ANOTHER MASSACRE OFF THE COAST OF LAMPEDUSA - STOP BORDER VIOLENCE!

ANOTHER MASSACRE OFF THE COAST OF LAMPEDUSA - STOP BORDER VIOLENCE!

Tomorrow it is four months since the Cutro "massacre", and only 10 days since the one in Pylos. In such cases, the fact that the lifeless bodies were washed up from the sea on the very beaches of Europe - those ready to fill up in summer with vacationers - or the particularly high number of victims, have shaken Italian and international public opinion, arousing indignation, anger or at least a note of disappointment in a framework of general torpor and indifference.

Yet tonight, off the coast of Lampedusa, there was another, yet umpteenth, shipwreck. We do not even know how many people, exactly: the first testimonies collected by UNHCR report at least 37. A number that fails to account for the gravity of the situation. It does fail to recall the other 4 missing from two days ago, when the civilian fleet's boat Nadir for hours and hours tried unsuccessfully to find them following a shipwreck a few miles off the Tunisian coast. Nor can it provide answers to the families of those who, three days ago, lost their lives after another boat capsized.

Over the past year, the conditions of departure from Tunisia have become increasingly dangerous. The criminalization of "sub-Saharans," which exploded after President Kais Sayed's racist speech on Feb. 21, has precarized the living conditions of thousands of people, leaving them homeless and jobless in an environment of generalized racist hatred. Taking to the sea in iron boats has become the only real solution, a forced choice with no other alternatives.

Maldusa has been present in Lampedusa since September 2022, and there have been countless shipwrecks since then. Most of these have not even been named. Not one newspaper article, not one in-depth study, no visits from emeritus ministers.

What are we waiting for to create safe passages? Every death, every missing person at sea is a measure of the inadequacy of the strategy put in place by the institutions; the slowness of operations and the mode of operation itself insist on considering the presence of boats at sea as an exception while every day, for years now, there are dozens of reports of people in distress. Meanwhile, civilian fleet boats are opposed and criminalized as if they were the "real enemy", forced to go to distant ports or seized in port, while offshore, out of sight, the emptied sea becomes a theater of horror.

The Mediterranean is not a cemetery but a crime scene.

How many more deaths, how many more invisible shipwrecks - and yet so concrete, if you only know someone involved, when you talk to those who have lost friends, comrades, relatives.

We can't wait to see, again, victims on our beaches. We can't wait for numbers so high that we cannot imagine them.

Let's oppose the deadly policies of refoulement and exclusion, let's fight against this European management of borders!

Let's fight for freedom of movement for all!