One year after the Cutro shipwreck: managing borders or repairing injustice?

It seems unbelievable, but it is true: to the indignation and grief following what was called ‘the Cutro massacre’, at an institutional political level Italy and Europe persevere with their strategies of rejection and border defence. On 20 December 2023, the European Parliament reached an agreement, considered ‘historic’, on the management of migrants and asylum seekers. In fact, this is a further ‘drift in migration policies’ (Source: avvenire.it). EU money will keep even more migrants away from our borders.

FORBIDDEN TO FORGET!
On 26 February 2023, a boat from Turkey
with around 200 people on board broke in two
a few metres from the shore at Steccato di Cutro.

Photo: www.it.euronews.com

THE ITALIAN AUTHORITIES HAD BEEN ALERTED.
 NO RESCUE ACTIVATED:

94 confirmed dead including 35 minors,
80 survivors and it is not known how many are missing.

A year later, the story of Cutro is that of the many broken promises of a government that has even had the effrontery to tie its name to the decrees that have tightened the net of reception, denying rights and a future even to those who have lost everything on that beach.

No refugee status, no family reunification, even no DNA for the last pitiful act of giving a name to those bodies buried with a number on the coffin.

Image:www.rainews.it

A glimmer of hope and recovery in humanity comes from the recent final sentence handed down by the Court of Cassation, which upheld the conviction of the captain of an Italian tugboat that had rescued 101 migrants and then handed them over to a Libyan patrol boat: Libya is an ‘unsafe port’ and facilitating the return of the migrants to the Tripoli authorities is a crime.

EVEN ON THE BALKAN ROUTE
THE FATE OF MIGRANTS IS NO BETTER

Half-naked in the cold, migrants rejected at the Serbian border
return to Macedonia: NGO Legis’s complaint

Unclothed men walk in single file in near-zero temperatures, forced to return on foot from Serbia to North Macedonia. The video, recorded in early February by a resident of Lojane, near the Serbian border, shows the plight of the migrants, with around 50 people reportedly suffering the same fate.

URGE TO CULTIVATE HOPE FOR THE HOPELESS
#makeadifferencewithmigrants

THE SHIPWRECK OF OUR HUMANITY REMAINS ‘ UNFORGIVABLE
IN THE EYES OF GOD AND FUTURE GENERATIONS