Outrage over conditions: migrant camp on Lampedusa removed

The overcrowded and littered migrant camp on Italy’s Mediterranean island of Lampedusa is being cleared and to be cleaned up. The terms of the welcome center have faced sharp criticism – including from the United Nations.

Italian authorities begin to evacuate the Lampedusa refugee camp. In the morning, a naval ship brought 600 migrants from the small Mediterranean island between Tunisia and southern Italy to Porto Empedocal in Sicily. Then the ship overturned and took away 600 people.

Rome’s interior ministry had responded with the same direction to the latest reports and developments on Lampedusa. A ship belonging to the Financial Police was also requested for transportation.

Crowd

At the end of last week, a good 1,800 people were counted in the refugee hotspot – although the camp actually has room for only about 350 people. Since many new refugees from North Africa are expected to arrive in Lampedusa in the new week, the camp should be evacuated and cleared as soon as possible.

According to the Ansa news agency, by Tuesday, all people should be distributed to other camps in Italy, announced the prefect of Agrigento in Sicily, whose province belongs to the island of Lampedusa.

“Shame of Lampedusa”

There was a ruckus in the reports regarding the condition of the reception center. Giucci Nicolini, the former mayor of Lampedusa, posted pictures and a video of the camp on Facebook. You can see people lying on old foam mattresses, some of them outside, in dustbins and corridors filled with mountains of garbage. People also include pregnant women and children. Nicolini wrote, “The pictures may be from Libya. But no, it is Italy.”

Flavio Di Giacomo of the Mediterranean Office of the United Nations Migration Organization (IOM) tweeted about the “shame on Lampedusa”. On Sunday, he said the problem was not the number of people visiting, but a poor distribution system. The interior ministry in Rome this year registered more than 30,000 people boating on Italian shores – including the Lampedusa – by the weekend.