Thursday 8 March 2012

From one shore to the other: Lives that count

Native Italians and immigrants for peace and rightsi

War has a entered daily life, but we must continue to think of peace, and as women.
Virginia Woolf


We Women in Black dedicate International Women's day to all women who act for democracy, for the liberty-liberation of all women and me. We dedicate it in particular to the women involved in the Arab Spring of 2011. We are convinced that no spring can become summer (either for them or for the whole worlds) without the dreams and desires of girls and women who, like us, are trying to to live in the world with love, justice, and solidarity across all divides and conflicts, with the force of tenderness and of nonviolence.

In the months following the Tunisian Jasmine revolution (14 January 2011) up to the violently repressed demonstrations in Libya and the war (in which Italy took part despite article 11 of our Constitution), there have been hundreds of disappearances and deaths in shipwrecks in our own mediterranean.

Many young people set out for Europe claiming their freedom of movement. Of more than 500 of them, there has been news. Are they dead? Are they in the Centres for Identification and Expulsion (CIE), are they in Italian jails?


We don't know their names, neither do we know their stories. We know the sea that carries them to the places where we live. Each one of them − women, men, girls and boys − had a woman who gave them life and now perhaps has a strip of water that takes the flesh from their bodies and carries away their bones.

The desire of the mothers, the sisters, the wives , the family and friends to know the fate of their vanished loved ones is so deep-rooted that it crosses all borders and barriers to reach us. It brings with it the desire for freedom that brought these men and women to cross the Mediterranean.

Today, on International Women's Day, we want to give voice to the women who, in Africa, in Italy, in Europe, in America, in the whole world, react to sorrow by demanding that no one be allowed to disappear in the sea or in the CIE or in prison or swallowed up by indifference and oblivion.

Just as the Mexican women of Nuestras hijas de regresso a casa and like the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, we are convinced that the vanished daughters and sons "live for ever. Disappeared because of terror and of death, disappeared because of lies and complicity. Alive in the victory of dreams. These dreams that like the light announce the day. ».

Ignored by the Tunisian, Italian and European institutions, the families of the disappeared who left Tunisia are asking that the fingerprints, used to register people and restrict their freedom of movement, now be used to find out where their sons and daughters have gone. Women and men in Tunisia are demonstrating to demand that the Tunisian Foreign Ministry ask the Italian government to check the fingerprints. We , here in Italy − together with the feminist insieme collective of native women Le2511 (http://leventicinqueundici.noblogs.org, venticinquenovembre@gmail.com), and a group of Tunisian women resident in Italy − call on Anna Maria Cancellieri, Italian interior minister, to accede to their request.

We Women in Black protest in silence to end the silence of the sea and denounce the responsibility of our governements (current and past) for the policy of turning back immigrants. Italy's years-long policy of turning back immigrants, which we have denounced for years as inhuman and unjust, has now been condemned by the European Court of Human Rights at Strassburg. The Court has declared that in the Hirsi case (where 200 people were turned by to Libya in 2009) Italy did not respect article 3 of the Convention on Human Rights, on the degrading treatment and torture. The Court established that Italy violated the prohibition on collective expulsion (this is the second time in 60 years that a state has been found guilty of this) and did not respect the right of the victims (24 people - 11 Somalis and 13 Eritreans, traced to Libya and assisted by the Italian Council for Refugees) to have their cases heard before Italian courts.

Today, March 8, we want at least for a day, to confer on those people who we will never meet and who could have become our fellow citizens, the symbolic citizenship of this country that rejected them and forced them to make a possibly fatal voyage.

We will continue to demand that the motor of expulsions to North African be stopped because we want to live in a country that welcomes people. We want to say that there is another Italy that includes us, that wants to build a world free of violence and poverty.