Italy: Silvio Berlusconi Puts Troops on Patrol in Rome

Tourists arriving in Rome today may be startled to find the main railway station and the underground guarded by troops.

Some 3,000 soldiers are being deployed this morning as part of a package of measures introduced by Silvio Berlusconi's government to fulfil an electoral pledge to uphold law and order.

The government has repeatedly linked rising crime rates to illegal immigration, which last month prompted Berlusconi and his ministers to declare a national state of emergency.

The deployment of the military is the latest high-profile element in a campaign that already includes the fingerprinting of those of who live in camps on the outskirts of Italy's big cities, the vast majority of them Roma. The troops are expected to remain on the streets until at least the end of January.

About 1,000 soldiers will guard embassies and other sites to free up the police and Carabinieri for other duties, with a further 1,000 posted to immigrant detention centres to prevent escapes. In the part of the exercise arousing the greatest controversy, the remaining 1,000 are to be sent on patrol, alongside police and Carabinieri.

On Thursday the defence minister, Ignazio La Russa, a leading figure in the formerly neo-fascist National Alliance, astonished the local authorities in the Sicilian holiday resorts of Taormina and Naxos by hinting that they too might get troops. "Soldiers?" asked the mayor of Taormina, Mauro Passalacqua, "have we gone mad?" He said the town had seen just one bag-snatch in the past six weeks and that the last murder in Taormina was committed in the 1960s.

At a meeting with government officials, council representatives in Rome thought they had secured an undertaking that soldiers would not be posted to the main tourist sites. But a joint statement put out subsequently by the defence and interior ministers said troops could be deployed "in the historic center".