Migrant Sicily Newsletter, September 2016
– Drawn-out Landing Operations
and Facilities in Free-fall: The Failure of the Italian System Creates Violence
and Exploitation
– Continual Rejections and
Illegal Detention, Inhuman Consequences of the “Hotspot” Approach
– Hotspots and Extraordinary
Reception Centres: The Non-Places of the Reception System for Unaccompanied
Minors
– News and Events
– Information and Contacts
Drawn-out Landing Operations and Facilities
in Free-fall: The Failure of the Italian System Creates Violence and
Exploitation
The practice of a “long landing” seems to be becoming a recurrent feature in the treatment of
migrants arriving in Sicily. At the landings which took place in September at
the ports of Palermo, Messina, Pozzallo and Augusta, extremely long times were
observed for the carrying out of the identification and registration
procedures. In some cases, such as the landings in Palermo on the 6th
and the 12th of September, the operations lasted more than 36 hours,
with a large part of that time spent by many migrants left waiting in the rain.
In Palermo the identification operations for the most recent landing, on September 12th, had to
be carried out in the police station, and lasted until the evening. Rejection
notices were distributed on the basis of nationality alone, ordering direct
repatriation. The crisis of the reception system in Palermo is sharply felt in
the centres for minors, frequently hit by protests. The young residents often
choose to run away from these centres, putting themselves at risk of becoming
the working hands in the market of organised crime, and €2 per hour labourers
for the bosses in the fields.
http://139.59.187.32/2016/09/20/from-the-sea-to-the-countryside-passing-through-our-cities/
Dozens of migrants at the port of
Augusta, the majority of them unaccompanied minors,
have been living for weeks at a time stuck in the tent settlement, in the
terrible hygienic and sanitary conditions. Some of the adolescents met by the
Catania Antiracist Network at the city’s train station, tell of having been
able to escape after several days detained in the tent-city, suffering from the
heat and without any information on how to request asylum and humanitarian
protection. Others say they were forced to give their finger prints after being
beaten with an electrified baton; still others, once identified, have been
abandoned in the street and have travelled along some 40km of asphalt to return
to Catania.
Continual Rejections and Illegal
Detention, Inhuman Consequences of the “Hotspot” Approach
We can only call it a new wall, perhaps invisible but still difficult to cross, set up by Fortress
Europe to put into practice a disastrous, unwelcoming politics of excluding
migrants. The checks and identifications held at the landings point towards a
“selection”, with the final aim of carrying out ever more numerous rejections.
And for those who remain, their treatment is certainly no better: the
unaccompanied minors and vulnerable persons – pregnant women, single mothers
with children, those who are sick and psychologically fragile – are illegally
detained for months at a time, in conditions of overcrowding and without any
appropriate divisions of gender and age, forced into a painful survival with
neither adequate support nor any answers about the future which awaits them.
Hotspots and Extraordinary Reception
Centres: The Non-Places of the Reception System for Unaccompanied Minors
Minors continue to arrive at Pozzallo, hosted in the overcrowded Hotspot and in the new Extraordinary
Reception Centres (CAS) for minors opened by the Prefecture of Ragusa in the
centre of the coastal town. The minors do not receive any information about the
new system in which they have been placed, and are left in the dark regarding
their rights and duties. In this way the practice of illegal detention is
allowed to continue, so as to control and manage migrants like numbers rather
than people. Inasmuch, at the community for minors at San Michele di Ganzaria
the situation remains difficult. After the serious episode of violence in which
four young Egyptian men were attacked there have been charges and arrests
following protests over the lack of pocket money. Yet again, an incompetence of
management and mediation, and the lack of the educational approach essential in
a community for minors, impeded any sane solution to the conflicts. Already
having only just escaped death by land and sea, the minors are leaving the
centres, escaping a process of integration which could, instead, make them feel
finally saved.
http://139.59.187.32/2016/09/13/unaccompanied-minors-when-reception-is-seen-only-as-a-challenge/
In dealing with newly arriving children
and unaccompanied refugees, the number of whom has
doubled since last year, the Italian reception system has demonstrated all of
its ineffectiveness. In the first quarter of 2016, more than 5,000 children
have been declared “missing”, having either run away or been driven out from
the minors’ centres. The situation is denounced by the new Oxfam report, “Great
Expectations Left to Drift”.
http://139.59.187.32/2016/09/08/everyday-28-children-disappear-from-the-italian-reception-system/
News and Events
MEDU presents the “Exoduses” project in
Rome, an interactive map of the migrant routes from Subsaharan Africa to
Europe; “A partisan told me” has launched the crowdfunding for a new book by
Gabriele Del Grande; the project “Mediterranean Missing” was presented to the
Chamber of Deputies, a joint project from the University of York, City
University London and the IMO, which attempts to provide a name to those who
have died in the Mediterranean.
http://139.59.187.32/2016/09/14/dont-call-them-economic-migrants-medu-explains-the-exodus-to-europe/
http://139.59.187.32/2016/09/30/names-for-the-mediterranean-missing/
Information and Contacts
For information on how to donate
to Borderline Sicilia Onlus – Banca
Etica Popolare di Palermo Agenzia di Via Catania, 24 IBAN IT 28 Q
0501804600000000141148 Codice BIC CCRTIT2T84A – and for updates on the
current situation of migration in Sicily see the blog:
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Translation: Richard Braude