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Rodney D. Coates
Professor

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Italy's African Heroes

By Roberto Saviano

January 25, 2010, The New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/25/opinion/25saviano.html?em

Naples, Italy

WHEN I was a teenager here, kids used to shoot dogs in the
head. It was a way of gaining confidence with a gun, of
venting your rage on another living creature. Now it seems
human beings are used for target practice.

This month, rioting by African immigrants broke out in
Rosarno, in southern Italy, after at least one immigrant was
shot with an air rifle. The riots were widely portrayed as
clashes between immigrants and native Italians, but they were
really a revolt against the 'Ndrangheta, the powerful
Calabrian mafia. Anyone who seeks to negate or to minimize
this motive is not familiar with these places where
everything - jobs, wages, housing - is controlled by criminal
organizations.

The episode in Rosarno was the second such uprising against
organized crime in Italy in the last few years. The first
took place in 2008 in Castel Volturno, a town near Naples,
where hit men from the local mob, the Camorra, killed six
Africans. The massacre was intended to intimidate, but it set
off the immigrants' anger instead.

In Castel Volturno, the immigrants work in construction. In
Rosarno, they pick oranges. But in both places the mafias
control all economic activity. And the only ones who've had
the courage to rebel against them are the Africans.

An immigrant who lands in France or Britain knows he'll have
to abide by the law, but he also knows he'll have real and
tangible rights. That's not how it is in Italy, where
bureaucracy and corruption make it seem as if the only
guarantees are prohibitions and mafia rule, under which
rights are nonexistent. The mafias let the African immigrants
live and work in their territories because they make a profit
off them. The mafias exploit them, but also grant them living
space in abandoned areas outside of town, and they keep the
police from running too many checks or repatriating them.

The immigrants are temporarily willing to accept peanut
wages, slave hours and poor living conditions. They've
already handed over all they owned, risked all they had, just
to get to Italy. But they came to make a better life for
themselves - and they're not about to let anyone take the
possibility of that life away.

There are native Italians who reject mafia rule as well, but
they have the means and the freedom to leave places like
Rosarno, becoming migrants themselves. The Africans can't.
They have to stand up to the clans. They know they have to
act collectively, for it's their only way of protecting
themselves. Otherwise they end up getting killed, which
happens sometimes even to the European immigrant workers.

It's a mistake to view the Rosarno rioters as criminals. The
Rosarno riots were not about attacking the law, but about
gaining access to the law.

There are African criminals of course, African mafiosi, who
do business with the Italian mafias. An increasing amount of
the cocaine that arrives here from South America comes via
West Africa. African criminal organizations are amassing
enormous power, but the poor African workers in Italy are not
their men.

The Italian state should condemn the violence of the riots,
but if it treats the immigrants as criminals, it will drive
them to the mafias. After the Rosarno riots, the government
moved more than a thousand immigrants to detention centers,
allegedly for their own safety, and destroyed the rudimentary
camp where many of them had lived. This is the kind of
reaction that will encourage those immigrants to see the
African criminal organizations as necessary protection.

For now, the majority resist; they came to Italy to better
themselves, not to be mobsters. But if the Africans in
Rosarno had been organized at a criminal level, they would
have had a way to negotiate with the Calabrian Mafia. They
would have been able to obtain better working and living
conditions. They wouldn't have had to riot.

Italy is a country that's forgotten how its emigrants were
treated in the United States, how the discrimination they
suffered was precisely what allowed the Mafia to take root
there. It was extremely difficult for many Italian
immigrants, who did not feel protected or represented by
anyone else, to avoid the clutches of the mob. It's enough to
remember Joe Petrosino, the Italian-born New York City police
officer who was murdered in 1909 for taking on the Mafia, to
recognize the price honest Italians paid.

Immigrants come to Italy to do jobs Italians don't want to
do, but they have also begun defending the rights that
Italians are too afraid, indifferent or jaded to defend. To
those African immigrants I say: don't go - don't leave us
alone with the mafias.

[Roberto Saviano is the author of "Gomorrah: A Personal
Journey Into the Violent International Empire of Naples'
Organized Crime System." This essay was translated by
Virginia Jewiss from the Italian.]

Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

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