San Ferdinando shantytown’s eviction

An extemporaneous measure that risks to produce further precariousness

MEDU and A Buon Diritto negatively regard the decision to carry out yet another and precipitous evacuation of San Ferdinando’s shantytown, scheduled for the 6th of March.

Indeed, the urgency to evacuate a settlement with dramatic housing and sanitation conditions is unquestionable. However, evictions are being implemented extemporaneously and without adequate planning to protect the dignity and rights of the people housed. To begin with, despite the Prefecture informed the inhabitants about the evacuation and offered to some of them the possibility to transfer “by buses provided by the Prefecture of Reggio Calabria at the CAS / SIPROIMI, specifically identified by the Ministry of the Interior”, no one was notified of the exact destination. Moreover, no solutions were reported for those not included in the Prefecture’s lists, prepared in the weeks before the sudden order for immediate eviction. All this took place without taking into consideration the individual rights of the migrant workers or commitments of the regional and local institutions and associations made in the direction of a gradual and wide-ranging action aimed at social, housing and work inclusion for migrants, in order to favor the local economy’s development and to revitalize an increasingly depopulated and depressed territory.

MEDU and A Buon Diritto repeatedly denounced the tragic living and working conditions of migrants in Gioia Tauro, which in just over a year took the lives of four people, murdered or burned in the repeated fires of the shantytown, in what MEDU defines a “slow and guilty slaughter”. Moreover, during the past six years of medical and socio-legal intervention with the mobile clinic, MEDU repeatedly asked local and national institutions to engage in urgent actions to ensure decent and safe housing conditions for migrant workers in Piana di Gioia Tauro, providing for this purpose data and concrete proposals. In fact, these years of experience repeatedly demonstrated that temporary solutions that do not take into account the territory’s needs and the individual workers conditions, are completely unsuccessful when not carefully planned and are also unnecessarily expensive over time.

For example, the first tent city set up by the Ministry of the Interior in 2013, following the dismantling of the existing shantytown, was then incorporated into a new shantytown, even larger than the previous one. In this way today’s situation was reached: an informal settlement where about 2,000 people live in dramatic conditions, flanked by a tent city that hosts just under 500. It comes easy to foresee that the umpteenth evacuation intervention carried out without adequate planning in terms of immediate reception and socio-housing inclusion in the medium term will only lead to a vicious cycle that increases the areas of exclusion and degradation and the number of people forced to live in conditions of extreme marginality. This all happens in a context in which the application of the Salvini decree makes the legal and social status of many foreigners more precarious, in particular for humanitarian protection holders.

MEDU and A Buon Diritto demand that before any evacuation, the Prefecture shall provide with timely information about the exact destination of the provision’s beneficiaries and the number of places available. MEDU and A Buon Diritto also strongly reaffirm the need to take immediate action for the working conditions’ state of legality and dignity and to provide migrants with adequate housing solutions.The Medu Mobile Unit will also be present on Wednesday in the area adjacent to the shantytown to offer health care and socio-legal orientation to the people present.
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