For A Different World: No More Deaths in the Mediterranean Sea!

A Mediterranean of Death

Waldesian Evangelical Church of Catania
Baptist Evangelical Christian Church of Catani (via Capuana)

Since the beginning of the year, more than 1,400 people have died at sea while attempting to reach Europe. This massacre could be avoided if there were active and legal means for immigration and if there were not this generalised re-emergence of policies of rejection across Europe.

Anguish and Torment

As citizens of this country, and even more as believers in God and Jesus Christ, we are not only distraught at the death of each of these migrants but also angered by the barbarity of the national political discussion around immigration and the abuse of power by the Minister of the Interior, who ignores international law and is supporting policies of closure that have no basis in any parliamentary act of debate.

Complex causes

We are aware of the complexity of migration, but this is no reason for us to close our eyes from what is happening to it. On the contrary, we recognise that it is not immigration that needs to be fought, but every process that brings climate change, every policy that adds to the injustice that produces poverty, war, environmental disasters and economic exploitation.

Our criticism

We criticise and denounce the exploitation of resources in so-called poor and developing countries by so-called industrialised countries, whether in the East or West.

As citizens of a Western country, we denounce our own responsibility in the enrichment of our countries through:

– arms sales
– foreign policies that create civil wars used for alliances that benefit our own interests
– the economic plan that favours corruption in public administration of these countries and the growth of public debt, blocking the full development of a free and independent economy on a local level
– the rules of a global market economy that favours old and emerging powers, idolising profits for a few and denying the right to life and well-being of millions of human beings

We demand a radical change of plan

These complex phenomena have no immediate solution. They requiere a conversion and a long-term global change.

We thus call for a change of plan, going beyond our current ideas, seeing ourselves and our society from a new perspective. We ask this and nothing less from Italian, European and international politics.

We call for individuals to stop being complicit with propaganda that identifies today’s evils as deriving from the effects imposed on those who pay the highest price by unanswerable powers.

As believers

We believe that faith to the cross, Jesus Christ, does not reside in wooden idol or a national flag but in listening to the cry of pain from the cross, and from the cross of our own time.

We affirm, in the words of pastor Martin Luther King Jr, that 殿ny religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about economic conditions that cripple them and the social conditions that damn them is a dry as dust religion.”

Finally, we state that another world is possible. It has been promised to us by God and it is already in the works: it is the inheritance given to those who today are in pain, are hungry, who are persecuted.

Catania, 20 July 2018

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

Translation by Richard Braude