Italy’s New Racist StormBY RICHARD BRODIEA fascist terrorist attack has highlighted the growing threat of Italy’s far right in the lead-up to the March 4 elections.
Refugees and migrants are seen waiting to disembark after arriving in port on June 12, 2017 in Reggio Calabria, Italy. Chris McGrath / Getty ImagesOne month before Italy goes to the polls, the conflict over immigration, and the future of migrant communities, has exploded. The European question has disappeared. For a moment, discussions around universal income and other forms of poor relief entered the stage. But these too have quickly receded in the wake of the attack on the morning of Saturday, February 3, when a fascist shot eight West Africans on the street in Macerata.
Faced with mass youth emigration and a stalled economy with seemingly no way out, practically all of the electoral parties have scapegoated immigrants for years. The days are over of praising migrant rescues at sea and the welcoming nature of ordinary Italians. For two years both the opposition parties and the government have shifted to the right, the former through ratcheting up racist, xenophobic rhetoric and the latter in criminalizing solidarity and all but closing the Mediterranean route, effectively condemning hundreds of thousands of people to the Libyan inferno.
In the Macerata attack, all the racism which has been fostered by the media and political class to create an ideological distraction from the material problems of the working class boiled over into a horrific act of fascist violence, in the process accelerating the tendency as the election nears: a train of hatred hurtling towards the end of the track.
A Saturday Morning in the MarcheOn Saturday morning, at least eight young West Africans were shot on the streets of Macerata, near the eastern coast of central Italy. The worst hit was a twenty-eight-year-old man from Mali, Mahamadou Touré, who remains in intensive care with liver trauma. A second man, Festus Omagbon, from Nigeria, was buying some West African foodstuffs with a friend from Ghana, both of whom are residents of an asylum-seeker hostel in the town. They were shot in the ribs and arm, respectively. A young Gambian man, Omar Fadera, received a grazing wound.
Jennifer Otiotio, again from Nigeria, was the only woman shot. Only seven months in Italy, she lives in an asylum-seeker project, working occasionally as a hairdresser. Her left hand is fractured. She was waiting for the bus with her partner, who pushed her body aside from the direct line of the gun when he heard the shots. “The real wound isn’t the one you can see, it’s not the one on my body,” she told journalists. “I’m much worse inside than I look on the outside. I never did anything bad to anyone, I was smiling and chatting with three other people. Now I don’t feel I can go around in peace.”
Another young Nigerian, Gideon, was riding his bicycle and was shot in the hip. “I scream and scream before I went to bus stop, before they come and pick me and take me to hospital,” he says in a YouTube video. Having arrived in Italy from Nigeria four years ago, he now finds himself without the right to remain in the country. He checked himself out quickly, scared for his legal situation. Indeed, these are only the six people we know were shot on Saturday morning; there were at least two more who did not go to the police or the hospital.
The victims inadvertently form a snapshot of the new generation of migrants in Italy, the generation that now stands in the political crosshairs: Gideon, here for the longest time, now finds himself with neither documents nor a hostel. And of the six, only one was a woman, aptly reflecting the predominance of men in Italy’s most recent wave of migration. Furthermore, two people were shot but did not report themselves: and this is perhaps the most significant fact that the fascist attacker managed to bring to light, that even in the face of the most appalling danger, people will still make themselves invisible to protect their ability to remain in Europe, the condition for hyper-exploitation which, as we will see, underlines the entire process of division within the working class in Italy.
These young West Africans were all shot by Luca Traini, a skinhead with a copy of Mein Kampf in his bedroom and who ran as a candidate in the local elections last year for the right-wing Northern League party (he received no votes). After his drive-by shootings he stopped at the town’s fascist war memorial, wrapped an Italian flag around his neck, gave a fascist salute, and shouted “Viva l’Italia.”
Traini, unemployed and living with his grandmother, seemed to have turned to fascist views around three years ago, around the time he bought a Glock 0.9 with a sports gun license. His gym instructor says that over the past few years he has hung around not only the Northern League but also the explicitly fascist organizations Forza Nuova and Casa Pound. After making racist jokes and fascist salutes in the gym, he was kicked out in October. He has a fascist symbol tattooed on his head.
