- Isolated,
abandoned and sleeping rough: Italy fails to welcome those who need protection
- “We fled
to survive”: thousands of migrants continue to arrive on the Sicilian coast
- News: the accusation against a Borderline Sicily worker is filed. Lamin's experience: a refugee in Italy, but imprisoned in Mali by bureaucracy
They have
risked their lives to ask Italy for protection and the possibility of a real
future, but years later many people still find themselves without a place to
sleep. They are several dozen refugees who are forced to camp out in the tent
city at Pian del Lago, victims of a heightened disrespect for human rights, one
that forces hundreds of people into an unjustifiable bureaucratic limbo,
deprived of the possibility of enjoying their fundamental rights.
If such
unwelcoming practices facilitate the proliferation of mystifying speeches and
xenophobic deportations, interacting with citizens here can only bode well for
the future social inclusion of those who arrive. This is what happened at
Piazza Armerina, where a section of the population has begun a dialogue and coexistence
with asylum seekers recently transferred there. They have decided to be one of
the main supports of the migrants there, who are determined to end up not as
victims to a depersonalising system which ignores human rights, but instead to
follow the path of freedom and self-determination.
“We fled
to survive”: thousands of migrants continue to arrive at the Sicilian coast
Around 10.000
migrants were disembarked by rescue ships along the Sicilian coast this month,
with landings happening mainly in the ports along the south eastern coast and
at Lampedusa. The weather conditions are bad, the organisation of the journeys
always more precarious, the boats ramshackle and minuscule, and the situation
of departure at the limit point of survival. Nothing will stop people fleeing
violence and the lack of a real future. And at the same time, migrants are
being ever increasingly interrogated and identified while still on board the
ships.
Many people
arrive in extreme conditions, or with disabilities, living witnesses to the
death of fellow travellers. What awaits them, however, is a system
characterised by an absence of the protection of human rights and a host of
linguistic, physical and bureaucratic barriers which soon enough carries many
into psychological problems or to remain invisible on the island. The great
welcoming so lauded in the militarised landing operations never to seem to have
truly begun.
The
massacres are commemorated, but the deaths at sea continue: Europe raises new
barriers
By now it
is every week that one notes the lives of those who do not survive off the
coast of Egypt, Libya and in the Sicilian sea. Misinformation and a climate of
indifference support Europe's inhumane migration policies, the primary cause of
this continual massacre.
On the day
before the first anniversary of the shipwreck of 18 April 2015, when around 800
migrants perished, another 400 refugees lost their lives at sea. But Europe's
response to these deaths is the reinforcement and implementation of its systems
for the control, selection, rejection and deportation of migrants. Within the
Hotspots, the key words are identification, selection and surveillance, and the
migrants who are taken there turned from people into numbers, left to the mercy
of whoever wants to gain either visibility or profit.
News:
the accusation against a Borderline Sicily worker is filed. Lamin's experience:
a refugee in Italy, but imprisoned in Mali by bureaucracy.
The judge
at the court in Caltagirone, on the request of the Prosecution of the Republic,
has filed the accusation presented by the manager at the SPRAR* at Grammichele,
run by the “San Francesco - 4 Ottobre” coop, against one of Borderline Sicily's
workers. This counts as only the latest intimidation taken against those who
carry out independent monitoring.
He has been
trapped in Mali since 2015, having lost his documents. Lamine, a Senegalese
citizen recognised as a political refugee in Italy, has fallen victim to
Italian, European and International bureaucracy. In a work where goods and
communication can move freely, the same cannot be said of human being, not even
in relation to those who our country, and Europe, has engaged itself in
protecting.
*SPRAR – Sistema
di protezione per rifugiati e richiedenti asilo: protection system for refugees
and asylum seekers
