The Silos were cleared last Friday to the great satisfaction of the regional and municipal councilors. Since Friday the stones and arches of the dilapidated building have been surrounded by high green plastic grates but there is also barbed wire. Enough degradation, a new reception policy? Welcoming migrants had never been a concern of local administrations and, right from the start, it can be said that it continues to be this way and that the only initiative is to do nothing, to let a desert take care of those who arrive. The associations, churches and volunteers take care of it even if they don’t have sufficient means. The right, be it Municipality or Region, at most clears things out as they did on Friday because they wanted to cover up the disaster and thought that a tidy and clean paint job was enough.
One hundred and sixty-five boys were transferred to Lombardy but little or nothing is known about their fate. In Trieste about ten, still without documents, wait for a signal from the Police Headquarters and others arrive in the meantime and here they are sleeping in the open, many on the grass of Piazza del Mondo. Where are the promised places? Where is anything beyond the golden sheets of Linea d’Ombra and the food brought by Fornelli Resistenza and the shoes that are never enough? The dormitories made available by the associations and the bishop are still saturated because there are migrants but also the spreading poverty, those who are left homeless, who ask for alms where they can do it because if they did it on the street they would get a hefty fine for outrage against decorum. Where is the public intervention?
The eviction of the Silos was a tragic farce. It was clear from the start and already on Saturday evening there was a demonstration organized by ICS with twenty other associations and organizations that deal with migrants and refugees: words, music, sharing. Gianfranco Schiavone’s harsh words on the route and on reception, on the Europe that rejects and tramples and then prepares deserts so that those who arrive find nothing. Then Lorena Fornasir with urgency in her voice: “We must have courage, we must open the doors of our homes, we must go in front of the Prefecture and not ask that migrants do it” and so the demonstration became a procession. In front, the sheet that has been sewn for months in the Piazza del Mondo: red thread to embroider the names of those who got lost, of those who drowned, of those who fell off a cliff, of those who didn’t make it there and who knows where in the Balkans he may have found an anonymous burial. Names brought to Trieste by friends, by traveling companions embroidered with red thread on a sheet and how many others there are that we will never know.
Now the city is starting to be locked down, traffic diverted, police everywhere, because a special week awaits for the center of Trieste: Valditara with the G7 on Education, then the President of the Republic and, on 7 July, Pope Francis. If there are any problems they will remain on the outskirts. For now, still, there is Piazza del Mondo, in front of the station certainly not on the outskirts, where there is nothing but there are people bringing something and migrants arrive late in the evening and ask for something to eat or a couple of shoes to replace the broken ones. Some chemical toilets were finally installed in the square months ago but just yesterday they were taken away. Vandalized, it has been said, there is no point in keeping them there. It wasn’t the migrants who harmed them, no, even if this is what is implied: it was the wickedness of this city, those unpunished fascists who go around scarring, breaking, threatening the migrants. It was the reactionary Trieste that spits hatred, the one that scratches the cars of volunteers to leave a sign of its own cowardice. It was the “who cares” administration and the great indifference that becomes complicit in a murderous policy. Who knows if in the next few days the square in front of the station will also be surrounded by a wall. Let no one see the children, the women, the kids sleeping on the floor.
