is not as developed here,” Italian historian Marco Fossati told AFP.

Michela Marzano, a philosopher and deputy from the centre-left Democratic Party (PD), said: “there is an extreme tolerance towards intolerance.”

“Italy has not had many opportunities to enter into contact with ‘the Other’, because it has always been a country of emigration rather than immigration,” she said.

While millions of Italian fleeing poverty emigrated to the United States, Latin America and other parts of Europe throughout the Twentieth century, the Mediterranean country has only had to absorb large numbers of immigrants over the past 20 years or so.

“We have remained very provincial, and the Calderoli affair has sparked a lot of indignation but no concrete action,” said Fossati, adding: “anyone who reacts with indignance is seen as a moralist, someone who is infected with the ‘politically correct’ virus.”

Luigi Manconi, head of the civil rights commission in the Senate, dates the ‘legitimisation’ of racial abuse back to an episode in 2007, when an Italian woman was raped by a Romanian man ahead of municipal elections, kicking off a fear-based campaign equating Romanians to rapists.

From that point, Manconi says, the Northern League — and Calderoli in particular — have felt increasingly free to be racist and “have played a fundamental role in the legitimation of xenophobia.”

Adriano Prosperi, modern history professor at Pisa University, compares Italians’ apathy in the face of racism today with the introduction of racial laws in 1938 which were “passively absorbed by Italian society” under dictator Benito Mussolini’s Fascist regime.

Centre-right former premier Silvio Berlusconi, renowned for off-colour comments, sparked a backlash in January when he stated during the inauguration of a Holocaust museum that the regime “in many ways did good things” for Italy — before retracting his comment.

Despite such incidents, Prosperi said he does not think Italy is “profoundly racist at heart”. While the League may generate shock headlines — its former leader Umberto Bossi once said immigrants arriving by boat should be shot at with cannons — it won just four percent in the last elections.

The real reason Calderoli has not been forced out, Prosperi says, is that the current government “has sacrificed values for the sake of realpolitik.” – AFP

Italy’s first black minister receives death threats

Italy’s first black Cabinet minister is facing Internet death threats before a visit to a region known for its anti-immigrant political base.

But Cecile Kyenge says she’s not afraid and challenged Italians to respond to such intimidation themselves to prove that Italy isn’t racist.

Kyenge, a Congolese-born doctor who has lived in Italy since 1983, has been the target of racist diatribes ever since she was named integration minister in April. She has been called “Congolese monkey,” and a member of a “bonga bonga government.”

Last week, a local politician from the xenophobic Northern League party was expelled from the party after she suggested on Facebook: “Why doesn’t someone rape her (Kyenge), so she can understand what victims of atrocious crimes feel?” The official, Dolores Valandro, was implying that immigrants were responsible for violent crime in Italy.

Kyenge on Wednesday acknowledged “racist episodes,” but declined to brand the country as a whole racist. She has offered a muted response to the attacks against her, saying it’s more for Italy as a nation to respond.

“These actions are directed against all of us, not just me,” Kyenge told reporters. “Surely it hasn’t left me indifferent. But I think the response that the country gives is important.”

Unlike France, Germany or Britain, where second and third generations of immigrants have settled, albeit uneasily, Italy is a relative newcomer to the phenomenon, with the first waves of immigrants coming to Italy’s shores only in the 1980s. The country’s race problem was then largely seen at soccer stadiums, where even today black stars like Mario Balotelli are routinely subjected to racists taunts.

But Kyenge’s emergence onto the political stage has brought the issue to the fore, spurred on in part by her call for Italy to change its citizenship law to allow children born in Italy of legal immigrants to obtain citizenship more easily.

Currently, such children can only apply once they turn 18, and can be denied citizenship for a host of bureaucratic mistakes or omissions. Kyenge says changing the law is a key part of changing Italians’ very concept of citizenship, to take into account the country’s changing demographics.

Foreigners made up about 2 percent of Italy’s population in 1990; currently the figure stands at 7.5 percent.

“It’s a new citizenship that comes about by the meeting of different cultures,” she said.

Her call, however, has been met with stiff resistance by the anti-immigrant Northern League, which isn’t taking part in a parliamentary committee drafting the new citizenship law. Kyenge’s spokesman, Cosimo Torlo, said it’s unclear at what age citizenship could be obtained under the proposed legislation – at age 3, 5 or 10 – but that “Whatever it is, it will be better than the current law.”

The threats against Kyenge are real. She arrived at the Foreign Press Association with a phalanx of bodyguards, two of whom flanked the dais where Kyenge spoke, talking into their shirt cuffs and sending signals to two other colleagues at the back of the room.

Asked about the unusually high security detail, Kyenge noted that all ministers have bodyguards. “But it’s clear that for me, because of the threats I have received, there’s a greater attention on protection.”

This weekend, Kyenge will give the opening address to a multicultural festival in the northern region of Veneto, the political home base of the Northern League. Far-right groups are planning a protest. Isabella Zuliani, vice mayor of the town hosting the event, told newspaper Il Gazzettino that police have already been informed about a new round of Internet death threats directed at Kyenge, including one that exhorted simply: “Kill her.”

“Racist episodes exist, but you can’t say that a country is racist because there are certain episodes in the territory,” Kyenge said.

That said, Kyenge appeared more ready to acknowledge such “racist episodes” than in her first meeting with the media, soon after she was nominated. Then, she said Italy’s problem wasn’t so much racism as ignorance of “the other.”

After two months of taunts directed against her, Kyenge said, “Maybe what is missing in Italy is a culture of immigration: We have to try to know, understand the ‘other,’ and that diversity is a richness.

“As soon as we understand that, we can evaluate whether Italy is racist,” she added. – AP

Councillor calls for black Italian minister ‘to be raped’

dolores valandro-2 — Councillor Dolores Valandro

A councillor belonging to Italy’s anti-immigrant Northern League party called Thursday for the country’s first black minister to be raped, sparking an outcry and her expulsion from the party.

“Won’t someone rape her, just to make her understand what victims of this terrible crime feel? For shame!” Dolores Valandro, a councillor in Padua in Northern Italy, wrote on Facebook alongside a photograph of African-Italian Immigration Minister Cecile Kyenge.

Valandro was apparently reacting to an article on a website called “all immigrant crimes” which detailed an alleged attempt by a Somali in Genoa to rape two Romanian girls, Italian media reports said.

Kyenge said “everyone should feel offended” by the comments, and said she had long battled against violent language and behaviour.

Her reaction was supported by Prime Minister Enrico Letta, who said: “Cecile Kyenge is right, each one of us should feel offended, I feel offended.”

“The words do not deserve any comment, just disdain. Cecile deserves solidarity from me, the government and the country,” he said.

Valandro later apologised, saying: “It was a something I said in a moment of anger. When I’m angry I vent that way.”

Kyenge, an eye doctor and Italian citizen originally from Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), has been subjected to a barrage of racist attacks since being appointed minister in February.

She has drawn heated criticism from the League over plans to push for legislation that would allow children born in Italy to immigrant parents to get automatic citizenship instead of waiting until 18 to apply. – AFP