16th FEBRUARY 2010: ANDREW Brons embarked on a fact-finding mission to Rosarno in Italy as a member of a delegation of the European Parliament's Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE) committee.

The MEP for Yorkshire and North East Lincolnshire visited Rosarno, a town near the western coast of Calabria in the 'toe' of the Italian peninsula where there has been nights of rioting by African immigrants.

At least 37 people were hurt, including 18 police officers and 14 bystanders, when immigrants armed with metal bars or wooden sticks, attacked police and local residents.

The rioting began after two men, one from Nigeria, the other from Togo, were shot at by an air gun. They claimed they were victims racism and in response, groups of protesters stoned police and smashed shop windows and cars.

Andrew and his fellow MEPs had meetings with the regional authorities of Rosarno, and with trade unions representatives and local employers.

The delegation also attended a briefing where they heard about the measures being taken to tackle organised crime and the trafficking of illegal immigrants.

These are Andrew's observations on the achievements of the delegation's visit.

The events in Rosarno in Calabria, in January, placed that town on the front pages of newspapers throughout the world. The town's residents were said to have attacked, physically, workers from Sub-Saharan Africa and the authorities were said to have colluded with the residents, by deporting the Africans. There was also more than a hint of the involvement of organised crime, in the form of the Mafia.

As you can imagine, all of this was enough to make liberals horrified to the point of sheer delight. They would be able to see themselves crusading against all of the powers of darkness at one and the same time: unreconstructed small town xenophobes; hard hearted local bureaucrats ill-treating ethnic minorities; ruthless criminal gangs; and gentle and noble, if slightly naive, sophisticates from the Southern hemisphere whose generosity and nobility makes them easy prey to all of the afore-mentioned. LIBE would have to make its presence felt!

The truth? I'm not sure that this was allowed to get in the way of a good story. We did meet some regionally elected people and some centrally-appointed prefects. However, we did not meet any of the ordinary population, apart from some locals demonstrating on a different issue. We did not meet any elected representatives of the local councils because three councils had been suspended for being controlled (allegedly) from top to bottom by the Ndrangheta, the Calabrian Mafia or at least that is what we were told. The people we did meet seemed to spend most of their time telling us that the local people were not 'racist'. They seemed to skirt over random acts of violence as though they were of little significance, compared with the central charge of racism. 

We might have been transported back to some Italian (or English) village, in the Middle Ages, in which the local crone was being accused of sexual congress with Beelzebub ('the chance would be a fine thing,' I imagine her thinking) but she proclaims that whilst she might have poisoned the well, killed everybody's first born and brought plague and pestilence, she and Old Nick were not even good friends, let alone frantic lovers. So that makes it all right then!

However, we did begin to build up a picture from what different protagonists said in concert.

It appears that the 1500-2000 Africans had been working seasonally (October to March) in the small town, Rosarno, of 15,000 inhabitants for several years. There does not seem to have been any overt hostility shown to them, by the local population and, indeed, some local Guardian reader-equivalents had provided them with some food and support. It seemed to be assumed by everybody (apart from me) that an absence of overt hostility to the immigrants, as people, means an acceptance of the presence of immigrants, as a phenomenon. I felt that I had to explain that the lack of overt hostility to the immigrants might be simply because the locals were decent people who knew that it was wrong to be unpleasant to strangers. However, that did not necessarily mean that they accepted the immigrants' presence.

There were reports of individual immigrants, urinating and even defecating in public, particularly on the day that the events started. However, it was also clear that the immigrants were living in appalling conditions in disused factories, without clean water, bedding or lavatories. They were apparently being paid as little as twenty-five Euros per day (of fourteen hours). The questions were why and how did they come to Italy. We were told that there was involvement of Ndrangheta in the trafficking of people from Africa. There were some suggestions that the would-be migrants had to pay between 10,000 and 18,000 Euros to the traffickers, before they were transported. I thought that it would have been more credible that they would pay off that sum by deductions from their wages in Italy, which might explain the low pay they received. Another suggestion, made by the Italian Minister for the Interior, Mr. Maroni, was that they might have paid their 'fare' by helping to traffic drugs.

On an occasion in January, shot, from a powerful air gun, was fired by a passenger in a car at a group of migrants. A citizen of Togo was wounded in the pelvis and had to be admitted to hospital. The driver and passengers in the car have never been identified.

The migrants took to the streets in protest and they were even joined in that protest by some of the local population. However, they were not satisfied with the response that they received form local officials.

The protests turned into riots, lasting three days. Road signs were torn down and turned into make-shift weapons. Cars belonging to local residents were destroyed; shops were damaged; and residents, including a pregnant woman, were attacked. She lost her baby as a result of the experience.

The reaction of the local community was predictable, if not all justifiable. They formed a protest committee that demanded the removal of the migrants. They barricaded the migrants in the area of the disused factories in which they were living and there were even some attacks on migrants themselves by people, described as 'local criminal elements'.

