 |
Immigrants waited to be transferred from Rosarno to immigrant detention centers in Crotone after riots tore through southern Italy. (Adriana Sapone/Associated Press) |
In Italy, immigrants detained after riots
ROME - More than a thousand African workers were put aboard buses and trains in the southern Italian region of Calabria over the weekend and sent to immigrant detention centers, after some of the country’s worst riots in years.
The clashes began Thursday night in Rosarno, a working-class city amid citrus groves in Calabria, the toe of Italy’s boot, after a legal immigrant from Togo was slightly wounded in a pellet-gun attack in a nearby city.
Blaming racism for the attack, dozens of immigrants burned cars and smashed shop windows in Rosarno in two days of riots, throwing rocks at residents and fighting police. More than 50 immigrants and police officers were wounded, none seriously, and 10 immigrants and locals were arrested before authorities began sending immigrants to detention centers elsewhere in southern Italy on Saturday.
Yesterday, authorities began bulldozing the makeshift encampments outside Rosarno where hundreds of immigrants live in what human rights groups describe as subhuman conditions. They are often paid less than $30 a day to pick fruit, a job many Italians see as beneath them.
It was not entirely clear whether the immigrants left willingly for the detention centers, or whether some were forced to leave.
© Copyright 2010 Globe Newspaper Company.
