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Thread ID: 12920 | Posts: 1 | Started: 2004-03-29
2004-03-29 04:32 | User Profile
In First for Rome, Immigrants Cast Votes
By NICOLE WINFIELD Associated Press Writer
March 28, 2004, 2:43 PM EST
(link: [url]http://tinyurl.com/22eon[/url])
ROME -- Immigrants living in Rome voted Sunday to elect city and district representatives from their own ranks in the first such election here. The vote was designed to give non-Italians a greater say in Italian affairs.
Fifty-one candidates from across the globe vied for four nonvoting seats on Rome's city council -- one each to represent Africa, Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe. Another 172 others were bidding for 19 nonvoting district council seats, representing each of Rome's 19 municipal neighborhoods.
Some 33,000 immigrants were eligible to vote at the polls, which opened at 8 a.m. and close at 10 p.m. Results were expected Monday.
Winners of the election will sit on the councils, with the right to participate in their work and make proposals, but without the right to vote on any issues. As a result, some candidates said Sunday's vote fell short of what they want.
"I think it is a nice beginning for all immigrants," Victor Okadu, Nigerian candidate bidding for the Rome city council, told Associated Press Television News. "From the right to speak, we hope to conquer the right to vote, too."
With it's proximity to Africa, Eastern Europe and miles of unguarded coastline, Italy is very often the first port of call for immigrants. Many move onto other European countries with larger immigrant communities, but some stay and either work illegally or try to get legal residence papers.
There are about 150,000 legal immigrants in Rome -- and far more illegal ones. About 120,000 of the legal ones are of voting age, but only about a quarter of them are registered to vote.
Maurizio Bartolucci, head of the Rome city administration's special commission to give immigrants the right to vote, attributed the disparity to the logistical nightmare of having to encourage people who might never have voted before in their lives to register.
In an interview Sunday, he said the Roman initiative was a first step to granting Italy's growing immigrant community a voice of their own in Italian affairs.
"They don't have any representation or material rights, so we tried to make a proposal while we wait for a national law to give them the full right to vote, at least locally," he said.
Some candidates, though, said the proposal was merely a ploy by politicians to get around having to deal themselves with immigrant issues.
"They don't want immigrants to come to them directly with demands," said Nure Alam Siddique of Dhaka, Bangladesh, a candidate for one of Rome's district councils.
"It is much easier for the city administration to have an immigrant to point to and say, 'This is your representative, take it up with him.' It is a political joke."
Rome's center-left administration held the vote just months after a center-right member of the national government, Deputy Premier Gianfranco Fini, suggested the time might be right to allow immigrants to be allowed to vote in regular Italian administrative elections.
As a result, Siddique said the Rome initiative was just a "defensive strategy" of the center-left to make up for Fini's proposal. "The center-right has proposed giving all immigrants a real vote in administrative elections, and the center left wanted to get there first, but it's a diluted cover," he said.
In the Rome city council race, one of the four seats must go to a woman. If there is no woman among the top four finishers, the woman with the most votes will get the seat, displacing the actual male winner. The 30 top finishers who aren't elected will form an immigrant consulting body.
Copyright é 2004, The Associated Press