- Pozallo (gro) The refugees from Africa, from the Middle and Middle East who land in southern Italy, mostly in Sicily, want to move on as quickly as possible to the more northern climes of Europe. That is one of the reasons why you meet and see more refugees in Milan and Rome than in Calabria or Sicily, in the extreme south of the country. In addition, in the hotspots of refugee arrivals, in Lampedusa, in Pozallo, in Augusta and Palermo (all in Sicily), well-rehearsed teams and organizers ensure order and immediate onward transport.
- Hundreds of traffickers arrested
- Of the efficiency in dealing with the continuing onslaught of refugees testifies further the fact that the Italian Federal Police. dIe paramilitary organized force of Carabiniere, since the beginning of the year in the ranks of more than 100. 000 refugees has identified and arrested more than 200 traffickers, most recently, on Tuesday, October 25, 21-year-old Egyptian Mahmoud Abd Al Hamid and 45-year-old Sudanese El Sadik Mohamed. They commanded and piloted, according to the carabiniere, a soul seller from which an Irish Navy ship named “Samuel Beckett” had taken 650 people in distress at sea between Libya and Lampedusa.
- Italy “feels abandoned”
- Matteo Renzi, the prime minister of Italy, has these days again expressed regret that his country feels “abandoned by the European Union” on the refugee issue. And indeed, Italy bears a major burden on this issue. While popular opinion toward the so-called refugee issue has calmed down thanks to clogged borders, the influx into Italy continues unabated.
- Racism is “unnatural”
- In Sicily, where racism is seen as “something unnatural,” the Spanish Bourbons ruled until 160 years ago, and before that Habsburgs, Frenchmen of the House of Anjou, Hohenstaufen, Normans, Arabs, Romans, Carthaginians, Greeks and Phoenicians had set the tone on the largest island in the Mediterranean. Sicily, and this can be seen and felt by the people there every day, is a melting pot of cultures and peoples; a melting pot that last year, at the end of 2015, because of its very special Arabic/Byzantine/Norman architecture and culture was placed under the umbrella of UNESCO as a World Heritage Site worthy of high protection. It should not be overlooked that it was from Sicily that the first, extraordinarily fruitful Islamization of the Occident took place. Gaby Imhof-Weber has reviewed this significant era in a very worth seeing documentary.
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in southern Italy.