Over the last decade of clandestine immigration into Puglia, southern Italy, the boat people have learned a thing or two. That is why a message went out two nights ago from a rusty fishing boat, crammed far beyond the safety point with 1,120 Rom fugitives from Kosovo, claiming that there was a dead child on board.
The boat people had evidently gambled that the coastguards would not turn around a boat with a dead person on board. The ploy worked perfectly. The rusty old fishing vessel, listing dangerously in the relatively calm waters of the 120-mile-wide Otranto Straits which separate Montenegro from Puglia, was towed into Bari harbour on Thursday morning. When the coastguards went on board, they found no dead child but tired but relieved Rom who had taken 17 hours to make the crossing and who had been abandoned to their fate in mid-voyage by their "crew" of contraband traffickers.
Before leaving the boat to drift dangerously and aimlessly, the had relieved their passengers of about £400 by way of a fare.
The relief of the Gypsy boat people at having finally reached Italy was short-lived, however. The Italian Ministry of the Interior yesterday confirmed that after routine identifications and medical checks all the Rom will be repatriated.
Since July 20th, Italy no longer grants the temporary visas that applied during the NATO bombardment of Yugoslavia when Kosovan boat people were treated as refugees.
The 1,120 Rom towed into Bari harbour this week were only the latest in what has become a mini-exodus from Kosovo.
Hours before they arrived in Bari, another boat, with 365 Rom on board, had been apprehended and towed into Brindisi, and last week another boat with 154 Rom on board limped into Bari. The Rom, many of whom speak good Italian, all tell the same story, claiming that they have been subject to vicious reprisals by returning Albanian Kosovars, who accuse them of having participated in the "ethnic cleansing" of Albanians by Serb militia in Kosovo. Speaking to Italian state television yesterday, one of the Kosovan Rom argued emphatically that he and his companions were entitled to refugee status. adding He added in tones of angry desperation: "We just wanted to get here and stay here. We don't have a homeland any more. For us, that doesn't exist any more. If the Serbs don't want us and if the Albanians don't want us, where are we to go? Where?"
For the time being, it remains unclear just how and when the Rom will be repatriated. According to Gianfranco Schiavone of Italian Solidarity, a group which works with Rom already established in Italy, many of those who arrived this week will not sit around waiting to be put on a ship back to Montenegro but will slip out of their reception camps and make their way north, either to family members or to existing Gypsy camps in Rome, Florence and Mestre.
This latest wave of boat people comes at the end of a busy spring and summer in Puglia when 13,118 people were apprehended while attempting clandestine entry into Italy.
In other words, between January 1st and August 6th this year, more boat people entered Puglia illegally than in all of 1998. Ministry of the Interior figures suggest that 54,000 known clandestine immigrants entered Italy this year, 6,700 of them Rom, mainly from Kosovo.
AFP adds: The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees expressed alarm yesterday over the exodus of tens of thousands of Kosovan Serbs and Gypsies.
"This is becoming increasingly alarming," said Ms Sadako Ogata. The number of Serbs in Kosovo had dropped dramatically since NATO's 11-week campaign of air strikes, which ended in June, she told the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan.
"The number of Serbs in Kosovo before the conflict was estimated to be about 200,000," she said, but 170,000 had now left.
There were only about 2,000 left in the capital, Pristina, compared to 40,000 before the conflict. The situation for Gypsies suspected of collaborating with Serb oppression of ethnic Albanians in the province was even worse.
In the past week in Kosovo there had been nine murders and seven serious assaults, "mostly against the vulnerable, and that angers me. A lot of the people left are old people," Ms Ogata said.