2 Dead Gypsy Kids ~ Italians Continue to Sunbathe While Bodies Roast in the Sun

[Mr.Goodbar]

The picture that shames Italy

It's another balmy weekend on the beach in Naples. By the rocks, a couple soak up the southern Italian sun. A few metres away, their feet poking from under beach towels that cover their faces and bodies, lie two drowned Roma children.

The girls, Cristina, aged 16, and Violetta, 14, were buried last night as the fallout from the circumstances of their death reverberated throughout Italy.

It is an image that has crystallised the mounting disquiet in the country over the treatment of Roma, coming after camps have been burnt and the government has embarked on a bid to fingerprint every member of the minority. Two young Roma sisters had drowned at Torregaveta beach after taking a dip in treacherous waters. Their corpses were recovered from the sea – then left on the beach for hours while holidaymakers continued to sunbathe and picnic around them.

They had come to the beach on the outskirts of Naples on Saturday with another sister, Diana, nine, and a 16-year-old cousin, Manuela, to make a little money selling coloured magnets and other trinkets to sunbathers. But it was fiercely hot all day and, about 2pm, the girls surrendered to the temptation of a cooling dip – even though they apparently did not know how to swim.

"The sea was rough on Saturday," said Enzo Esposito, the national treasurer of Opera Nomadi, Italy's biggest Roma organisation. "Christina and Violetta went farther out than the other two, and a big wave came out of nowhere and dashed them on to the rocks. For a few moments, they disappeared; Manuela, who was in shallow water with Diana, came to the shore, helped out by people on the beach, and ran to try and get help."

Other reports said that lifeguards from nearby private beaches also tried to help, without success. "When Manuela and Diana came back," Esposito went on, "the bodies of her cousins had reappeared, and they were already dead."

It was the sort of tragedy that could happen on any beach. But what happened next has stunned Italy. The bodies of the two girls were laid on the sand; their sister and cousin were taken away by the police to identify and contact the parents. Some pious soul donated a couple of towels to preserve the most basic decencies. Then beach life resumed.

The indifference was taken as shocking proof that many Italians no longer have human feelings for the Roma, even though the communities have lived side by side for generations.

"This was the other terrible thing," says Mr Esposito, "besides the fact of the girls drowning: the normality. The way people continued to sunbathe, for three hours, just metres away from the bodies. They could have gone to a different beach. It's not possible that you can watch two young people die then carry on as if nothing happened. It showed a terrible lack of sensitivity and respect."

The attitudes of ordinary Italians towards the Roma, never warm, have been chilling for years, aggravated by sensational news coverage of crimes allegedly committed by Gypsies, and a widespread confusion of Roma with ordinary, non-Roma Romanians, who continue to arrive. The Berlusconi government has launched a high-profile campaign against the community, spearheaded by the programme announced by the Interior Minister, Roberto Marroni, to fingerprint the entire Roma population. The move has been condemned inside Italy and beyond as a return to the racial registers introduced by the Fascist regime in the 1930s. The fingerprinting of Roma in Naples began on 19 June.

The most senior Catholic in Naples, Cardinal Crescenzo Sepe, was quick to point out the coarsening of human sentiment which the behaviour on the beach represented. But the Mayor of Monte di Procida, the town on the outskirts of the city where Torregaveta beach is located, defended his citizens' behaviour.

When the Roma girls got into difficulties, he said: "There was a race among the bathers and the coastguard and the carabinieri to try and help them." He rejected the claim that the indifference of the bathers was due to the fact that the girls were Roma.

The two cousins were given a Christian Orthodox funeral service in the Roma camp in Naples, attended by 300 Roma and city and regional representatives.

In a speech yesterday, Mr Maroni proposed, "for humanitarian reasons", granting Italian citizenship to all Roma children in Italy abandoned by their parents.

The Italians and the Roma

Roma have been living in Italy for seven centuries and the country is home to about 150,000, who live mainly in squalid conditions in one of around 700 encampments on the outskirts of major cities such as Rome, Milan and Naples. They amount to less than 0.3 per cent of the population, one of the lowest proportions in Europe. But their poverty and resistance to integration have made them far more conspicuous than other communities. And the influx of thousands more migrants from Romania in the past year has confirmed the view of many Italians that the Gypsies and their eyesore camps are the source of all their problems. The ethnic group is often blamed for petty theft and burglaries. According to a recent newspaper survey, more than two thirds of Italians want Gypsies expelled, whether they hold Italian passports or not.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/wo...ly-873743.html

[Darkmist74]

Great post......disturbing though. I'm glad I'm not a Gypsy.

