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Italy bulldozes migrant shanty town after deadly fires
ROME, March 6, 2019 (BSS/AFP) – Hundreds of migrants were evicted
Wednesday from a make-shift migrant camp in southern Italy which has been the
site of several deadly fires, Interior Minister Matteo Salvini said.
“As promised… we went from words to actions,” said Salvini, head of the
far-right League party, as bulldozers tore through the San Ferdinando shanty
town in Calabria under the watch of 600 policemen.
Four migrants have died in the camp in the past year in either arson
attacks or accidental fires lit to keep the residents warm, according to the
Italian association Doctors for Human Rights (MEDU).
The death in February of Moussa Ba, a 29-year-old from Senegal whose body
was found in a caravan after a fire, prompted the government to announce the
overcrowded and dirty camp would be razed.
San Ferdinando, which sits on the outskirts of the southern city of
Rosarno, was home to over 1,500 people who scrabble to get work largely in
the area’s orange and olive groves.
Most worked illegally for local farmers for pittance pay.
Some of the migrants left after the government said the camp would be
closed. The last 900 or so quit their shacks overnight Tuesday or were moved
on early Wednesday.
Salvini had promised to relocate them to reception centres, but several
migrants told Italian media that they still did not know where they would be
housed. Many feared they would be taken far from the farms where they work.
It is not the first time the camp has been officially dismantled.
MEDU slammed the closure decision “without taking into consideration either
the individual rights of the migrant workers, nor the long-term commitments
made by regional and local institutions and associations to promote social
integration”.
Rosarno is notorious for the climate of tension between seasonal workers —
many from sub-Saharan Africa — security forces and local residents, and has
been the scene of repeated clashes.
Doctors Without Borders in 2010 fiercely condemned attitudes towards the
migrants, saying conditions in the San Fernando camp and others in Italy were
often worse than in refugee camps in Africa.
BSS/AFP/ARS/1712 hrs