A Dog Is Worth More Than A Black

At Campobello di Mazara, a dog can be cured by a vet with the help of €2,000 from the local council, while at the same time, the money apparently cannot be found to guarantee some support – and a little dignity – for thw 1,800 migrants who harvest our olives. This sliver of news found while scrolling online once again confirms that migrants are worth less than nothing: we can take away all of their freedom and rights because we see them as animals, less worthy than even cats and dogs. 

Humanity Drowns On Lampedusa

The Italian government has always used the most beautiful island in the Mediterranean as a place to experiment with immigration policies. And the Lampedusans have always been treated as guinea pigs by different governments over the years in order to see how much can be tolerated.

Reports of a serious law infringement in the Hotspot of Lampedusa

Press release – Despite the sentence of the European Court of Human Rights on the Khlaifia case, arbitrary detentions, mass expulsions and the negation of the right to asylum continue to happen. Mister M. has been on a hunger strike for 4 days. With him, around 200 fellow Tunisians locked up in the Hotspot centre of Lampedusa are refusing to eat until they are granted their rights. One of his companions has been hospitalised a few hours ago. They are being detained without legal validation and they have not met anyone who could explain to them the procedure for a possible asylum request.

No One Is Meant To Know

At the recent Paris talks, representatives from France, Italy, Germany, Spain and the EU confirmed their shared political line of cooperating with dictatorial states, of being the de facto ATM for blood thirsty regimes whose task is, and will increasingly be, to block people departing for Europe at all costs. It is important that nothing of what’s going on in Africa leaks into Europe, into public opinion. Minniti and the Italian government have already done the dirty work for this, gorging out indiscreet eyes by excluding the NGO ships from the Mediterranean, the unique and troublesome witnesses.

Rejected Tunisians at the Palermo train station

Migrants, the CIE* and the hotspots reminding of Lager. Between dirt, cold and loss of dignity

MeridioNews.it – The first report of the National Guarantor for the Rights of Detained and Semi-Detained Persons focuses on a long series of shortfalls which characterise the stay of foreign citizens arriving in Italy. In this context, structural problems are added to procedures casting doubt on whether rules are being respected.

I'm Starting To Be Scared For My Children

The Minniti-Orlando decree, now law, came into force in a deeply concerning way the past few days, with raids across Italy, rejection notices from the police stations and deportations from the Hotspots. The style is fascist, even if the law was signed off by two politicians who, in theory, ought to be fighting fascism. This government's actions are nourishing a daily xenophobia and violence against migrants which increases by the day, just as the glaring security measures close in while the government gives the nod.

Lampedusa: 40 Nigerians made to alight on a Meridiane plane to be deported

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

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

Not Only At Sea

Last week, we marked the day of remembrance all over the world with horrific memories, and worthy proposals, from those who lived through some of the most brutal pages in the story of our poor world. A world so lacking in values, values which we lost long ago, that it can celebrate the suicide of those from whom we have taken everything; because, unfortunately, life is so intensely hard for so many young people impoverished by the system enacted by today's ruling powers, that they have lost all hope of a dignified life, and the only way out from so much pain is to take their own lives. Death does not meet them only at sea, because the violence which they have gone through cannot be wiped away. And without support, they remain alone with their pain, and decide to end that pain once and for all.

Migrants transferred from the Lampedusa Hotspot to Villa Sikania, via Porto Empedocle

Miss, I'm Sorry, But I Have To Inform You That Your Son Has Been Killed

There have been too many, far too many phone calls over the last week. Too many messages from mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters looking for information about their loved ones, prisoners of our war on migrants. A battle which claims its victims every day: the last ones – if only they were truly the last – were those claimed last week, on the weekend of 13^th -15^th  January, when Europe's policies murdered around 200 people.

Lampedusa Counts the Dead.

The sea doesn't discriminate. It knows no racism, but swallows everything we offer it. And the Lampedusans will cry, and continue to count and gather the dead. A dead who have no common denominator save for being brought down by this system: fishermen who brave the waves to be able to live, to feed their own families, and migrants searching for freedom, and to feed their families in turn. 2017 has begun just as 2016 ended, with death upon death, with the daily murder of young men, women and children. A massacre without end.

Messina: A Mega Tent-City for Migrants in the Old 'Gasparro' Barracks. The €1,932,000 Contract Already Announced in the Official Gazette. And that's not all...