[Stevee]

The "Gitanos" or Gypsies were treated much the same in Spain when I was there, their living conditions were shocking you had 3 year olds begging in the middle of fields while their parents plucked unripe oranges off of trees which they couldn't eat, things may have changed now as I am going back 26 years so who knows, I sincerely hope they HAVE changed for the better, my best friend was a gypsy, my dad had to buy him clothes as he had fucking shorts and that was it no shoes nothing.

[diamondsmiles]

Maybe the sunbathers were just stupid. With the way some people are, had they been alive, they may not have wanted to be disturbed.

[sherrimccharles]

Well then where are there fuckin parents then? Its up to a Mother and Father to protect their children. Gypsies are like "mind your own business stay away from us leave us alone we raise our children our way" Shat ap

[kellyhound]

don't think all sunbathers knew they were roma but still, sitting there with 2 dead child corpses few feet away is wrong and shortsighted.
I remember tourists doing the same back in 2004 after the big tsunami. Just sunbathing while rescue workers were still fishing dead bodies from the shoreline.

[Marak123]

Maybe the gypsies were to stupid to swim...

[MCBR]

No wonder it's Southern Italy. Everything's fucked up down there.

[ices]

Gypsies huh?

I dont care, they're all thieves to me.

[gatagato]

This article was written during the campaign of italian Gov.t based on fingerprinting in order to identify the Roma children. Since each one of them has averagely 30/40 aliases, it's a little bit hard to identify them. Now, since in Italy the laws indicate that school is mandatory for EVERYBODY aged between 6 and 15, and since it was IMPOSSIBLE to make sure that Roma children would go to the school or not without previously identificating them, it was estabilished that the only way to identify them was to fingerprint them and to identify them in some unambiguous way, storing their data in a database: and this not for because of racism, but in order to warrant to them a future as CITIZEN, not as HALF CITIZEN. Now, the choice to fingerprint them sounds questionable, but ask to the journalist of the Guardian if he knows some better way to conduct a reliable census to determine the real size of the population in those camps and to estabilish who the fuck they are. Romas disagree with this way of identifying them, but it's because of their choice to live outlaws that italiang gov.t had to make such a (painful but unavoidable) decision, which is NOT even being applied BTW. When a cop stops for theft or for stabbing someone or else some dude, then he finds out that he previously provided authorities with 35 different first and last names and he's the author of hundreds of crimes, obviously you have a huge problem because not only you have people used to steal in the best case, but also you have no way to catch and punish the culprit since you cant sentence some nameless dude. Racism my ass, no one forced Roma to stick in Italy, but if they decide to, then they must respect the laws, and since they systematically lie whenever they are asked for first and last name, the possible solutions are two: either they stay in Italy (and they respect the italian laws), or they are free to find another place in some Country where school and ID are NOT mandatory, so the only way that they'll have to survive in their future will be to steal here and there, and after they grow, possibly stabbing someone to death for five euros, since that's all that they'll have been teached to do.
Romas claim to be discriminated against, but actually they claim positive discrimination, since they pretend to live outlaws and the Government of the country hosting them should not even have the right to know WHO the fuck they are. When they need money, they steal money (or better, they send their children to do that), when they need power, they make some rough connection to the first wires that they find (oh, and since you're there, steal some copper, just in case), same with gas. Sewers: are you kidding me? There's a river so close, you can shit, pee, wash yourself and your clothes, then take the drinking water and carry it to your children, all in the same spot. I don't think a civil country must accept this peacefully only for fear of being blamed to be racist by some ignorants who don't know the reality of the Country, nor the reality of a Roma camp in Italy: one should stick his ass there for MONTHS or YEARS before typing the first row of an article about a country that he does NOT know at all.
You live in the shit and i want to take you away from there, you are ignorant and i want to provide you with some education (because the laws say so in italy), you steal to survive and i would appreciate it if you'd stop stealing since jobs exist, you have no home and i can help you to find one (but first i need to ID you), and all you can say is that i'm a racist and you are being discriminated?
Be it, much better to be called a racist by some ignorant than act as nothing's happening


Southern Italy is messed up, MCBR, that's true: entire neighborhoods, in some cases entire towns are under control of Mafia, Camorra, 'Ndrangheta, SCU, Neaples is constantly submerged by garbage, people are poor
However,
If you find yourself in troubles anywhere in southern Italy, with no money nor food, everybody will help you, you will always find somebody ready to lean you a hand, a dish of pasta, or some money: they don't even know the meaning of the word racism.
Never trust articles telling you the half of the story, because at least the half of the truth is being kept hidden to you.
And by the way, I'd like to know how the couple in the photo was positively identified as italian:
as far as i know they could have been british, german, australian, us citizens, and many beach shuttle services operating in the area just drop you there at a certain time, then come back to carry your ass to the hotel at a certain time, so most likely those are two people sticking there just because they had no clue what to do.