Italy's first black minister compared to orang-utan by Northern League senator
The vice president of the Italian senate is facing calls to resign after he compared Italy's first black minister to an orang-utan.
Roberto Calderoli and Cecile Kyenge
Tom Kington in Rome
4:13PM BST 14 Jul 2013
Speaking on Saturday at a rally held by his party, the anti-immigration Northern League, Roberto Calderoli said that when he saw photos of Cecile Kyenge, Italy’s Congo-born minister for integration, “I cannot but think, even if I don’t say it, of the similarity to an orang-utan.”
His comments, which follow a series of racist insults aimed at Mrs Kyenge in Italy, were deemed by “unacceptable” and “beyond any limit” by Enrico Letta, Italian prime minister, while Guglielmo Epifani, he head of the Democratic Party, demanded Calderoli’s resignation.
Reacting to the outcry on Sunday, Mr Calderoli said he had merely made a “friendly joke”.
Mrs Kyenge, 48, an eye doctor who moved to Italy 30 years ago, responded: “Political debate must be based on content, and not based on insults.”
She has promised to fight for a new law granting Italian citizenship to children born in Italy to immigrants. Currently they must wait until they are 18.
Her statements have provoked a barrage of insults in internet forums as well as attacks from politicians in the Northern League, Silvio Berlusconi’s former coalition government ally. In May, Northern League member and European MEP Mario Borghezio warned that Mrs Kyenge would impose “tribal conditions” on Italy and turn the government into a “bongo bongo” administration, adding that Africans had “not produced great genes”.
He was later suspended from his group in the European parliament under pressure from UKIP MEPs.
In June a local councillor for the Northern League called for Mrs Kyenge to be raped, reportedly so she could understand the seriousness of an attempted rape of two women in Genoa by a Somali.
In 2006 Mr Calderoli provoked a riot outside the Italian embassy Libya in which 11 died by appearing on TV wearing a t-shirt bearing a cartoon about the prophet Mohammed. In 2007 he proposed walking pigs across the site of a planned mosque in Italy to defile it.
