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Italy's Roma wonder about 'legal' camps
AFP - Sunday, September 12
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Italy's Roma wonder about 'legal' camps
ROME (AFP) - – As the city of Rome dismantled illegal Roma settlements this past week, many Gypsies were wondering whether the Italian capital would finally make good on a promise to move them to "legal" camps.
"A lasting, solid camp, with water and electricity? Of course we're for it! it's our dream," Cristina, a 24-year old who arrived in Italy eight years ago from Romania, told AFP.
She lives in barracks wedged in between the pillars holding up a highway overpass about 10 kilometres (six miles) southwest of Rome.
Like most other people living in the unauthorised encampments, she was reluctant to give her last name because of safety reasons.
"They've been promising us these camps for years now, we have filled out dozens of forms and there's nothing to show for it. We've stopped waiting," she said.
Rome's mayor Gianni Alemanno has pledged to tear down all of the estimated 200 illegal camps on the city's outskirts and build three legal ones, overseen by local authorities, to add to the seven already in place in and around Rome.
The new legal camps in Rome should be ready by the end of next year and should be able to host up to 6,000 nomads.
Rome's municipality estimates there are currently more than 7,000 Roma nomads in and around the city, but non-governmental organisations place that number well above 10,000.
Alemanno said he would accelerate the demolition and evacuation of illegal camps after a three-year-old Romanian died in a fire in a camp near Rome in late August.
The accident took place only a few days after France flew hundreds of Roma Gypsies out of the country in a crackdown that drew sharp criticism by human rights groups.
The Red Cross, which visits illegal camps once a week to medicate nomads, welcomes the plan.
"If the new camps are created, with better living conditions like water and electricity, we will be very happy," said Marco Squicciarini, the local Red Cross head.
Not far from the first camp under the highway lies another settlement on an abandoned parking lot on top of a hill, home to about one hundred families.
"We have been in Italy since we were very small. All of the children were born here. Of course it's our country!" said Falco, a Yugoslav man in his thirties who has been living in Italy for 20 years now.
"A child that doesn't wash himself is not a child that can go to school. That's why it's so important to offer better living conditions. The integration of Roma begins with children," he said.
For adults, who make a living begging or collecting and re-selling scrap metal, employment is the main problem.
"We had a project in Rieti (a city northeast of Rome) to readapt some old buildings that would have allowed some Roma to move into a decent place and herd sheep and keep bees," said Squicciarini.
The project could have attracted five million euros (6.3 million dollars) in European Union funding according to Squicciarini, but local governments would not support it.
"There are solutions, but there's no political will to put them in place," he added.
Many Roma also fear that if they move into certain "legal" camps men and women will be separated and families broken up.
"I won't go in a place without my husband. We can't be separated, with women and children on one side and husbands on the other. We prefer living like this. Poor, but together," said Felicia, who lives in a third, more organised camp with its own central square right in the middle of a wild bamboo field.
But the 27-year-old mother hopes she will be able to move, at least for her children's future.
"It's dirty here, we don't know how to read. We want our children to go to school, something we didn't do," she said.
"We grew up here, but we don't want this ugly life for our children."
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