A camp formed outside the railway station was evicted a few days ago and since then about 200 people have taken shelter in a nearby church. In the past days, the police have been conducting racist raids throughout the city to hunt down migrants and deport them to Italian hotspots, severe beatings and other violence are being reported by migrants who have been taken to police stations, No Borders was evicted from their space and more supporter activists have received an official ban from returning to the area. Yesterday, about 50 migrants were taken away in buses to be deported from Genoa.
About No Borders Ventimiglia:
The
No Border Camp of Ventimiglia started on the 11th of June 2015, when a
group of migrants moved on the rocks in order to resist the police
eviction and identification and to continue to struggle for their
freedom.
We believe in freedom of movement: everybody should
be able to move to wherever they want, whenever they want and for
whatever reason they want. Whether crossing the Mediterranean, from
Lampedusa to Calais or in Greece, people are risking their lives in
search of safety; all across Fortress Europe, thousands have been killed
by the border. But despite the theoretical existence of a Schengen Area
without internal borders, in reality freedom of movement is not so
simple in Europe. The number of internal border controls is continually
increasing and at the border of France and Italy, many migrants who
recently succeeded to make it across the Mediterranean then found
themself stuck as they tried to continue onwards.
From
that day solidarity networks from different territories have been
working to build a permanent laboratory of resistance to the repressive
politics we see in action at the borders. On their way from Lampedusa to
Calais, passing through Ventimiglia, migrant people do not have freedom
in their everyday life and are not free to move around Europe in search
of a life beyond merely surviving.
The No Border Camp has
hosted different collectives and individuals coming from different
backgrounds, but who all have in common the desire to oppose the
discriminatory logic of power and to fight for their freedom of
movement, not only for migrants but for all those people that are
suffering from the restrictions of freedom.
Recent Situation: Repression, Raids and New Evictions
The
camp was evicted last September and since then the No Borders group
decided to rent a place in Ventimiglia in order to make it into a point
of reference for activists and for migrants; something like the
info-point in the Calais jungle. They call it "freespot" in symbolic
opposition to the system of hotspots, situated in the south of Italy and
in Greece islands. Given the fact that the local (banal and
conservative) newspaper started to cover the issue of migration in
Ventimiglia again, as it does every spring, the No Borders started to
experience some pressure from the neighbourhood and from the police at
the "freespot".
One day the police arrived with the
Boss of the Carabinieri and a big van of firepeople to prevent people
from cooking inside for the migrants at the station (this is because the
major in Ventimiglia made it against the law to distribute food at the
station, which is the place in which migrants were pratically living
without any kind of support). Once inside, a police man with a camera
started to waste the camera's storage filming some carrots on the table.
The story ended with pressure from the owner of the freespot: he didn't
renew the contract of the place after the 15th of may. In one week we
had to find a new place, move from the previous and face the arrival of
the Interior Minister in Ventimiglia.
About a month
ago the Interior Minister arrived in Ventimiglia and said that by the
15th of May the Red Cross center had to be closed and all the migrants
in Ventimiglia would be forced to give their finger prints and be
deported to hotspots. And this more or less happened.
The
center has been closed. Not that it makes much of a difference - The
Red Cross center was accessible only for the people who left their
fingerprints in Italy, but in Ventimiglia nobody wishes to do this.
That's why all the migrants stayed around the train station and the Red
Cross center was already useless by itself.
What's
more, we have seen the use of more and more force on migrants: they have
been taken to the station, brought to police stations and beaten there -
seriously BEATEN. We saw the signs on their body. One guy went to the
hospital because he drank the ink used for taking fingerprints. A
policeman squeezed the testicles of another person. 50 migrants have
been deported to a hotspot in Trapani from the airport of Genova and
with the airplane of PosteItaliane.
Dramatic, but
this was just a show. Not all the migrants have been deported because
the system of internal deportation is not sustainable (see the XXmiglia
blog for more exhaustive info on this).
Starting a
few weeks ago, a small camp started again under a bridge near the
station and there have been demonstrations in the center of XXmiglia and
more migrants are coming since it's impossible to truly stop a
movement.
However, the police ordered everyone to leave the
camp by last Sunday, May 29, and it has now been destroyed. On Monday,
the city became militarized with raids hunting down migrants taking
place at the station and other points throughout the city, with those
caught being sent away to centers throughout Italy. Some migrants were
able to stay in a nearby church. In the past days, a new police operation has been in progress at Ventimiglia: sweeps in the
station and rejections. A lot of police and roadblocks. Yesterday, June 6, 50 migrants were again taken to the Genoa airport for deportation on a
Bulgarian air charter flight.
The limits of
these days are obvious. The Catholic Church and the Red Cross are
continuing to shift the public discourse to that of needs, avoiding the
central question, that of the border and its closure and seeking not to
denounce violence and deportations. For the police the day was all too
quiet, with two hundred persons protected by the church, while they
raked the streets to take migrant in small groups and those waiting /
and arriving at the station.
But possibilities
remain. People sought refuge in the church to escape deportation and
have been in a permanent assembly for the past days. The government's
strategy is a failure, there is no doubt about this, and people continue
to arrive in Ventimiglia and to burn the border every day.
Crowdfunding to support the struggle: https://www.youcaring.com/no-borders-ventimiglia-578788
For More Info and New Updates (in Italian) See: https://noborders20miglia.noblogs.org/
Some information on the raids in French: https://mars-infos.org/operation-de-chasse-aux-migrant-e-1221