After The Landing, Human Rights On Hold: The Case Of The Extraordinary Reception Centre at Rosolini

Mohamed and Ahmed (not their real names) arrived in Sicily on the first of July. The Swedish ship BKV 002 to which they were transferred while still at sea brought them into the port of Catania along with 650 other migrants and 9 bodies. “It was extraordinary to think that just one step more and we were in Europe” is the phrase they used on arrival. At least, it was in our first meeting.

Migrants at the port of Augusta (Province of Syracuse)

"They Leave As People, They Arrive As Ghosts” Shipwrecks And Push-Backs At Sea. Italy Closes The Doors, Including To Those Who Manage To Arrive

On June 12th a Swedish ship belonging to Frontex landed at Catania, with 356 migrants on board and 8 bodies. The survivors spoke of a dozen missing and the collapse of their rubber boat, packed with people far beyond its capacity. Only a few days later, a group of Sudanese migrants reported a boat which had broken apart after two days at sea, from which only a dozen people had been saved. Other refugees reported having met Syrian women and children in Libya: they had just been “brought back” to the departure point by the local Coast Guard and themselves told of having seen other small wooden boats go under.

The Italian Coast Guard vessel Diciotti in port at Catania

“We Can't Stop”. The Signs Of The Borders Written On The Bodies Of Those Who Arrive

“It was a long journey, but I put some money aside from my 'pay' these last few months. And I had an accident too, when my finger was crushed. My friends took me to the hospital and they had to amputate it. I'm better now though, I'm in a reception centre, I can talk and be understood.” 'M' writes to us again after a month of silence, from his new hostel in Germany. In May he will turn 17, and in June it will have been a year since he landed at Pozzallo.

The Golfo Azzurro, from the NGO Proactiva, arriving at Catania

Recovered or Saved? Criminalisation of the Sea Missions and Still More Slaughter At Sea

A few hours ago the news broke of the latest, horrendous shipwreck off the coast of Libya, in which it is thought around 240 people lost their lives, according to the account of the NGO Pro-Activa Open Arms, which recovered five cadavers found near to two empty rubber boats. On March 20th another 38 deaths were confirmed off the Libyan coast. The migrants had been drifting on two rubber boats which were then “saved” by the Libyan Coast Guard.

The Ocean Carrier docks in at Pozzallo

Unaccompanied Foreign Minors: An Open-Air Orphanage

From Repubblica.it

According to data from the Ministry of the Interior, 25,846 minors arrived in Italy via the Mediterranean in 2016. Sicily is the region which hosts the highest proportion of them. As part of a project to monitor the new reception centres, the Guarantor for Childhood and Adolescence visited Catania and Noto. Oxfam and Borderline Sicilia, however, have provided damning reports.

Ph: Repubblica.it

Minors in Tent Cities and Hotspots: Pozzallo, Augusta, Catania and Messina

The year 2016 ended with more arrivals, more deaths, more missing persons. The year 2017 has begun with the proposal for new detention centres and other limitations on migrants' freedom of movement. The criminal policies of Fortress Europe increasingly require new discussions, commemorations and real solidarity. On December 24^th, 111 migrants landed at Pozzallo, but the daily news recounts nothing but the immediate arrest of two alleged boat drivers, which bring the number of arrestees in the Province of Ragusa to 200.

Photo: the Pozzallo hotspot - Lucia Borghi

Refugees at a Distance: New Victims Amid the Complete Silence of Fortress Europe

“Europe talks about migrants as refugees only when they're at a distance, still in the countries of transit or where a war is unfolding. When we manage to cross the borders, we immediately become simply numbers, talked about as nothing but a problem.” 'L'. is from Senegal, and just a little over 20 years old, the last five of those years spent in a journey to reach Fortress Europe, where he arrived three years ago. He tries to stay calm and composed while speaking, even if the resulting tone makes his anger and frustration clear enough, and the pain which he tries to swallow down every day.

Deaths, Rejections and Vulnerable Detentions in the Pozzallo Hotspot: The Daily Tragedy of Those Fleeing to Europe

On average there are four landings every week at Sicilian ports alone, along with dozens of deaths and an imprecise number of people missing at sea. We're at the beginning of December, but the departures from Libya continue, with ever less certainty of arriving in Europe. The first round of shared training between the Libyan Coast Guard and the Italian Navy has just come to a conclusion on board the navy vessel San Giorgio, carried out by the European Union Naval Force, within the remit of the EUNAVFORMED operation Sophia. At the same time, the various humanitarian maritime missions, including the Bourbon Argos and the Dignity of Doctors Without Borders, Save the Children's Vos Hestia and MOAS*'s Phoenix will soon be concluding their own rescue operations for several months.

Market Commodities: Unaccompanied Minors Fleeing Without Any Protection

“I got out of Italy. Now I'm in a safe country.” 'A's message arrives early in the morning, a young Eritrean man who we met at Pozzallo and then followed throughout his first month at a centre for minors in the province of Syracuse. From the moment he arrived, 'A' had continued to repeat the first sentence he heard in Italian: “You are in Italy, a safe country.”

Remembrance by the Few, Silence of the Many. Three Landings and 29 Bodies at Pozzallo.

"I left after having spent 40 days in a bunker in Libya. I was threatened with death, robbed of my documents, tied up and beaten. I lost all sense of time, I couldn't tell when it was night or day. It was only on arrival in Italy that I properly understood how much time had passed. Looking at myself, I hardly recognise who I am anymore.”

