From Eritrea and Syria to Bolzano: The trapped migrants who can't get out of Italy
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Version 0 of 1. Five Eritrean youths race down the platform. They’ve avoided the 15 or so Italian police and Carabinieri officers who are there to stop them climbing aboard. But inside the final express carriage, a huge Austrian policeman looks down at them, his arms folded. They don’t even bother trying. Instead, the 2.31pm German Eurocity express to Munich glides away, as small groups of migrants up and down platform number three at Bolzano station watch glassy-eyed. After weeks or months of harrowing travel across war zones, the air-conditioned final stretch to Munich is a journey too far. One of the Eritreans, Sweet, a 25-year-old student, shows me the ticket that cost him €68. He hopes to get a refund. But without documents, this is unlikely, says Luca, one of the volunteers in charge of local charity Volontarius. Sweet says he is both an economic and a political refugee. He wants to reach his family in Hamburg. “Eritrea is very poor and life there is terrible. I was in the army and it was horrible,” he says. Migrants protest along the sea front in the city of Ventimiglia, at the border between Italy and France. The issue of migration is expected to top the agenda at the June 25-26 meeting of EU leaders in Brussels (EPA) Btou, a 22-year-old who fled Syria with her sister and her two babies, shows me a picture of the conditions they endured in the Mediterranean coming from Turkey, “in a tiny boat with very big waves”. They didn’t bother trying to board the 2.31pm for Munich, because they were thrown off the train at the final Italian stop, Brennero, and brought back to Bolzano by bus. She hoped her brother in Sweden would send her more money. She was waiting in the makeshift Red Cross treatment centre – the first in an Italian railway station – set up to deal with hundreds of migrants trapped in Bolzano, which is now dealing with scabies, according to the nurse managing it, Enrica Giannelli. As the last major town on the Italian rail route to Germany, the wealthy Alpine city of Bolzano has come face to face with otherworldly desperation. And for the desperate people trapped here, it is a sort of purgatory. The news that Germany is reinstating normal Schengen open-border rules has seen hundreds attempt to catch the Eurocity for Munich. But they’ve been cruelly deceived. Even if German controls are being relaxed, those in Austria are not. “We know what’s happening,” says local journalist Riccardo Valleti, who covers the migrant problem for the regional AltoAdige. “Germany has pushed Austria to up the number of police controls on board. It’s using it as a buffer zone. Even when Schengen restarts today or tomorrow, these poor people won’t make it as far as Innsbruck.” Another Volontarius worker, Melitta, said people were sleeping by rail tracks, rather than in migrant centres, for fear of not being allowed back in the station by authorities. “Some of them have already spent €200 on tickets that they haven’t used,” she said. Some of the migrants are children as young as 14, travelling alone. The smart ones used to blend in and slip through Italy’s borders unnoticed by pretending to read a copy of the nation’s favourite paper, the pink sports daily La Gazzetta dello Sport. But that isn’t enough now, and those without approved documents are send back to Bolzano. Mario Deriu of the Italian police union Siulp, says his members have been effectively “transformed into anti-refugee officers to help Austria and Germany… to be used like nightclub bouncers”. The build-up of migrants in Italian railways stations has prompted Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi to threaten the rest of Europe with what he calls “plan B” if EU fails to “accept the path of solidarity” – following the apparent rejection of plans to redistribute 24,000 migrants from Italy, and 16,000 from Greece. Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi wants EU states to share the burden of migrant influx (EPA) Renzi’s threat has been taken by many observers to mean the distribution of temporary travel permits to asylums seekers registered in Italy, which would allow them to travel around the EU. “We don’t know for sure what he will do. But the size of the problem is now so grave and the political pressure on him so great he will have to act, and this is the most likely option,” says the leading political pundit Alfonso Giordano at Rome’s LUISS University. Mr Renzi will press British Prime Minister David Cameron on Wednesday during his visit to Milan’s Expo trade fair. This threat appears to be, in large part, a response to events on Italy’s border with France, near the town of Ventimiglia, where French police have blocked hundreds of migrants from the Horn of Africa. The upshot is that hundreds of migrants, wrapped in foil sheets, have been sleeping on rocks by the sea. |