Around 100 grants protested in the town of San Ferdinando
in south-western Italy on Monday, January 29, after a fatal fire in a
tent city housing hundreds of migrants.
The protesters marched in silence from the remains of the
encampment to the town hall, according to the USB , a union that
campaigns for migrant workers’ rights and which organized the
demonstration.
Some of them held photos of Becky Moses, the 26-year-old
Nigerian woman who died in the fire that broke out in the night
between Friday and Saturday. Two other women were badly hurt and dozens
of others received treatment for less serious injuries, La Repubblica
reported.
According to the newspaper, Moses had only been staying in
the encampment for a few days before her death. She was previously a
resident in Riace, a small town on the other side of Reggio Calabria
province that has rehoused refugees from all over the world as part of a
widely praised resettlement programm.
However, having recently had her application for political
asylum denied, Moses was obliged to leave Riace and had been sleeping
instead in a tent in San Ferdinando.
The encampment, on the outskirts of San Ferdinando in an
area called Rosarno, is home to around 1,000 people living in tents and
shacks. Most of the residents work as labourers on local farms.
The shantytown sprang up after violence broke out between
locals, migrants and police in 2010, leaving more than 50 people injured
and prompting hundreds of foreign workers to flee the centre of town.
Tensions have remained high in Rosarno ever since.
According to the Italian aid group Doctors for Human Rights
(Medu), as many as 3,000 labourers – the majority of them with valid
residence permits for Italy – live in the camp at the height of the
harvest, working for minimal wages and sleeping without electricity or
running water in conditions that the NGO describes as “shamefully
inhumane”. It calls the tent city “one of the biggest ghettoes in
Italy”.
The cause of the fire last weekend is unclear, though
smaller blazes in the past have resulted from residents lighting
bonfires for warmth.
As a result of Monday’s march, USB said, regional
authorities have agreed to allow people living in the camp to register
as local residents.
Anyone whose documents were destroyed in the blaze will
also be given an official certificate of loss to help them obtain
replacements, the union said.
