Migrants clash with police in Italy

Hundreds of asylum-seekers clashed with riot police near an immigrant centre in the southern Italian city of Bari yesterday in a protest to demand refugee status that left dozens lightly injured.

Protesters hurled rocks and metal bars at police lines, set off fires and trashed the facility on the outskirts of Bari. Police responded with tear gas and live rounds fired into the air and 30 protesters were arrested.

The rioters blocked a main road and railway for several hours, disrupting regional train services and car traffic. A passing bus was also wrecked.

Local officials later intervened and persuaded the protesters to stand down after the authorities undertook to respond to their requests by next Wednesday.

The asylum-seekers returned to the facility, Italian news media reported.

Last winter Corfu shipwreck sans papiers death toll: a 16-year-old afghan refugee testimony

source: http://w2eu.net/2011/07/20/dublin-deaths-between-kerkyragreece-and-bariitaly-15th-of-january-2011/#more-3027

Dublin-Deaths between Kerkyra/Greece and Bari/Italy

The following testimony of Amin Fedaii, a 16-year-old afghan refugee, is alarming. On January 15th 2011 more than 20 refugees (mainly from Afghanistan) died while trying to flee from Greece and to reach their relatives and friends in other European countries.

The asylum system in the crisis-ridden Mediterranean country has entirely collapsed. Refugees cannot find protection neither any income and often even no accommodation. Against this background deportations to Greece according the Dublin II-regulation have been stopped in many European Countries, but the affected persons got stuck in unbearable conditions in Athens or in the harbour-cities of Patras and Igoumenitsa. While EU-citizens can travel without any problems, refugees are trapped: a regular exit is refused, although they have – particularly if they come from war-zones like Afghanistan – good chances to receive a residence permit on humanitarian grounds in many EU-countries.

Amin survived and is now living in an accomodation for minor refugees in Hessen, Germany. But he had to experience the meaningless death of 20 persons by drowning, because firstly entry and afterwards their rescue has been refused: 20 more victims of a merciless european border regime, which obviously is calculating with the death of refugees.

Rome immigration prison set on fire by detainees

source: UK INDYMEDIA, Anti-racists from Rome | 31.03.2010

Rome immigration prison set on fire by detainees

«Total chaos!» At midnight on 30th March, this text message was sent from one of the detainees inside Ponte Galeria, the immigration prison in Rome, Italy. An hour prior to the text, a riot inside the detention centre had started: mattresses were burnt and two huge fires reached the infirmary. Some of the detainees were on the roof, while others broke three or four doors and reached the outer fence. The detention centre was soon full of riot police. Gunshots were heard around 1.20am.

There riot has allegedly caused €200,000 worth of damage; a hydraulic and electric system was put out of order; four people escaped and an unknown number of detainees were moved to other detention centres, while 17 were arrested. They are due in court on 31st March.

Since the 1st March, when the Red Cross handed over the management of the detention centre to another organisation, detainees have been on hunger strike and several riots have taken place over since then. They were rebelling against the use of violence and the daily abuse at the hands of the police with the complicity of the centre’s management.

The detainees are forced to live in unbearable conditions: unsanitary and unhealthy environment, off food, drugs (including Valium) put in the food and drinks. The riots and other forms of protest, such as self-harm, are the desperate response of people who have been imprisoned for up to six months only because they do not have the right documents.

On Wendsday, 31 March, at 8:30 am, there will be a sit-in at piazzale Clodio, in front of the court, in solidarity with the detainees who tried to rebel.

At 19:00, there will be a meeting at the Forte Prenestino squat for organising an immediate collective response to what is happening at Ponte Galeria and beyond.

NELLA TUA CITTÀ C’È UN LAGER
CHIUDIAMO TUTTI I C.I.E.
There is a lager (detention camp) in your city!
Close all the immigration prisons!

‘Mafia’ Provocation Behind ‘Race Riots’ In Southern Italy

Two texts from the Brighton NoBorders blog.

read also:

• Italy: revolt for life and dignity 2
• Italy: revolt for life and dignity

MONDAY, 11 JANUARY 2010

More details have emerged since the ‘riots’ in Rosarno at the end of last week and it now appears that the attack by local youths on Friday was the final insult in a long line of provocations.

The migrants from sub-Saharan Africa have been a common site in Italy for decades. In southern Italy they move en masse from the grape harvest in Sicily, via the orange, tangerine and kiwi harvests in Calabria and the olive picking in Apulia. Local farmers have relied on them since the ‘native’ agricultural workforce evaporated. Instead, the 8000 or so ‘clandestini’ in Calabria pick fruit and vegetables for 12 to 14 hours a day for 20 to 25 euros and many are regularly forced to pay kickback of up to a quarter of their wages to local gangsters in the ‘Ndrangheta, the regional version of the mafia.

