Rome  - Italy's centre-right government vowed Monday to press on with a controversial proposal to deploy hundreds of soldiers to help police combat crime and maintain public order, including dealing with unrest linked to the Naples rubbish crisis.

"In many urban areas, there's a perception of growing insecurity," Defence Minister Ignazio La Russa said, defending the proposal which the cabinet is expected to approve through a decree on Tuesday.

The measure involves deploying a total of 2,500 soldiers for a period of six months in 10 major cities, including Rome, Milan, Naples, Turin and Genoa.

Soldiers will have the same power as police, including that of stopping suspects and carrying out searches.

"The defence forces have 190,000 men - I believe that for a year we can offer some of them to the Interior Ministry as a stop-gap measure," La Russa said in an interview published in Rome-daily, La Repubblica.

Surveys indicate that many Italians fear petty crime is spinning out of control, with many, including local officials, blaming illegal immigrants for the situation.

Also, authorities have struggled to deal with riots and demonstrations, as in Naples where local residents have, often with impunity, erected barricades blocking the creation of rubbish dumps in their areas.

Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's centre-right coalition triumphed in April's elections on a law-and-order platform, as well as a pledge to solve Naples' rubbish crisis, and the government is keen to show it will keep its promises.

But Italy's opposition which includes the centre-left Democratic Party and the Catholic centrist Union of Christian Democrats (UDC), have slammed government plans, including steps to make illegal immigration a crime.

"By playing on fear you can win elections but not govern a country," the Democratic Party's "shadow" interior minister, Marco Minniti, said.

The soldiers' deployment is nothing more than "a television advert and a special effects" stunt by the government, according to UDC leader Pier Ferdinando Casini.

For Minniti, "the same amount of money spent deploying the troops could have been spent on paying police for over-time work, thus doubling their presence throughout the country."

Studies suggest Italy has one of the highest law enforcement agent- per-citizen ratios in Europe, but co-ordination is often a problem because of the existence of three main corps responsible for policing.

These - the police, the Carabinieri and the Guardia di Finanza border and tax police - fall under different supervision, respectively the ministries of interior, defence and economy. (dpa)