In some ways, both the migrants and the local community generally were reacting (or perhaps over-reacting) to what had been done to them. The greatest culprits were the people who fired the shots from the car. Who were they? The answer is that we do not know or at least the authorities say that they do not know.

Were they the Ndrangheta? I do not know but I cannot see what a profit-maximising criminal organisation would hope to get out of starting a riot that would hurt their own people and bring unwelcome attention to their criminal activities. However, while the Ndrangheta might not have been involved, some of their operatives, the Ndranghetisti, acting as individuals - individuals with fast cars, weapons and a readiness for violence - might easily have been involved. It must be remembered that the Ndrangheta in the region comprises eighty central families and another two hundred families connected with them. In a small town of 15,000 people, it might be difficult to find anybody who was not connected with them. Only that would explain the suspension of whole councils, their elected representatives and their staff.

We met local politicians 'though not locally elected ones' because they might or perhaps might not have been Mafiosi and removed from office. We met left-wing trade unionists, one with a version of a Russian forename. We heard from the Italian race relations industry, who said, in Italian, the equivalent of 'We are all guilty and we are enjoying the experience immensely'. We were even introduced to two of the migrants, whose accounts of the troubles was full of stories about locals planning 'Hunt the Blackman' events (almost as if they had been privy to such plans) but were strangely forgetful of the three days of rioting, as though they might have been merely insignificant details. We met the Minister for the Interior (the Italian equivalent of Home Secretary); and we even met the Chief Anti-Mafia Prosecutor. However, we did not meet the ordinary people of Rosarno, despite my suggestion that we should.

I did mention that, in Rosarno, we were greeted by a demonstration by local workers for the municipality. The immediate reaction of our entourage was to ignore them and enter the building because our hosts were waiting for us. I decided to break ranks and I approached the demonstrators and asked, with the help of my excellent interpreters.

What they were protesting about? It seems that they did not have a point to make about the migrants, except to say that a lot had been said about the migrants' poor working conditions (no contracts, no minimum pay or the equivalent of national insurance) but nothing had been said about their own conditions.

They were workers who had been made redundant by local factories, when they had closed, and were now employed doing "socially useful work" (whatever that might be) for the local municipality or council. They had no contracts of employment or minimum working conditions. I mentioned this to the Minister for the Interior and I said that local residents being employed in the black economy by the council was a greater scandal than migrants working under those conditions for a private employer. I said that the problem was not one of 'Migrants' Rights Being Abused' but of "Workers' Rights Being Abused" The Minister for the Interior did not agree, because, he said, these workers were lucky to have these jobs and would otherwise have no job at all. That would be easy for a Minister to say and even easier for an MEP to agree. However, I could not agree that the plight of local workers should be dismissed so readily, because their cause did not appeal to ethnically-driven, liberal hearts.

Reporting back to LIBE on Rosarno

This was the contribution made by Andrew Brons to a debate held on 4th March 2010 in LIBE (Human Rights, Justice & Home Affairs) about the report of a delegation to Rosarno in Southern Italy to investigate distrurbances between local people and immigrants.

"One comment that I would make about our approach (to this inquiry) is that we heard from and questioned officials and representatives of organisations but we did not hear much from two groups of people who might have been able to tell us what happened.

"One is the population of immigrants. We heard from two of them briefly but shortage of time meant that we were not able to ask them any questions. The other group from whom we heard nothing at all was the ordinary population of Rosarno. If we had heard from both of these, we might have discovered the motives or even the identity of the people in the car from which a shot was fired that started all of the trouble."

(in response to a claim by an MEP that the immigrants were all legal)

"I would like to comment briefly on the legal status of the immigrants. We did hear contradictory evidence. I shall give just two examples: the representative of Medicin Sans Frontieres said that most (90%) of the immigrants did not have labour permits. The representative from ARCI said that most did have labour permits. I am not in a position to judge which evidence is the more reliable. I suspect that they were looking at two different samples of immigrants."

After the visit Andrew Brons contacted to the editors of the Italian newspapers which include Rosarno in their circulation.

The MEP for Yorkshire and North East Lincolnshire wrote:

"I was a member of the European Parliamentary delegation that visited Rosarno last week, to investigate the troubles that took place in January.

"We met and heard accounts from two centrally-appointed prefects, one regional representative and several representatives of trade unions, trade associations and campaigning bodies. We even heard brief accounts from two of the migrants although there were no opportunities to ask extensive questions.

"The people we did not meet were the ordinary people of Rosarno. I had intended to make my own way to Rosarno to meet local people but the distance from our hotel in Lamezia to Rosarno was too great. I should be most grateful if your readers who were witnesses to any of the incidents in January would write to me and give me their accounts."