Italy’s interior minister wants a register of gypsies (News)

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Rome: Italy’s hard-line interior minister, who recently sparked a multinational showdown by refusing entry to a Mediterranean Sea rescue boat packed with 630 migrants, is now taking aim at Italy’s minority Roma community.

Matteo Salvini told a Lombardy television station on Monday that he wants to conduct a census or “registry” of Roma, also known as Gypsies, in Italy. Salvini, the leader of Italy’s right-wing League party, insisted later the project’s purpose wasn’t to identify individual Roma.

“I’ve asked the ministry to prepare a dossier on the Roma question in Italy,” he told TeleLombardia, adding that the current situation of Roma was “chaos” several years after a crackdown.

Italy has a sizeable Roma community that includes people originally from Romania and the former Yugoslavia. Authorities periodically clear out the squatter camps where many live on the outskirts of big cities.

Salvini’s remarks sparked immediate denunciation from centre-left politicians, who warned that Italy had a “terrible” history with its Fascist-era census of Jews.

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