Deportations From Italy, With Frontex’s Help

Despite the visible failure of the Hotspots, the Italian government is launching other such centres: according to announcements by Franco Gabrielli, Chief of Police, the new centres will be placed in Messina and Mineo. Sicily will thus continue to be subjected to the very worst process of militarisation, including the detention of thousands of migrants.

Capitalism. Illustration by Francesco Piobbichi

Some of them end up saying that they do not even feel that they ever left Libya. No doubt they are no longer abused and tortured as they were in Libyan prisons, they are not murdered in cold blood with a bullet, but the bureaucratic waiting times and the choices made by institutional agents increasingly simply create invisible people, without presenting people with any options except running away in the best of instances, or more usually working and dying either in the seasonal work camps or on the street.

In the worst of instances, Italy deports people, in total silence. These are operations of which the media do not breath a word, in order to avoid providing news which might show the government’s and politicians’ true nature.

Illustration by Francesco Piobbichi

Last week, at least thirty Nigerians arrived in Lampedusa and were immediately put on an airplane for Fiumicino airport in Rome, to then be taken to Lagos. There is no humanitarian organisation aware of the exact number of people who were deported, and there is no politician who understands the precise dynamics of these operations.

Italy has begun on a still closer collaboration with Frontex, an organisation with ever more powers, and these deportations are the result of the response which the Italian government wants to give to Europe and its calls for more deportations from Italy.

Frontex.

The government, after the “raids circular”, had to deal with the Nigerians picked up across the country, making use of the plane organised by Frontex at the same time, originally from Germany, by which at least 30 people were repatriated only a few days after arriving from Libya, or after a longer period in Italy, but either way made invisible, exploited by our laws.

Full blown deportations, a violence which the affected migrants never see the back of, with the proviso that we will never know the destiny of those who have been sent back.

Alberto Biondo
Borderline Sicilia

Project “OpenEurope” – Oxfam Italia, Diaconia Valdese, Borderline Sicilia Onlus

Translation by Richard Braude