Bathers and tourists on the beaches of Pozzallo and its surroundings will have to get used to it. On Wednesday 30th July, a military vessel was found offshore throughout the morning, an unusual presence a few miles from the coast. He disembarked migrants on a tug which then took them to the port. Even more unusual was the scenario on Monday the 28th when the huge profile of a cargo or container ship stood out wrapped in the morning fog a couple of miles from the beach. Again 299 North Africans were transferring to a tug. The pace of arrivals shows no sign of slowing despite the wind whipping the Sicilian coasts throughout the month of July and the structures in charge facing the emergency without retreating. But what is the outcome of these dramatic first seven months of 2014 and more generally of the ten months since the start of the Mare Nostrum mission?
The MILITARY MISSION made up of five deep-sea ships and a coastal transport with a dozen aircraft and helicopters and about 1500 soldiers deployed by the Navy to deal with the immigration emergency has carried out and is carrying out those humanitarian operations that it had set itself, it has transformed in a sort of 118 of the Mediterranean with all the pros and cons that entails. The number of victims and shipwrecks has decreased, but the number of refugees trying to reach Italy with makeshift boats has probably increased. After all, the risks are reduced once you leave the African coast. More disappointing was the specifically military and deterrence aspect that could initially be imagined, given the size and equipment of the naval units assigned to the operation. A 3.300-ton missile ship is not the most suitable (even in terms of cost) to carry out simple rescue tasks. Ships of that type would instead be useful for blocking boats leaving Libyan ports or escorting the return to the North African coast of migrants collected in international waters in good health conditions.
A balance therefore in chiaroscuro well summarized by the deputy prosecutor of Palermo Maurizio Scalia: “the operation, which I strongly support from a humanitarian point of view, has favored the landings. Now they leave with small ships because they know that someone will save them at sea". And it is difficult, as Minister Alfano attempted to do in the Senate, the day after the boat's arrival in Pozzallo with 39 dead, to attempt a connection between Mare Nostrum and the overall drop in crimes recorded in Italy since the start of the military operation. And the figures from the United Nations High Commissioner do not allow us to be optimistic: according to the UNHCR there are more than 800 drowned and non-drowned people who are missing in the Mediterranean in the first few months of 2014. More than the six hundred recorded last year. And in the first half of the year more than 75 migrants landed on the coasts of Southern Europe, 25% more than the 60 in all of 2013!
The record peak of arrivals has put Italy's reception capacity in serious difficulty, highlighting problems and flaws in our organizational structure, once it has been put under stress. The VIMINALE gave carte blanche to the prefectures, widened the purse strings, denounced, repeated and shouted to the wind the faults of Europe which left us alone, but was taken by surprise by the boom in arrivals in recent months which highlighted the difficulties in hosting such a large number of refugees in Sicily and in the South. Hence the urgency of developing a "structured plan" that will involve the whole country and will develop an organizational module capable of preparing 10 places that all regions must make available for emergencies. A plan worth several hundred million euros which has four barracks with 600 seats each distributed between the North, Center and South as the first reception line.
The plan is necessary to deal with a migratory flow that by the end of the year will have far exceeded 100 arrivals, but also to rationalize reception with plans that go beyond the randomness of recent months. Sicily and the South do not have structures available to deal with these numbers and in fact already in recent months 20 thousand migrants, who it was not possible to welcome in the traditional reception centers, have been distributed throughout Italy in an often confused way and without warning. The news of the buses arriving at the Comiso airport in the middle of the night with the airport closed (and returning to the starting point not always close) or the protests of the municipality of Milan forced to find 24 beds in less than 750 hours for refugees "sent ” from Sicily without warning have punctuated the news of the last few weeks.
Another symptomatic flash of the thousand problems that the RECEPTION STRUCTURE encounters with the arrivals of these months emerged in June when hundreds of intact meal packs were found in the rubbish bins of Pozzallo. After the initial indignation and the launch of the usual investigations, it began to be understood that the company in charge of providing the meals had not raised the problem of the beginning of Ramadan nor had the reception centers taken steps to understand how they would change during the month of fasting the eating habits of the guests, mostly Muslims, and to provide precise instructions to the company. The numbers of refugees have put Sicilian structures in difficulty and this has been remedied in all possible ways, finding new residences, asking parishes, Caritas centers, convents for hospitality, in order to find a roof for everyone. But you can't always live in an emergency, it's not healthy, and overcrowding transforms improvised or otherwise improvised structures into a sort of prison. Not to mention problems such as hygiene, services and so on. You can also spread a few hundred mattresses on the floor if the surface allows it but multiplying the number of bathrooms, toilets and showers is more complex. And we risk arriving at the paradox of a center in the Ragusa area which resorts to purging four times a day: impractical and too expensive, to limit ourselves to mentioning the simplest criticisms.
Better coordination between municipalities, provinces, prefectures and more generally a loyal collaboration between the various institutional levels could improve the overall picture, too many municipalities at the moment that refuse to be involved, but the real bottleneck is in an infinitely long time for the bureaucratic process and the examination of requests for asylum and protection. A recent directive from the Interior Ministry moves towards speeding up identification procedures and speeding up the times for evaluating requests. Keeping thousands of asylum seekers stranded for months only ballasts the entire structure, faster permits and tight deadlines are needed. Ultimately bailouts and first reception work fairly well even if with large numbers they go under, but the argument does not apply to second reception and integration. The refugees landed and distributed in the various centers are often left to their own devices even if they are recognized as worthy of protection.