By Stampalibera.it

In a few months' time the former barracks of 'Gasparro' in Messina (in the urban area of Bisconte) will be transformed into one of the largest centres in Italy for the forced “welcoming” of those migrants awaiting the authorities' decision on whether they will be eventually relocated to other structures for asylum seekers in Europe or – as will be the case for the vast majority of them – to be deported by military force to their countries of origin. Dozens of tents and containers will be installed next to the buildings of the 'Gasparro' (where around 200 young migrants have already been stuck for three years) allowing for the tripling or even quadrupling of the number of residents, and – just a short walk from the town centre – replicating the infamous failure of the “Mineo” model of reception.

[photo: Enrico di Giacomo]

Hard to Accommodate: Lampedusa

There are 850 migrants stuck in the Hotspot of Contrada Imbriacola, inside a (partly uninhabitable) structure which could take around 250, at most 300 people. On Lampedusa, away from eyes and hearts, anything can happen, including locking up women and children with acute problems inside a Hotspot for months at a time, without any appropriate divisions by age and gender, in violation of every law on the protection of the vulnerable, illegal detention in an off-limits centre where civil society and NGOs are blocked from entering into contact with those inside.

Western Sicily: The Failure Paid For By Those In Search of Hope

The high number (over 40) of housing communities for minors in the Province of Agrigento makes monitoring them difficult. Many of the centres of very first reception for minors, called “highly specialised” centres, are specialised in nothing other than malfunctioning. The most serious situations are to be found in Licata, Palma di Montechiaro and Porto Empedocle, but the reports we are receiving are wide ranging.

The Great Frontier Within Our Cities

There is a border we have built which is larger than any of the walls being raised up throughout the whole world, a frontier which is born from within ourselves and the culture from which we are all nourished even as children, a frontier which is created by our egoism and comfort, a frontier which kills people even before the sea does. It is a frontier which behaves as if exploitation, death and discrimination were simply daily “sport”. It is a frontier which divides rich and poor within our cities and neighbourhoods. It is a frontier which we raise up so that we can live well, so as not to raise our glances over the wall which we have built for ourselves.

[Image: The Cemetery at Agrigento. Photo: Alberto Biondo]

Mincemeat

I was sitting down with two workers from an Extraordinary Reception Centre* in the province of Trapani, to discuss some of the problems which noiselessly repeat themselves within the centres (and not only those in Trapani), looking for some possible practical solutions. In these situations, the analysis often ends up being expressed in all its rawness: “They're mincemeat. It doesn't matter if they're adults or children, men or women, most people don't give them any attention, starting with the institutions and ending with the stressed and confused workers. And in these moments of stress, the migrant always takes the blame, and pays for it. The workers are always more distant from the needs of those who are being welcomed, because they're not paid, and they're pressed from all sides by endless requests from the migrants, who end up having mincemeat made of them, without any possibility of getting out unharmed.”

The Voices of Those Who Are Thrown Back by the Walls and a Lethal Indifference

In these muggy August days we have been reading tales of violence meted out on migrants in various ways: from the politician who comes up with a decree to prevent acts of solidarity extended to migrants asking for food, to teenagers who have died from the crushing effects of a society which remains indifferent to their attempts to reach their parents, all the way up to the shameful punitive deportations of the migrants living throughout many Italian cities. The climate we are living through is the result of a growing institutional racism, one which both creates and legitimates violence, which raises walls – and, above all, kills, because the sea continues to wash bodies up on the shores. The last 5 such bodies on August 21^st.

Everyone Sit Down Please

It's not just a line for children, but also the position lived out by migrants while on board the rescue ships, while waiting their identification at the port, while in the police station for their finger prints to be taken. Sat on the ground so that we can watch over them from above. We who decide their fate.

The Dead: The Sea Can't Take Them Any More

The sea now leaves many of the dead on the beaches of Libya, the very same from which so many depart in search of a new life, a life which has then been denied them, men and women of all ages. In the last week some have been recovered by humanitarian vessels such as Aquarius and Dignity managed by Médecins Sans Frontières. The most recent are the 22 bodies of young women which were disembarked last week at Trapani. Women and children are the first to die in the journey from Libya to Italy, due to their position within the vessels.