World Refugee Day
Let us dwell on this humanity on the move: rejected by the ferocity of politics and our indifference in Fortress Europe
“Refugees, are increasingly being reduced to migratory flows, statistics, numbers, nameless and faceless, in order to distance them from the sensibility and encounter with European citizens. Suffice it to think of the oblivion in which we relegate the victims of migration: deaths of indifference that no longer make the headlines, addicted as we are to tragedies at sea, to the logic of numbers and emergency” (source : https://www.agensir.it)
According to UNHCR’s latest Global Trends Report 2024 (https://www.unhcr.org), the total number of people forced to flee-which touches 120 million as of May 2024-is on the rise for the 12th consecutive year.
Photo: www.it.euronews.com
This year’s World Refugee Day – instituted on 4 December 2000 by the United Nations General Assembly to mark the 50th anniversary of the Geneva Convention that defined refugee status in 1951 – was preceded by yet another shipwreck of migrants attempting to cross the Mediterranean Sea to reach our shores and then on their way to other European countries. This is how Avvenire of Tuesday 18 June headlined yet another horror:
“Ten dead bodies and 66 missing,
without rescue
a sea of dead.”
There are also entire families among the dozens of migrants whose tracks were lost after two shipwrecks off the coasts of Calabria and Lampedusa. Yet another massacre at sea further aggravates the death toll. According to IOM and UNHCR, more than 800 people have drowned since the beginning of the year, with the frightening average of five people a day.”
Photo: www.link2007.org
AS IF THAT WERE NOT ENOUGH IN ITALY
WE ARE FACING THE
DECLINE OF WIDESPREAD RECEPTION
Over the years, in fact, tenders for the management of facilities have not favoured the modality of reception in small distributed centres, although recognised as the preferable solution: the prices offered are lower than those for larger centres, in exchange for more expensive services to offer. This has led to a progressive shift in favour of large facilities.
The system as a whole therefore discourages widespread accommodation. A dynamic from which derives negative repercussions in terms of services to the received person, including inclusion in local communities.
The Italian government’s interventions on migration are limited to the emergency approach, to the detriment of migrants’ quality of life and possible long-term integration in the territory.
Edvard Munch, “L’urlo” 1893
#makeadifferencetomigrants
We assume their pain
and gather in prayer
to dialogue with powerlessness
in the face of our 'devastating nothingness'
WE HAVE NO OTHER WAY
Father Davide Maria Turoldo
We have, men, no other
way to save ourselves than to become
consciousness of what we are
and confess it to one another
and shout it to the four winds
before the universe,
with decision, and humility
trusting in the pity
of all creatures,
and together believing that this
our disastrous nothingness
commits God himself
to intervene...
