Rights and rules. Better, first the rules and then the rights. It seems like an obvious principle for civil coexistence. Whether it is so obvious to everyone remains to be demonstrated in a society that aims for rights and often forgets the rules. A broad discussion, which would take us far away, into terrains that are difficult to navigate. The fact remains that what happened again in Gallarate with the repeated eviction of a nomad camp leads us to reflect on why there are people, even communities, who know no rules, except their own.
Now, before they back out of the picture moralistic pranks and identity and cultural justifications, let’s say straight away that, in this circumstance, we are unconditionally on the side of legality. What a municipality, with a mayor rightly convinced to do respect the rules that the vast majority of his fellow citizens respectdecided to restore it also for the Sinti community, illegally camped in an area that had already been the subject of an eviction a few years ago (2018).
Good, or rather, bad: some of them have returned to that area with mobile homes and caravans, as if it were theirs, as if nothing had ever happened in the past and, above all, as if several months ago, despite the appeals to the Tar intervened in the meantime, they were not warned that they could not stay there. The urban planning indications do not allow it nor, apparently, the hygienic living conditions. Above all, they could not stay there because they were illegally connected to the various utilities. To put it plainly, they didn’t pay for electricity or water. Convenient, right?
To make the situation worse, immediately after being evicted by order of the judiciary and after ignoring the prior warnings, some families took possession of public housing assigned to a disabled person, now absent for health reasons: he is hospitalized. A real assault, with hose blows, to the apartment, where they took shelter with the children as shields. What to say? Unspeakable, at least in a context of normality, where there is the freedom to live even in a hut, if one wants, but in compliance with the laws that govern civil coexistence. Beyond identities and individual cultures. Beyond the claims of assistance to be registered in the Gallarate registry office. Point.
Everything else is exasperation, chatter, cunning that cannot and should not be admitted. Even if now we expect the entry into the scene of those who will credit the clearance operation to a certain policy that does not tolerate diversity. But they would just be fumes to confuse the crux of the problem, which concerns neither respect for identities nor cultures, nor the possible propagandistic actions of politics itself which is never wrong, whatever the origin, when it combats illicit acts; the crux of the problem, we were saying, concerns only the urgency of one’s duties and respect for the rules. By respecting which we can then talk about rights.