Despite all of this, most Italian journalists and politicians have been reluctant to call him a fascist, with Repubblica, the Corriere della Sera, and RAI instead opting for “racist,” “madman,” and “lone wolf,” following the established rituals by which European states and the US protect white supremacist organizations from public scrutiny. He has explained his motives as “wanting to shoot the blacks who sell drugs.”
Femicide and the Racist TurnBefore stopping at the fascist war memorial, Traini briefly drove to the site where two bags had been found three days before. Inside were the brutalized remains of a young Italian woman, Pamela Mastropietro. It is the events surrounding her death that provoked Traini to commit his attempted assassinations.
Pamela, originally from Rome, had moved to Macerata in October, to a rehabilitation center for drug addicts. She disappeared from the center on January 30. She met an Italian man who took her from her rehab center to Macerata, and apparently paid her €50 in exchange for sex. She subsequently went to buy a syringe from a pharmacy and then, it seems, went to the apartment of a Nigerian man, Innocent Oseghale. It is now known that she died of an overdose. Her body was later cut up and hidden. Oseghale remains under arrest and is charged with concealing evidence and desecration of a human corpse, though not murder. Traini has said that he originally thought of going to the court to attack Oseghale.
Pamela’s parents have made it clear that they want no part in this instrumentalization of their daughter’s death by the right-wing:
We only want justice. An exemplary sentence for the man who killed and cut up our daughter. But we strongly condemn the attack. We’re not racists and Pamela herself, if she were still alive, would be horrified by this hateful act. . . . We’re good people. Welcoming migrants can be done well, and on March 4 everyone can go to the ballot knowing how to vote.
These have perhaps been the most progressive words to have reached the mainstream media over the past few days. Indeed, the effect of the attack has not been a polarization of views but a sudden jolt to the right. Even while Touré and Otiotio remain badly wounded in hospital, Forza Nuova, a neo-fascist electoral front, expressed its solidarity with the shooter. This was an unpredictable and risky maneuver which sparked off a chain of political reactions. The next day, all the centrist and right-wing parties took a step to the right in their statements.
Matteo Salvini of the right-wing Northern League, whose party has played a central role in churning up racism in Italy for almost two decades (shifting from hatred of Southern Italians to Muslims to black people), has had a privileged position on the airwaves, blaming the attacks on “those who are filling up our country” and stating that “it’s clear that uncontrolled immigration, an organized, willed, and financed invasion of the the kind we’ve seen over recent years, leads to social conflict.”
But this time it was not only the Northern League that chimed in about deportations and security: the ostensibly center-left Democratic Party leader and former premier, Matteo Renzi, has declared that “Italy and Italians ought be defended by the police, not mad gunmen,” promising ten thousand more police on the streets. He thus curiously implied that somehow Luca Traini was defending Italians. The interior minister, Marco Minniti, claims that his plan to close the Mediterranean route was effected in order to avoid this kind of attack. Former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi made a snap promise to deport six hundred thousand people if he returns to power, describing migration as a “social bomb.”
It ought to be reiterated: these are the reactions to an armed fascist attack on black people. In Rome, a group of ultras (far-right football hooligans) displayed a banner in solidarity with the fascist shooter.
The calls for police on the streets and migrants to be forced onto planes headed for Africa (already a weekly occurrence) are being supported through a conservative instrumentalizing of a weak feminism, as misogynistic in its chivalry as it is violent in its racism. Despite the many victims of the last few days, the figure to be protected after the events of the last week remains the white woman and not black people, men and women alike. The dog whistle calls for “justice for Pamela” are reflected in Traini’s own expressed regret for having shot Jennifer, the only female victim of his racist shooting spree.
In the context of Italy’s own violent misogyny, this is more than a rehabilitation of an old racist and fascist trope; it amounts to an attempt to neutralize the progressive and leftist movements calling for a politics that might confront the growing rate of violence against women. As the left-feminist network NON UNA DI MENO put it in a statement of solidarity with the victims of Saturday’s attack, “The femicide of Pamela M. adds to those committed at the hands of boyfriends, husbands and exes, the majority of which happen within a close circle of friends and family members. This is simply the tip of the iceberg of a general phenomenon: male violence against women.”