Serious Violations of Rights on Lampedusa

In these times, so arid from the standpoint of humanity, the question which we keep asking of ourselves is at what point can we push ourselves further. The direction is clear: walls, rejections, abandonment. Those paying the price of these inhumane political choices are migrants themselves, ending up as cannon fodder in Libya (a country which never signed the Geneva Convention), dying at sea, or being exploited and abandoned in Italy. Today the situation is worse still, after the migrant hunt has been officially opened, and the raids are already taking place in our cities.

Migrants landed at Porto Empedocles from Lampedusa. Ph: Alberto Todaro

Diary from Campobello di Mazara

We are Simon and Verena, two anthropology students from Bolzano who decided to visit one of the many social realities of migration which our friends at Borderline Sicilia had “narrated” to us. We wanted to see it with our own eyes, and accompanied by some of the activists from Campobello spent more than a month in a village which today is host to a large number of migrants during the olive harvest. We tried to maintain a diary to record our experience.