YET ANOTHER EVICTION WITHOUT ALTERNATIVE SOLUTIONS IN PIAZZALE SPADOLINI

Rome, 15 July 2021 – On the morning of the 14th of July, the informal settlement in Piazzale Spadolini, located in the back of the Tiburtina station in Rome, was subject to yet another eviction operation in the presence of various Italian and Roman institutional actors: the Municipality of Rome, the Prefecture, the Police Headquarters, the City Hall, Grandi Stazioni Rail and Rete Ferroviaria.

More than a hundred people have found a makeshift shelter in the Piazzale for years. Most of them are forced migrants in transit, mainly young men between the ages of 20 and 30, from various Sub-Saharan African countries – Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, Sudan, but also Mali, Ivory Coast and Gambia – who have experienced traumatic detention and torture in Libya and arrived in Italy a few weeks ago with the intention of continuing their journey to northern European countries. There are often many unaccompanied minors among them. There are also many migrants, asylum seekers and refugees who have been in Italy for several years and who are not hosted in reception the centres of the Municipality of Rome.

During the evening, as every week, the MEDU mobile clinic team reached the square guarded by the police. The MEDU team met some migrants who were deprived of their few personal belongings and who were forced to move of a few metres in search of new makeshift shelters.

Mayor Raggi – who is going to face the new elections soon- has publicised the operation as a way of upgrading and restoring decorum to the station area, which has been in a state of extreme decay for years. Immediately after the operation, large flowers boxes took the place of people, without them being offered any alternative to the street. On the other hand, the absence of a vision of the phenomenon of migrants’ transit and of the social exclusion of the most vulnerable people living in our city, as well as of measures to deal with them effectively and systematically, has been a constant in recent years, characterised by ineffective evictions more than by social policies.  In fact, the number of places in Rome’s reception system continues to  decrease because, instead of opening new facilities, existing ones are closed, as it happened in the case of the Via Assisi reception centre – part of the social emergency circuit – a few weeks ago.

MEDU reiterates that eviction operations are in no way a solution to the phenomenon of social marginality in our city. They only have the effect of moving people around by a few metres, leaving the problems of individuals and of the territory untouched.

MEDU therefore goes back to asking the competent institutions for an organic view, based on a competent and far-sighted approach that allows to face the phenomenon respecting first of all the dignity and rights of the most vulnerable people. Reception, social and health support, constant presence of the institutions in places of social marginality, planning of long-term interventions instead of hypocritical and ineffective eviction actions, are some of the proposals that MEDU has been submitting to the institutions for years, not only to protect dignity and basic human rights, but also in order to effectively address the complex and deep-rooted phenomenon of exclusion that characterize many areas of our city.