Orang-utan jibe wasn’t racist: Italian senator

AFP/RomeAn Italian anti-immigrant party raised hackles again yesterday when a senator who compared a black minister to an orang-utan said that his remarks were not intended to be racist and sent her flowers.Roberto Calderoli, deputy speaker of the Senate and a top member of the Northern League party, said that he was sorry but ruled out resigning over his jibe, and party leader Roberto Maroni said the issue was “closed”.Calderoli also said that he would continue to oppose the government for “encouraging illegal immigration” – days after Pope Francis called for greater tolerance for asylum-seekers in predominantly Catholic Italy.Calderoli said he had phoned the target of the jibe, Integration Minister Cecile Kyenge – who is an Italian citizen of Congolese origin – and told her: “There were no racist insults in what I said.”A group of local officials from the centre-left Democratic Party meanwhile said that they were taking Calderoli to court for “defamation with racial hatred”.But yesterday Kyenge played down the row, telling reporters she did not want it to “get personal”.“The time has come in Italy for all of us to understand ... the importance of words,” she said.The senator, a former government minister, once said that Italy “risks becoming a nation of poofs”.In other outbursts, he has also said Italy should not have a “tanned president” like the United States and that immigrants should “go back to the desert and talk to the camels or to the jungle with the monkeys”.The Northern League, a former coalition ally of former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, won 4% of the vote in parliamentary elections in February.The dispute comes after Pope Francis last week flew on his first trip outside Rome to the island of Lampedusa to “cry for the dead” asylum-seekers who perish trying to cross the Mediterranean from Africa to Europe.The Pope urged people to heed “the cries of others” on a trip that humanitarian organisations and Italian parliament speaker Laura Boldrini, a former United Nations refugee worker, hailed as “historic”.But some politicians, who are little inclined to defend secularism in Italy on issues such as crucifixes in schools, abortion or gay marriage, called for greater “autonomy” from the Catholic Church on the issue of migration.Fabrizio Cicchitto, a deputy from Silvio Berlusconi’s People of Freedom party, said there was a difference between “religious preaching” and “a state handling a difficult, complex and insidious phenomenon”.Lawmakers from the Northern League have gone further, calling on the Pontiff to provide “money and land to house immigrants” who land in Europe.The debate has taken a sinister twist with Calderoli’s comments, which have sparked outrage in the country although no apparent censure for the senator.Prime Minister Enrico Letta spoke of a “shameful chapter” and President Giorgio Napolitano said the comments were an example of “barbarism”.Calderoli said the jibe was intended as a “joke” and added insult to injury by saying he “liked animals a lot”.The Northern League has also capitalised on the publicity it is receiving by announcing it will hold a demonstration against illegal immigration in Turin.Kyenge says she has received daily threats.She said remarks like the ones made by Calderoli showed “a lack of knowledge of others and of the phenomenon of migration, as well as an absence of culture of immigration”.The centre-left Democratic Party has been equally critical and leading senator Luigi Zanda said Kyenge’s proposal on a law to allow children of immigrants to acquire Italian citizenship should now be adopted as quickly as possible.Historically a land of emigration, Italy’s foreign-born population has increased exponentially over the last two decades ever since a wave of immigration from Albania in 1992.Since the revolutions in Tunisia and Libya there has also been an increased influx of migrant workers from sub-Saharan Africa transiting through these countries.In 10 years, between 2002 and 2012, the share of immigrants in the population has tripled to reach 7.9%, according to figures from the labour ministry.At a meeting in Rome on Monday, Letta and his Maltese counterpart Joseph Muscat called for greater assistance from the European Union to manage undocumented migration.Muscat, who last week threatened to send migrants back to Libya, said that the situation was “unsustainable” since there were no EU rules on the “pushback and push forward of migrants” to other parts of the EU.A former member of the Christian Democratic party, Letta said it was “fundamental to apply the Pope’s appeal launched in Lampedusa: ‘Never again’”.The United Nations says thousands of people have drowned in recent years trying to reach Italian shores and 40 have died so far this year.