Photo: the MOAS Topaz Responder, at Pozzallo.

Will There Ever Be A Dignified Welcoming For Migrants at the Port of Augusta?

By the Catania Antiracist Network

Dozens of migrants, the majority of them unaccompanied minors, crowded for weeks into tent structures in a closed-off, militarised port, in undignified sanitary conditions, left without any prospect of being housed properly, and without even the most elementary legal safeguarding of their human rights.

From the Sea to the Countryside, Passing Through Our Cities

 What do a young Ghanaian woman, a middle-aged Nigerian man and a Senegalese teenager have in common? Beyond the colour of their skin, without a shadow of a doubt, they share an experience of violence and exploitation, and the fact that they have been killed by our laws. This system has decided to sacrifice migrants so as to stay on its feet, has decided to outlaw anyone who wants to rise from the ashes we have left in the countries from which they arrive, young men and women who live daily with death on their doostep, which frequently gains the upper hand.

[Image: Landing at Palermo. Photo – Alberto Biondo]

More Vulnerable People, Less Protection. Prolonged Detention in Pozzallo and Augusta.

Fifteen migrants dead at sea, including women and children.

The notices of death in the Mediterranean are ever more frequent and standardised, and the images of rescue missions and the disembarking leave only a minimal functional space to call into question European responsibility and to commend Italian work. Faces and bodies quickly disappear, usually destined either for a far-off burial away from the view of friends, or to eek out an exhausting survival in a country which is shown to be ever less democratic and welcoming.

Child migrants in Sicily must overcome one last obstacle – the mafia

From The Guardian

Many refugee children have disappeared from the island amid allegations of people-smuggling by organised gangs

The diminutive figures were lined up outside Catania’s central station. There were seven in all, aged between 15 and 17. They had recently escaped from the massive government-run migrant reception centres inland or further along the Sicilian coast. Now they were alone, waiting for the city’s matrix of organised criminals to take them north.

                                          Via Garibaldi in Catania, Sicily - Ph. Alamy

The Violence Reproduced by Emergency

Emergency considered as the only possible response. It is the institutional reaction at an international, national and local level faced with this continuing, terrifying massacre. It is a response that is being invoked with ever more force in the context of managing the phenomenon of migration in Sicily. If we recall that an emergency is “an improvised situation which has to be confronted immediately”, we can understand quite quickly how inappropriate a word it is to be used to describe the situation of the arrival, placement and “welcoming” of migrants. To make a system out of an emergency that lasts years, shows the clear will of the relevant political actors, and the absence of any institutional transparency in involving the citizenry in what is actually going on.

So Many Arrivals, So Little Protection. Migrants In Ever Worse Conditions And Abandoned To Themselves.

In only a few days 4,500 people have been rescued and brought to the main Sicilian ports: Pozzallo, Augusta, Catania, Messina, Porto Empedocle and Palermo. The arrival of such a high number of migrants paradoxically corresponds to refugees' extraordinary invisibility and the lack of protection for them. As always happens when there are various landings on the same day, NGO workers are forced to divide themselves among the different ports, leaving somewhere uncovered.

Foto Lucia Borghi

A hotspot in Messina instead of Augusta--What is a hotspot and what are the differences to other first reception centers?

Source: Tempostretto

For three years now the city of Messina in Sicily is constantly occupied with the routine state of emergency of the reception of migrants. People arrive at the city pier on a daily basis, the former barracks of Bisconte remain active and, moreover, reception continues in the tent city of Pala Nebiolo, depending on the season in dust or in mud. Unaccompanied minors are accomodated in the Ahmed center. Taken together, the city has three reception centers, two of which are under ministerial aegis, while the third one is run by the city Messina.

New disembarkings and hundreds of rejections at Pozzallo and Lampedusa

When we visited the Hotspot at Pozzallo a few days ago, we asked repeatedly for clarification regarding the procedure for separating “economic” migrants from those seeking international protection. The officials at the Prefecture told us how, once the disembarking operation has come to an end, the refugees are transferred by bus to the centre situated a few hundred metres away, and allowed into a building through a side entrance which leads directly from the port; here there is the initial health screening, immediately followed by 'pre-identification', including the filling out of the so-called “notification paper” which inquires into the migrant's reasons for having fled from their country.

Fortress Europe's Revolving Doors

The image which comes to mind so often at the moment is that of a hotel's revolving door, the kind in which children play endlessly, and when they do finally emerge from all the spinning end up back where they started, but with a dizzy head. 

For migrants, it's the same thing but with dramatic consequences: in the moment in which they're saved by a merchant vessel, a navy ship or volunteers, migrants step into this revolving door, but as soon as they touch Italian soil they begin to understand that it is no game, and that the door will set them down where they started, but in a worse state.

New landings at Augusta and Pozzallo

Migrants’ journey has not ended yet. Last week-end about 940 migrants were rescued offshore Sicily, in eight different operations. 258 of them arrived at Augusta’s port onboard of Belgian frigate Leopold Ist, in the morning of Friday, november 7, within EUNAVFORMED mission. Newspapers already write of the capture of 4 presumed smugglers, omitting the fate of all of the other new arrived, supposedly shunted in the surrounding centres. Another 713 more  migrants land from the Coast Guard’s ship “Diciotti” at the port of Pozzallo, in the same Friday afternoon.

Photo Lucia Borghi