This island has been in the news for a week: more than 12,000 migrants have landed there and this weekend, the climate has deteriorated. Some demonstrations broke out, revealing that some of the residents were fed up.
Among the old naval maps, sepia photos and other Carthaginian amphorae, Fabio Giovanetti, founder of a cultural center and archives in Lampedusa, shows a black and white object, old in appearance. “It’s a nautical compass found on a migrant boat, many years agohe explains. Here, we are, literally, in the middle of the sea.” The first coasts, those of Tunisia, are, in fact, 108 kilometers away from this Italian island in the middle of the Mediterranean.
>> Lampedusa: what is happening on this Italian island, faced with an influx of 10,000 migrants in recent days?
Fabio Giovanetti explains that this position has always made the island a welcoming land and that until a few decades ago, the inhabitants themselves collected the migrants on the beach and took care of them, at least for a while. Those days are over, he says, even if there were many gestures of solidarity last week.
Lampedusa, “a place that questions you”
During the weekend, some residents expressed their fed up with incessant arrivals, notably more than 12,000 migrants in just one week. “Now residents see them more as a problem than as human beings, notes Fabio Giovanetti. It’s because there are too many of them: an area of 20 km2 cannot accommodate that many people.”
In addition, as soon as they arrive, migrants are directed to the Red Cross center, which does not promote the contacts that would make it possible to create links between residents and exiles. Fabio says all this with regret. And adds: “Lampedusa is not a normal place. It’s a place that questions you, forces you to take a stand and makes you feel useful.” A few minutes earlier, around thirty people, most of them Syrian, had disembarked at the port.
From a welcoming land to a fed-up land, Bruno Duvic’s report in Lampedusa, faced with an influx of migrants.