Italy: Marco Revelli, historian and sociologist

Marco Revelli, 60, is an Italian historian and sociologist who has studied, lived with and written about Italy?s Roma people for years. ?The logic of war? is what is happening in Italy, he says of the way the government is dealing with immigration. The case of Ghina Marinkovic, a woman who was born and raised in Rome but who for the government is a non-citizen. Despite having been to Italian school until the age of 18, the government refused to grant her Italian citizenship and she was forced to become Yugoslavian, even though she had never set foot in either Serbia nor Croatia, nor could she speak the language. Her tragic story unfolds through several exiles abroad where she was forced to abandon her young daughter with her parents until she could stand the separation no longer and returned to Italy illegally, where on the 30th of October 2007 her home was destroyed by bulldozers sent by the local government. Her house, along with the rest of Rome?s largest ?nomad camp?, in Via dei Giordani. It is against this backdrop that Revelli answers our questions.

What do you think of the Italian government?s modus operandi?
It is an aberration that reflects the government?s failure in politics generally. For starters, the principles of justice state that it is a criminal who should be punished, not his whole family or extended family. The only logic that I can find behind the destruction of the Via dei Giordani squats is a militant one, one that punishes a whole group for the actions of a few. It is the behaviour of an army operating in enemy territory. I also do not understand why the infrastructure had to be torn down, couldn?t it be put to a different use? And how do the politicians expect people to report on criminal activity if then they are the ones to pay for the crimes committed by those they report on?

What good practices are possible?
It should be up to good politics to deal with the contradictions that these situations inevitably lead to. But politics today to me seems more like the organisation of conflict, and not the organisation of cooperation. It forgets about the reality of life, the physical act of living, and looses its self in abstractions.

Where can we start?
By quantifying the amount of resources that are available for regeneration. I say regeneration because it is a form of investment. We must not let urban areas become degraded and abandoned, forget about the train stations, or the peripheries.

What do you think about the legality pact that Father Colmegna has signed with the Romanian neighbourhood that has taken over Via Triboniano in Milan, that obliges 300 families to send their children to school and not partake in illegal activities?
I think it is very positive in the sense that communication barriers have been breached and common ground has been found. It is a good way of dealing with emergency and hate issues. But it is not a universal solution. The thought of making an entire ethnic group sign a pact that obliges them to behave in a certain way is to say the least a worrying idea. We are obviously dealing with prejudice, prejudice that holds that the Roma have a tendency towards criminality. The destruction of nomad housing in Via dei Giordani was a show of power, where the strongest decided upon a pact of their own, that was carried out violently and destructively.

Politics seems to always end up there?
The real problem is that politicians must decide what they want to do with the lives they have chosen to discard. They destroy houses, but where should the people who once lived their go? They say they must be moved away, but where to?