Southern Italy Like Alabama In 1920s
Posted on January 11, 2010
Scylla and Charybdis were mythical monsters which preyed on sailors passing through the Strait of Messina between Sicily and Calabria.
African migrant workers in Calabria are caught between a modern and very real Scylla and Charybdis. One one side is the parasitic criminal organisation known as the ‘Ndrangheta, which profits from the super-exploitation of low-paid migrant labour, on the other is the motley, corrupt gang of chancers and rebranded fascists which constitutes the Italian governing coalition.
Race riots in the Calabrian town of Rosarno have resulted in the detention or relocation — ‘for their own safety’ — of more than a thousand African migrant workers. Residents of Rosarno indiscriminately attacked migrants with metal bars and wooden clubs after the workers organised a protest against poor working conditions, unpaid wages, racist attacks and shootings. Italian centre-left MP Jean-Léonard Touadi said Rosarno, now a whites-only town, is ‘like Alabama in the 1920s’.
Italian interior minister Maroni of Lega Nord, a party described as ‘openly embracing racist and fascist’ attitudes, blamed the workers for their own predicament, while other rightwingers cried that nobody asked the Africans to come to Italy: the ‘free’ flow of capital and resources is in one direction only, from the poor and the marginalised to the rich and light-skinned bosses of Fortress Europe and Fortress America.
