Feature: Italy aiming for better integration of Roma, Sinti communities

The Roma and Sinti are minority groups in Italy but addressing the challenge of their cohabitation with local citizens is a key for the country's social policy.

A study released earlier this week by not-for-profit organization Association 21 July found that around 180,000 Roma and Sinti live in Italy, equal to 0.25 percent of the national population.

Half of them have Italian citizenship and four out of five live in homes, are students or have a regular job, according to the organization which is committed to the promotion of the rights of the Roma and Sinti communities in Italy.

"However, the Roma and Sinti making the headlines are among 40,000, or one out of five, living in so-called camps," Association 21 July president Carlo Stasolla explained to Xinhua.

Stasolla called for more efforts by Italian authorities to address the issue of camps, most of which are managed by local governments and are "places of suspension of human rights."

The study highlighted that children who live in camps have almost zero probability to attend high school or university and their life expectancy is some 10 years lower than the rest of population.

"Italy is the sole country in Europe where institutional camps for Roma and Sinti communities exist and this is unacceptable," Stasolla said.

"We just want the Roma and Sinti to have a normal life in Italy," he stressed.

In fact the camps were created in the 1980s as "to institutionalize illegal settlements of Roma and Sinti communities in Italy," a representative of Italy's National Office on Anti-Racial Discriminations (UNAR), Pietro Vulpiani, told Xinhua.

UNAR, run by a department of the council of ministry, in 2012 launched a national plan to promote equal treatment of the Roma and Sinti communities ensuring improvement of their living conditions and the rights of being a citizen.

"Positive steps have been made in the past years in several Italian cities, which are experimenting new forms of housing and social integration for the Roma and Sinti communities," Vulpiani said.

This process takes time as it faces serious difficulties, he noted. "Just think that the Roma and Sinti are not represented by a sole leader or group of leaders and many of them are stateless as came from former Yugoslavia," Vulpiani pointed out.

Stasolla said new camps have been created in Rome and Milan and others are being projected in more cities worth a total of over 20 million euros (21 million U.S. dollars).

"At the same time, dozens of clearings out are carried out every year in a sort of game of the goose that only moves camps from a place to another place," he added.

"Looking at the overall investment for camps, we can say that the problem could be solved quite easily, if there was a real will to solve," he told Xinhua.

The Association 21 July has registered a number of hate speeches against the Roma and Sinti, nearly 90 percent of which came from politicians.

The latest case resonated in the Italian press on Wednesday, when the leader of right-wing regional party Northern League, Matteo Salvini, on the international day of Roma and Sinti called on "razing the Roma camps to the ground."

"It is true that many are interested in this topic just for electoral purposes. But a lot of other people are at work to plan actions for the full inclusion of the Roma and Sinti communities in society in view of a complete overcoming of all forms of discrimination," Vulpiani said. Endit