On the eve of the commemorations, institutional and otherwise, of the shipwreck of 3rd October 2013, dozens of boats are arriving in Lampedusa: some recovered by military assets, some rescued by the civilian fleet’s sailboats, others on their own. Within a few hours, over 800 women, men and children crowded the hotspot. In July, August and September, almost 24,000 people landed in Italy.
A wave that does not stop, that will not stop despite the ferocious efforts made by European institutions and the Italian government to strengthen the capacity of militias and regimes to detain or reject in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Algeria.
In the same hours in Rome, the Meloni government continues to produce new decree-laws: yet another “Security Decree n.1660” is being debated in parliament, while the approval of the “Flows Decree” is imminent. The first one generally represents a strong limitation of the right to demonstrate, with new offences and severe punishments that hit forms of struggle practised and shared by thousands of people, such as picketing in front of factories, offices and schools, or road and rail blockades. The second affects people on the move once again, reducing the possibilities of obtaining international protection and instead expanding the legal spaces for the detention and deportation of migrants; more brutality in line with European policies.
This, by now explicit, authoritarian tendency does not spare the civilian fleet: in the first decree there is a rule that strengthens the punishment of Masters of those ships that “disobey or resist national warships”, in particular the patrol boats of the Guardia di Finanza engaged in “law enforcement operations against illegal immigration”; in the second there is a rule that directly targets the activity of airborne civilian reconnaissance.
But the war also continues in the ports. This is demonstrated by the recent examples of attacks, both in the form of the “Piantedosi Decree” and the technical-bureaucratic measures against Geo Barents, Sea-Watch-5 and Mare Jonio. For Mediterranea’s ship, a 10-and-a-half-hour inspection by the “anti-NGO team” of the Italian flag authorities ended with the withdrawal of the Safety Certificate required to sail, if the rescue equipment on deck was not disembarked.
For MSF’s ship, at the same time in Genoa, a 60-day administrative detention was applied, prelude to confiscation, and an instrumental “Port State Control” inspection that would in any case stop the vessel. In its case as for Sea-Watch, Piantedosi’s motivation is only one: not to have obeyed the criminal orders of the so-called Libyan coast guard. But the qualitative leap is clear: for the civil fleet, the authoritarian tendency means the transition from the attempt to “obstruct” to the goal of “stopping.” For ever.
This appears to be the extreme right-wing government’s response to the “Italian chaos”, in tune with the rising “black tide” in Europe. An Italian chaos made up of a long series of failures for the government’s own racist anti-immigrant policy. In fact, the new decrees and the attacks on the civil fleet coincide with a particularly unhappy summer for Meloni and her Interior and Transport ministers: while the landings resume in Lampedusa and Calabria, at the Palermo court for the Open Arms case in August 2019, the prosecutors – after an indictment that put the entire “closed ports” policy under accusation – demand six years in prison for Salvini. While Piantedosi gets bogged down without being able to make the Italy-Albania agreement operational (by now there is no date for the opening of the camps), the Sicilian judges declare illegitimate the detentions of 95 per cent of the people who have been locked up in the new centres of Porto Empedocle and Modica-Pozzallo. Not to mention the new rulings in Rome recognising the rights of people deported to Libya, denouncing the complicity of the Italian state.
So: if the authoritarian trend is now very clear, equally evident is the difficulty in imposing it. Not only in the contested space of migration and borders. But the vast dimensions of the attack on rights and freedoms now open the space for new and broader social alliances. In Italian society, many are realising that a right denied to people on the move is the premise for denying the rights of all: the growing solidarity around the case of Maysoon and Marjan, the Kurdish-Iranian women and activists criminalised as “smugglers”, and more generally the attention paid to the situation of all “boat drivers” is proving this. If no one can feel safe in the face of the government’s attack, many are now willing to mobilise against it.
Picture: Mediterranea Saving Humans
2nd October 2024
Mediterranea Saving Humans