Italy: revolt for life and dignity 2

More texts on the situation in Southern Italy.

“We Are Not Animals!” Italy’s Racial Riots and Their Aftermath

MARIA RITA LATTO (January 11, 2010)

Rage and fear. This is what comes out of the images from Rosarno, a small town near the western coast of Calabria, where violent clashes broke out after two African immigrants were wounded by a pellet gun attack by white youths in a car.

“Those guys were firing at us as if it was a fairground,” one of the men told La Repubblica newspaper. “They were laughing, I was screaming, other cars were passing by but nobody stopped them.”

Italy: revolt for life and dignity!

photo published at athens.indymedia

text below from http://nobordersbrighton.blogspot.com/

Racist Attack Provokes Riot In Southern Italian Town

A racist attack on African migrant farm workers in the Southern Italian region of Calabria by a gang of local youths armed with air rifles has provoked a series of disturbances in the town of Rosarno. Last night hundreds of cars were damaged and set on fire as the migrants sought revenge for the attack that left several of them injured.

Earlier today, some migrants erected road blocks on the main roads into the town, whilst shop windows were again smashed as up to 2,000 immigrants gathered to protest outside city hall, chanting “we are not animals” and waving placards saying “Italians here are racist”. They demanded to see the town’s government commissioner, Francesco Bagnato, appointed last year when the town council was disolved to try and combat local influence of the mafia.

He tried to reassure the migrants that the police would protect them and persuaded them to leave peacefully. Nearby locals clashed with police and the situation was further inflamed when a local fired rifle to apparently try and scare the migrants off. Police said there were 15 arrests and 20 people injuried.

Interior Minister Roberto Maroni, in typical fashion, sought to exploit the situation, saying, “In all these years illegal immigration has been tolerated without doing anything effective, an immigration that on the one hand has fed crime and on the other has led to situations of extreme squalor such as that at Rosarno”. However, the governor of the Calabria region, Agazio Loiero, said that whilst the violence was “unacceptable”, the rioters had been “strongly provoked”.

The migrants are exploited both by the local farmers and by organised criminal gangs, and many are forced to live in squalid conditions in empty factories. Bagnato however claims that he has tried to improve living conditions since his appointment, reconnecting mains water to the factories and bringing in chemical toilets for the migrants.

…on the background of these:

• a text by Roberto Saviano, the anti-Mafia journalist and author of “Gomorra”
• and a months old New York Times article on the strenghtening of the anti-immigrant regime in Italy in the past few months  (both brought to attention byhttp://katalipsiesiea.blogspot.com/2010/01/blog-post.html).

Europe’s murderous borders: report by Migreurop

Text below by BRISTOL NO BORDERS

“A report published by Migreurop (a Euro-African network of 40 organisations from 13 countries working on issues of immigration policy, externalisation and their consequences within and beyond the EU’s borders) in October 2009 paints a vivid picture of the effects of the EU’s migration policies by focussing on three regions in which a number of common denominators are identified in spite of the significant difference between them (the Calais region and the north of France, the Greek-Turkish border and the Oujda region in eastern Morocco). These are added to by a case study on events on the Italian island of Lampedusa, where practices have been adopted for the sake of expediency that confirm the suspicion that legal guarantees and human rights conceived as minimum standards for the treatment of all human beings are becoming a luxury that is not meant for migrants who have been criminalised and de-humanised as “illegals”.”\

The themes that run through all the sections from specific areas are those of controls and attempts to stop migrants, their detention in awful conditions that often entails abuses by guards, and a de-humanisation that goes so far as to result in deaths and in the use of legal and illegal dissuasive practices, among which the Dublin II regulation and illegal repatriations are identified as being particularly harmful. Instances of resistance against policies enacted by government by migrants themselves and local populations that express solidarity for them are also examined. A special emphasis is placed on how some French policies are officially justified as seeking to prevent “a draught” that would encourage others to migrate towards Europe, that the authors interpret as people being made to endure dreadful situations not for their own sake, but for the message to reach their home countries and particularly those who might be tempted to follow them in the future.

