The 4 levels of the 'government strategy of refoulement' of migrants

The announcement by Doctors Without Borders that the government is forcing the Geo Barents to suspend its sea rescue operations should outrage everyone, not just those of us who have worked with the Geo Barents at sea for years. As MSF explains, it is because of the government's attack on sea rescues that a large and efficient ship, equipped with a hospital and fully equipped to save lives, has been forced to stop.

On the other hand, the planned and organised failure to rescue is one of the main strategies of the "architecture of refusal" set up by the Ministry of the Interior, in the deployed war against people on the move that characterises it. It is not a war against the smugglers, as they say, trying to give some legitimacy to the systematic violation of international conventions, which have been trampled and suffocated in recent years to the sound of decrees, circulars, rules of engagement and regulations.

But the meaning of these conventions is clear: at sea, everything must be done to save lives, rescue is not only a duty but an imperative to which everything else must conform. Instead, the government's imperative is a different one: not to let people reach Italian shores. By unspeakable means: funding militias, as in Libya, so that migrants can be imprisoned, captured at sea, disappeared in some mass grave.

Filling another regime, that of Tunisia, with millions of people on the condition that those who arrive there with the intention of reaching Europe are more likely to meet their death: a few days ago the UN report was published on the terrible violence suffered by men, women and children immigrants who are forced to sink at sea by the criminal manoeuvres of the patrol boats of the Garde Nationale provided by the Italian authorities. If they survive the shipwrecks, the migrants are deported to the desert, from ten kilometres outside the town of Tozeur to the Algerian border. They are left to die at sea after being rammed, and only those who are able to swim to shore can tell their story. And then the survivors are tied up and thrown into military pickup trucks, dumped into the desert without water or directions, and only those who reach Algeria can tell the story.

In fact, the failure to rescue is the second level of the government's strategy. The first is to finance destabilised countries on the Mediterranean coast to create a 'Maginot Line' against people moving towards Italy and Europe. An iron curtain, with armed militias disguised as 'coast guards'. Those who manage to pass through the hell of the camps, the enslavement, the deliberate ramming at sea, the deportations, enter the second stage of the "game", the one that has its fulcrum in the deliberate refusal of the "civilised" countries of the northern shore of the Mediterranean to rescue at sea. This omission is organised: the priority given to 'law enforcement' procedures over rescue procedures - the Cutro massacre is one of the most recent examples - the constant back-and-forth between states as to who should intervene in the event of an alert, which leads to fatal delays in intervention and the removal of civil rescue ships from the sea, through spurious administrative blockades and distant port assignments.

The third stage of the refoulement strategy has recently been introduced: deportation to Albania, with detention on an ethnic basis of people who have committed no crime. They call it an 'accelerated border procedure for asylum', but it is exactly the opposite: it is an illegal and inhuman procedure to deny asylum anyway. The fourth level is on the ground.

For those who manage to survive the previous three, the "game" becomes one of "non-reception". The deliberate and systematic dismantling of the institutional reception system, leaving all the burdens and decisions on the matter to the local authorities, amounts to a technique, perhaps the most refined, of rejection. This fourth level also has the function of providing ideological support for the 'invasion theory', which prepares the ground for laws of war against migrants to be applied at sea and through bilateral pacts such as those with Libya, Tunisia and Albania. The reproduction of 'civil war' in the cities is the aim of 'non-accommodation'. In the absence of 'welcoming' interventions and structures, the aim is to create pockets of clandestinity and marginality, capable of fuelling citizens' perceptions of insecurity and 'creating' public opinion in favour of 'final solutions' against the 'enemy'.

One of them is the CPRs, the so-called 'repatriation centres', which are nothing more than places of detention for migrants who have committed no crime. Places where people are destroyed, where psychotropic drugs are widely used and where human rights are abolished. Immigration becomes a weapon of mass distraction for the government. What better way to divert attention from the real problems - poverty wages, precariousness, climate catastrophe, deaths at work, mass emigration of young people - than to create an 'enemy from outside'? Of course, the figures say that we are not facing an invasion, but the scientifically constructed images are stronger than reality.

We are certain that MSF will soon return to the sea, despite the government's shameful attempts to prevent it from saving so many lives. In recent years, hope has grown and organised itself in the Mediterranean. It is no longer just the open-air cemetery that the policy of refoulement has turned it into: it is also a space of concrete solidarity between people, networks and associations that do not resign themselves to the war against people on the move.

We have not yet talked about the traffickers, whose business thrives precisely because of the political choices made by governments. In this story of our time, those who do not want to rescue them at sea, those who want to lock them up in camps and deport them to deserts, have the same regard for the lives of people on the move as those who use them to make money, who exploit their need to seek a better life. For the government and the traffickers, these lives are worth nothing. They are the same, and like-minded people understand each other. We will not stop fighting.

Solidarity with MSF and thanks for all the lives saved at sea. We will see each other again soon, side by side at sea, as always. We are sure of it.

13th December 2024