Italians protest over US base expansion
(Reuters)
17 February 2007
VICENZA, Italy - Tens of thousands of Italians under heavy police guard marched on Saturday through the city of Vicenza to protest against the expansion of a US military base that has divided the centre-left government.
Leftists who last year voted for Prime Minister Romano Prodi, an Iraq war opponent, turned out in droves to decry his approval for US plans to expand the military base in Vicenza, home to the 173rd Airborne Brigade.
Pacifists waved rainbow-striped peace banners while some protesters carried anti-American slogans like “Yankees go Home” as they marched through the city and gathered in a main square.
“There is no reason to have this base here,” said Antonio Faitta, a 25-year-old gardener who travelled from Genoa.
Prodi appealed to demonstrators to refrain from violence, following warnings from the interior minister that the protest march which began shortly after 2 p.m. (1300 GMT) could attract people “hostile to the forces of law and order”.
The US embassy had warned Americans to steer clear of the small northern Italian city of 115,000, where officials also shut schools normally open on Saturday as a precaution.
But the protests were peaceful. Police estimates pegged the crowd at more than 50,000 people. The leftist Communist Refoundation Party (Prc), part of the ruling coalition, boasted the number could top 100,000 and said Prodi should “listen up”.
The base expansion is the latest headache for Prodi, who has faced revolts by his broad leftist coalition partners on everything from gay rights to the budget and the
presence of Italian peacekeepers in Afghanistan.
“Today, Prodi has been given a vote of no confidence by his own majority. He should step down,” said Isabella Bertolini of the centre-right opposition Forza Italia party.
Lightning rod
The demonstration has served as a lightning rod for anti-US sentiment in a country where judges have ordered CIA agents and a US soldier to stand trial for kidnapping and murder.
A Milan judge charged the CIA agents on Friday with abducting a Muslim cleric in Milan in a covert operation and flying him to Egypt. The US soldier was charged on Feb. 7 with murdering an Italian secret agent in Iraq, although both governments have described the 2005 shooting as an accident.
All will almost certainly be tried in absentia, since Washington is not expected to hand them over.
“I don’t want any more Americans here and I don’t want a new base. They should just leave us alone,” said Pucci Mori, a resident of Vicenza, who lives near the proposed base expansion.
“Wherever they go in the world, Americans cause trouble.”
The Pentagon wants to double the size of the base to unite its 173rd Airborne
Brigade and expand its 2,750 military personnel to 4,500.
At present, the rapid reaction unit is divided among the base at Vicenza, about 400 km (250 miles) north of Rome, and bases at Bamburg and Schweinfurt in Germany.
The new barracks would be on the other side of the city from the existing one. That has raised worries about new roads to handle military traffic linking the two parts, loss of green space and strains on public services.
Residents fear it could even put Vicenza in danger.
