All over western Europe, in supermarkets and street-markets, the Christmas/New Year period is marked by the arrival of masses of oranges, tangerines, clementines and mandarins sold at cheap prices and consumed in vast quantities. These tropical fruits are supplied from citrus groves in southern parts of Spain and Italy, where they are grown in hothouse and industrial conditions and picked and packed for export by migrant labourers from Morocco and sub Saharan Africa.

Last weekend, the festive season showed its inhuman face in the little town of Rosarno, in the southern Italian region of Calabria, the heartland of the fruit-growing area. For the last 20 years, seasonal, illegal immigrants from Africa have been recruited by Italian networks to labour in the fruit industry for €20 a day (12-14 hours). They live in makeshift card-board structures inside abandoned factories without electricity, clean water or sanitation facilities. Last year, a BBC documentary made the point that these conditions amounted to slave labour and that here, ‘in the heart of Europe, they treat Africans worse than we treat animals.’ The Italian authorities appear not have been concerned by this state of affairs, despite periodic revelations in the media, Italian and foreign.

Suddenly last week, on 8 January, two men appeared on the site and shot at random at the African workers with airguns, killing two of them. In response to this unprovoked attack, the Africans, who are daily treated to verbal and physical abuse by Italian supervisors, decided enough was enough. Hundreds of them descended on the town of Rosarno (which has a population of 15,000), attacking, breaking and setting on fire shops, cars and so on.

The next day, the townspeople took their revenge, went up to the camp armed with guns and shot at the Africans; the ensuing confrontation, or ‘mini civil war’ as one Italian paper put it, left five more Africans dead and 33 injured in a total count of nearly 70. Some Italian commentators called the episode ‘our Klu Klux Klan in action.’

It was at this point that the police finally appeared, to evacuate the 1,000 or so workers to refugee centres pending deportation to their countries of origin. The cardboard living quarters have been razed, all traces removed.

The Minister of the Interior in Berlusconi’s goverment has put the blame exclusively on the illegal migrants and on the previous government’s laxism in letting them into the country in the first place. The fact that the entire fruit growing and exporting industry depends for its existence and profits on these foreign slaves who work and live in conditions and for wages totally inacceptable to the natives is of course never mentioned.

It was, however, Berlusconi’s own newspaper, Il Giornale, which gave the real background to the episode, explaining that the two men who first shot at the workers were members of the local mafia of Calabria, the ‘Ndranghetta’, judged generally to be the most vicious of the four mafias that control Italy’s non-formal economy….and much else besides. The shooting of the Africans was a reprisal attack by the mafia on the state authorities for recent police action against them; it was the mafia’s way of showing the police who controlled the turf in Calabria. After all, the workers’ very presence in Rosarno is due to the mafia who organise the human trafficking of these people every fruit-picking season. Berlusconi’s paper went on to advise the good people of Rosarno not to ‘shoot the negroes, but shoot the mafiosi’!

This comment sums up the general attitude of the rightwing press towards illegal immigrants, of whom there are some 600,000 in a population of 4 million foreigners living in Italy. Racist terms (‘nigger’ or ‘bingo-bongo’) for Africans are commonplace and nothing is done by the authorities to help even these foreigners integrate into Italian society which needs their labour – and their taxes. The criminal exploitation of the defenceless, illegal worker by the mafia is similarly ignored, certainly by Berlusconi and his allies of the Northern League.

Italians themselves were once migrants, working in the factories, farms and home of their richer European neighbours. There are 50 million Italians who have migrated to other countries today, the largest such group in the world. They were never treated and exploited with such cynical racism as the Africans are today in Italy. It is true and fair to say that Italy is not unique in this area and that illegal migrants are abused elsewhere in Europe.

However, what makes the Italian situation special is the mafia connection, over which this advanced democratic state seems to have little influence, if any. ‘We are not animals’, said the makeshift cardboard banners the Africans in Rosarno waved as they were herded off the site by the police. Strangely, the same sentiment was voiced by the Pope, but in different words, in his Sunday sermon, ‘An immigrant is a human being who must respected.’

If there is a clash of civilisations, it is surely here, in enlightened Europe, in the backyard of the Vatican, except that to understand it, one will have to read Joseph Conrad backwards and look into the heart of darkness here, where the mafia and the Klu Klux Klan meet and treat African labourers as cannon-fodder in their turf and profit wars.

2000 years after Christ asked his flock to ’love one’s neighbour as one’s self’, his representative on earth advises the faithful to treat immigrants as humans. Well, that is a start, of sorts. But then, come the next festive season, who will pick and pack the oranges…for €20 a day?

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Annar Cassam is a Tanzanian and a former director of the UNESCO Office, UNO, Geneva.
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