Surprising parallels are drawn, such as those between the “tranquillos” in northern Morocco and the so-called “jungles” in France, which are both make-shift shelters self-managed by those attempting to escape the attention of the police, immigration authorities, in short, to become invisible while they try to plan the next stage in their journey after hitting a dead end. In Morocco, they face the choice between trying to cross a heavily guarded stretch of the sea in which thousands have died en route to Spain, trying to climb the six-metre-high fencing erected around the Spanish north African enclave cities of Ceuta and Melilla, or to reach them by swimming around the border, again, risking death. In France, they have the Channel blocking their way into the UK, the Dublin II regulation stopping refugees among them from claiming asylum in case they are sent back to the countries they first entered the EU from (most often Greece, where the level of successful applications is well below 1%), resulting in a likelihood of them never being able to obtain asylum regardless of whether they fulfil the requirements for it.

Everywhere, the police are on their tracks, and capture involves the risk of detention, sometimes entailing violence as well as terrible living conditions, and expulsion, except for those who come from countries to where some European states will not expel them (unlike the UK, France does not usually repatriate Afghans), although this is not an issue if they are captured in Morocco or in Greece, where night-time returns to Turkey in perilous conditions across the river Evros are commonplace. The Italian practice of directly returning intercepted boats to Libya without identifying the people on board or their nationalities since May 2009 is a classic example of how the wish for expediency is trampling even the limited guarantees provided by increasingly harsh national immigration laws- expulsion without a judicial authority issuing a formal order; the presence of likely refugees disregarded; returns to presumed transit countries where they are likely to experience further abuses.

There are many excerpts of first-hand accounts from migrants’ experiences, ranging from a complete lack of understanding of the situation in which they are forced, for instance an Afghan youth in Calais who wonders how it is possible that he is not allowed to stay, nor allowed to leave and is thus condemned to roaming aimlessly, feeling as if he were “in a cage”, to harrowing descriptions of spiteful and mocking treatment at the hands of border guards that went so far as to lead people to perish, both on the Moroccan-Spanish border and the Greek-Turkish one.

The lasting impression caused by the report is that thousands of people are facing incredible ordeals as a result of policies, that awful living conditions from poorer countries are entering the EU as a result of exclusion and the creation of categories that are permanently forced to live in a condition of invisibility. On the other hand, to help them “regulate” immigration flows, the EU and its member states are funding a vast expansion of the internal security apparatus in bordering countries and of tough laws that are often implemented on the basis of skin colour.

This often means that visits by authorities from European countries and EU institutions for negotiations with third-country governments in this field result in indiscriminate round-ups in neighbourhoods in which large numbers of migrants live and in the spread of racism, both by security and police forces as well as by members of public, for example in north African countries against sub-Saharan migrants suspected of seeking to emigrate to Europe.The report is available on the Migreurop website:

Les frontières assassines de l’Europe (French, original)

Europe’s murderous borders (English)

Fronteras asesinas de Europa (Spanish)

Rapport-Migreurop-nov2009-en

Human Rights Watch: “2009 a Bad Year for Migrants – Deaths, Labor Exploitation, Violence, and Poor Treatment in Detention”

source: human rights watch website

(New York) – Many governments’ policies toward migrants worldwide expose them to human rights abuses including labor exploitation, inadequate access to health care, and prolonged detention in poor, overcrowded conditions, Human Rights Watch said today in advance of International Migrants Day, on December 18, 2009.  A 25-page roundup of Human Rights Watch reporting on violations of migrants’ rights this year, “Slow Movement: Protection of Migrants’ Rights in 2009,”  includes coverage of China, Cuba, Egypt, France, Greece, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Malaysia, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Thailand, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States.

No Deportations to Baghdad campaigns

source: http://no-racism.net/article/3143

No Deportations to Baghdad

On Thursday, 15. Oct 2009, early morning, a specially chartered plane provided by Air Italy deported 39 people from London to Baghdad. Activists call for a demonstration on Saturday and a campaign against Air Italy.

Message from the campaigning group Stop Deportation

The first deportation to Baghdad deported around forty people early on Thursday the 15th October on a specially chartered plane provided by Air Italy. This marks a shift in government policy which since 2005 has sent people back to Iraqi Kurdistan but not to Iraq. Now they have begun, deportations to Iraq are sure to continue putting the lives of many in danger.

Demonstrate on Saturday to build
resistance to deportations to Iraq!
Saturday 17 October 2009, 2pm
Parliament Square, London

Deporting people to a war zone like Iraq puts the lives of many deportees at risk. As recently as the 11th October, three car bombs exploded in the western Iraqi city of Ramadi, killing at least 19 people. Violence and bloodshed continue throughout the country, which saw 1,891 civilian deaths in the first six months of this year alone. There are also widespread food shortages, lack of access to clean drinking water and other grave humanitarian crises in many areas.

