MILAN — The metal shutters are closed at Shining Bar, a coffee shop near the central train station here. On the facade, someone has written “proud to be black” and spray-painted “Abba Lives” in red.
Abba was the nickname of Abdul William Guibre, who was born in Burkina Faso, raised in Italy and beaten to death here last month by the bar’s father-and-son proprietors. The two, Fausto and Daniele Cristofoli, suspected Mr. Guibre, 19, of stealing money and set upon him with a metal rod, the authorities said, when it was later determined he had stolen a package of cookies. During the altercation, the attackers shouted “dirty black,” lawyers for both sides said.
Although there is some debate about whether the killing was racially motivated, the attack on Mr. Guibre was the most severe in a recent spate of violence against immigrants across Italy. The attacks are fueling a national conversation about racism and tolerance in a country that has only recently transformed itself from a nation of emigrants into a prime destination for immigrants.
“A black English person, or French person, or Dutch person, that’s O.K.,” said Giovanni Giulio Valtolina, a psychologist and scholar at the ISMU Foundation in Milan, which studies multiethnic societies. “But a black Italian is a very new thing.”
In recent weeks, a Ghanaian man, Emmanuel Bonsu Foster, 22, was injured in Parma in a scuffle with the police; a Chinese man, Tong Hongsheng, 36, was beaten by a group of boys in a rough neighborhood in Rome; and a Somali woman, Amina Sheikh Said, 51, said she was strip-searched and interrogated for hours at Ciampino Airport in Rome. Last month, six African immigrants were gunned down in Castel Volturno, a stronghold of the Neapolitan Mafia.
Continue reading the main storyThe confrontations have resonated at the highest levels. In a meeting with Pope Benedict XVI at the Quirinal Palace in Rome this month, President Giorgio Napolitano called for church and state to work together “to overcome racism.” He cited a recent speech in which the pope pointed to “worrisome new signs” of deepening social tensions.
Last week, Parliament debated whether Italy was facing what newspaper headlines referred to as a “racism emergency.” The interior minister, Roberto Maroni, of the separatist Northern League, said that the attacks were isolated and that the alarm was overstated.
Many on the left disagreed. “You can’t say all Italians are racist, but it would also be dangerous to underestimate what’s happening,” said Jean-Léonard Touadi, a black member of Parliament. “There’s been a worrisome sequence of events, which can’t just be catalogued as isolated incidents.”
Mr. Touadi is originally from Brazzaville in the Congo Republic. Formerly Rome’s deputy mayor for security, he was elected in April with Italy of Values, a party that supports judicial reform. “Faced with social and economic crisis, it’s easy to push rage and frustration on the foreigner,” he said, adding that the government should work to create more opportunities for everyone. “It shouldn’t make this a war between poor Italians and poor immigrants.”
Indeed, Italy’s deep tradition of Roman Catholic tolerance is hitting up against economic uncertainty. And sometimes, church is pushing up against state.
A recent cover of Famiglia Cristiana, a Catholic weekly magazine, asked, “Is Italy Changing Its Skin?” and offered an investigation into “the rising number of episodes of intolerance and violence.” The cover featured a photo of three young black participants at an antiracism march in Milan after Mr. Guibre’s death.
Last week, Msgr. Agostino Marchetto, a high-ranking Vatican official, spoke out against “discrimination, xenophobia and racism” toward immigrants. Monsignor Marchetto, the secretary of the Pontifical Council for Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant Peoples, said refugees were often treated “without consideration of the reasons that forced them to flee.”
This has led, he said, to “measures aimed at preventing their entry into countries of arrival and to the adoption of measures designed to make this more difficult.” He said the measures had caused “erosion of humanitarian standards.”
Also last week, the Northern League called for greater controls on immigrants as part of a security bill pending in Parliament, including a system in which legal immigrants would be deported if they accumulated a certain number of points on their criminal records.
That prompted a front-page political cartoon in Corriere della Sera, Italy’s leading daily newspaper, in which an official asks a black man for his residence permit. The man points to the bandage on his head and says “seven points”; in Italian, “punti” means both points and stitches.
The Northern League is a crucial member of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s center-right coalition. In the campaign for elections in April, it ran on a platform of fiscal federalism and security concerns, which often resonated as anti-immigrant rhetoric.
There are paradoxes. The North, with the most integration and the most jobs, also registers the highest levels of anti-immigrant sentiment and the strongest support for the Northern League.
Immigration is definitely on the rise. The number of legal resident foreigners in Italy rose 17 percent last year to 3.4 million, or 6 percent of the population, according to recent data from the Italian National Institute of Statistics, the government research agency.
Italy is becoming a multiethnic society, said Mr. Touadi, the member of Parliament. “We shouldn’t hide our heads and continue to deny it, but realize that this is a trend worth taking seriously. Also, because we don’t have an alternative.”
Because of an editing error, an article and a picture caption on Monday about racially motivated attacks on migrants in Italy referred incorrectly to the explanation given by the authorities for a fatal beating by two proprietors of a Milan coffee shop of a Burkina Faso native, Abdul William Guibre. The authorities said the attackers suspected that Mr. Guibre had stolen money; they did not say they thought he had stolen money and a package of cookies. (The authorities later determined he had indeed stolen cookies, but not money.)