All the versions of this article: [English] [français] [italiano]

Tutti sull’Isola – Let’s meet up on the island to write the Lampedusa Chart

Throughout the years Lampedusa has been used to feed the fears of invasion, while the reasons and the stories of those thousands of women and men who migrate fleeing wars and injustices had been deliberately ignored.

After last Thursday’s carnage, a wide debate – unthinkable until a few days ago - has been opened, also thanks to the appeal for the opening of a humanitarian corridor promoted by many from the pages of Melting Pot Europe. What is the meaning of the visit of Barroso in Lampedusa? And what should we think about his bow in front of the coffins?
We firmly believe it is everyone’s duty to act in this space, to maintain it open and to try to turn it into concrete actions. However, to do that, we must start a path and abandon the idea that someone else can do it in our place.

There is also a second perspective, extremely delicate, that we need to clarify. The space of discussion that has been opened and the ideas of reviewing the norms - that are objects of an universal discussion involving the European and Italian heads of the states, Barroso and the International press – must be approached very carefully. At the moment, the discussion revolves around the empowerment of Frontex’ patrols, the rewriting of the bilateral agreements, the delegation of the asylum applications at Third Countries, some regulatory adjustment. All flavoured by the rhetorical discourses of the fight against human smuggling, the respect of human rights, the European solidarity.

The Lampedusa’s drama has actually questioned the legitimacy of European policies on immigration. As a consequence, European and national institutions have to face the necessity of rewriting the norms, or some of them, refining their mechanisms, announcing their annulment, mitigating their gleanings, restoring a brand new image. To do this, they need to abandon the old image in the form, in order to be able to reaffirm in the substance the structure of the Fortress Europe. There is the concrete risk that those institutional politics that affirm to be ready to change everything, don’t have any effect whatsoever in the reality, thus drowning the hopes of millions of women and men in the cloudy waters of broad alliances and European selfishness.

It’s up to everyone to get involved in this game, to direction all the discourses about change on a different trajectory.

There are no shortcuts. There is, instead, the possibility of restarting together with the aim of turning the incredible availability to get involved that we recorded after the tragedy in Lampedusa, into a path of thousands of people rewriting the norms through a new legal, political, cultural vision, in a really shared and European perspective.

Starting from Lampedusa. We need to meet up all together on the island as soon as possible, with those who ask for a change, who want to play this game until the end, to give birth to a great meeting, a moment of open discussion, involving the organizations, collectives, movements, associations and individuals. A moment to develop proposals but also to build up an European campaign for a different Europe, without detentions, deportations, denied citizenships or violated rights.
To make the place that has been forced in these years to suffer the consequences of the European political choices, the engine of change.
Let’s meet up in Lampedusa to write together the story of Euro – Mediterranean Sea: the Lampedusa Chart.

Melting Pot Europa, Project

Translated by Rosa Monicelli

[ 14 October 2013 ]