The British government, through its participation in the war on and occupation of Iraq since 2003, is responsible for these crises and the consequent displacement of millions of Iraqis. Instead of helping accommodate refugees fleeing war and violence, it is now sending them back en masse to face their possible death. Charter flight deportations in particular limit detainees legal recourse and are especially violent – see :: stopdeportation.net for more information.

We call upon all groups, organisations and individuals opposed to this brutal action by the UK government to stand with us in calling for all deportations to Iraq to be stopped. Join us to demonstrate against mass deportations to Iraq this Saturday the 17th October, at 2pm, at Parliament Square.

If you would like to add your or your organisation’s name to a :: statement against deportations to Iraq, or for any further information, please emailstopdeportation (at) riseup.net.

Campaign Against Air Italy

Air Italy was involved in the forcible removal by a charter flight leased to UK Border Agency of 39 Iraqi’s who had sought asylum in the UK, to an unknown destination in Iraq on Wednesday 14th October from Stansted Airport in the United Kingdom.

The :: National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns call for protests against the deportation airline. :: Details and model letter here.

print version

EU, Libya, Turkey: the states’ trade in refugee lives continues.

source

EU wants Turkey, Libya to help fight illegal immigration

By Christian Spillmann (AFP)

STOCKHOLM — The European Union will soon undertake tricky political talks with Turkey and Libya as they look for their help in cracking down on people-smuggling rings to stem the flow of illegal immigrants into Europe.

But some of the demands Ankara and Tripoli are making in exchange for their help could prove complicated.

EU Justice Commissioner Jacques Barrot, in Stockholm for a meeting of EU justice and home affairs ministers on Thursday and Friday, told reporters he was preparing visits to the two countries.

“I plan to travel to Libya after the summer break and to Turkey in September or October,” Barrot said, adding that he expected “an official invitation” from Turkey’s interior minister soon.

More than 67,000 people crossed the Mediterranean in 2008 to try to enter Europe illegally, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and some of those have died at sea.

Turkey, an EU membership candidate, is considered the main transit country for illegal immigrants from Asia. They arrive on the Turkish coast, and from there make their way to the Greek islands, the gateway to the European Union.

Immigrants from Africa meanwhile tend to converge on Libya, where they set sail for the European Union via Malta or the Italian island of Lampedusa.

The fight against illegal immigration “can only be fought by resolving two issues: ties with Turkey and Libya,” French Immigration Minister Eric Besson told AFP.

“When it comes to Turkey, their willingness to cooperate with the EU needs to be tested,” he added. “The first comments by Turkey’s interior minister have been encouraging. But now we have to see the concrete details.”

“When it comes to Libya, one can see clearly that they can stop illegal immigration when they want to.”

The 27-member bloc wants Turkey and Libya to crack down on the organised people-smuggling rings and to agree to take back the illegal immigrants who departed from their coasts, Barrot said.

It also wants Libya, which has not signed the Geneva Convention on human rights, to agree to protect persecuted people and make it easier for people to seek asylum there.

Barrot said he hoped to visit Libya together with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Antonio Guterres.

“I know his administration is not very keen (on the trip), but he understands the problems,” he said.

The UN refugee agency has harshly criticised bilateral agreements signed between Italy and Libya to turn back would-be refugees.

The Italian navy intercepted a boat carrying 82 migrants on July 1 near Lampedusa.

The UNHCR has alleged that some of the migrants were injured during transfer to a Libyan vessel, that some of their belongings were never returned to them and that their possible refugee status was never checked.

Barrot refused to comment on the allegations, which Italy has decried as “false.”

He is determined to curb the influx of illegal immigrants, which threatens to destabilise some countries in Europe — such as Greece — and hampers EU efforts to handle legitimate asylum requests.

“If we don’t link migration to development and diplomacy we won’t succeed,” he warned.

Yet a number of obstacles remain before Turkey and Libya agree to cooperate with the EU.

“Turkey is ready to sign readmission agreements” to take back immigrants who left from its territory,” Barrot said.

“But it says it is merely a transit country and wants similar agreements signed with Pakistan and Afghanistan” to enable Ankara to send back the immigrants who came from those countries, he added.

The issues with Libya are even more complex.

“They are demanding impossible things,” he said, explaining that Tripoli has put “enormous” financial demands on the EU in exchange for its help.

“We proposed 20 million euros, but they are asking for 200 to 300 million,” sources in Barrot’s entourage said.

Tripoli says it needs the funds to monitor its border with Niger and Chad