As the sun came up, the engine ran out of fuel and the raft started to drift in large circles. It was hot but Joy was afraid to take off her jacket. She was sure they would overturn and sink to the bottom of the sea. The day was long but as darkness came again, they saw a large boat with a spotlight on the horizon. One of the men held up a lighter to try to get its attention. The other men sitting next to her yelled and waved their arms, which caused the dinghy to bend and take on water. Finally, the spotlight from the larger vessel caught a glimpse of the dinghy and homed in on them.
Joy can’t recall all the details from the actual rescue, but she remembers that a smaller boat came out and gave them all life jackets and then took them off one by one and ferried them in small groups to the larger vessel, which was operated by the Italian Coast Guard. Joy had seen very few white men in her life and she says she found the Italians strange-looking. After everyone was off the dinghy, the Coast Guard officers set it on fire and let it drift, sending up a big plume of dark smoke.
Once they were on the Coast Guard ship, they were checked for burns and signs of torture. Several of the men were treated for injuries from their time in the Libyan detention centers. The pregnant women were taken to a separate area of the ship. One of the nurses told a story about how a baby was born on the same ship after the mother had gone into labor during the rescue. Some of the women whispered about how they were pregnant from rape along the route through the desert or in Libya.
Several of the women who had been vomiting were given intravenous drips to rehydrate them. They were offered apples and water and a choice between sweet biscuits or salty crackers. They all slept on the deck of the ship wrapped in matching blankets. The ship sailed for two days and finally reached the Sicilian port of Augusta in the city of Catania, near the Mount Etna volcano and the CARA Mineo camp.
When they got off the boat, an Italian military policeman in a thick bulletproof vest stood guard with a gun as another man patted them down. The officers took knives from some of the men and when people had documents in their pocket, they were pulled from the line and sent to a woman with a clipboard.
They were taken to a large tent lined with army cots and told to sit or lie down. An officer accompanied by another Italian policeman with a gun went around the tent and asked their names and where they were from. A woman handed out shoes and flip-flops or white counterfeit Adidas sneakers that had been confiscated from illegal African sellers in Rome and Milan, who also started their journeys in ports like Augusta after crossing the sea. Another woman handed out bruised yellow apples from a large metal tub. An officer used a black marker pen to write a number on their left hands. Joy was number 323. No one took fingerprints or pictures of them, but sometimes migrants do have to have their pictures taken, holding up their numbered hands by their faces. That usually happens when the migrants are rescued by NGOs like Doctors Without Borders or Save the Children. When the Italian Coast Guard does the rescue, there are officers onboard the ships with guns who often carry out the initial fingerprinting and documentation of those rescued at sea. When the charities do the rescuing, there are generally nurses with cookies and hot drinks.
Once they were patted down and numbered, Joy says they were divided up into groups and directed towards large buses that were parked outside the tent. Joy’s bus was headed to CARA Mineo.
Just like her maman in Benin City had told her, a charity run by the Catholic Church gave Italian phone cards to all those who had been rescued, which they were told they could use to call home. Joy didn’t have a phone number for her maman to call and let her know she had made it safely to Italy. The number on her ankle had faded away when her foot was in the fuel at the bottom of the rubber dinghy, but she still had her jacket with the phone number sewn inside.
She turned on her phone and, after inserting the Italian SIM card, dialed the number. The line was busy. She kept trying during the short bus ride to CARA Mineo. The woman who finally answered told her to apply for political asylum using a fake name and birth date, and never to give the phone number she had just called to anyone.
Joy applied for asylum the morning after she arrived using her own birthdate and the name of her younger sister. She figured that maybe, if the asylum request went through, her sister might be able to come over, too. She would teach her how to braid.
Once migrants apply for asylum, which is a general application that could result in anything from full legal residency and permission to travel around Europe to a much more common ninety-day permit to stay, they are free to come and go from the center at designated times as they wait for word about their application, which can take many months. After three days, a man inside CARA Mineo, whom Joy did not recognize, found her and told her she was to wait at the roundabout down the road from the Mineo camp every morning and eventually someone would come and pick her up. Joy asked how she would know who was picking her up. “You will know,” the man told her. “Just get into the car when it stops.”
Joy was put in a villa with ten other Nigerian women around her age. Many of them were also coming to Italy for jobs as braiders. Some were coming to be prostitutes, even though they said that they really didn’t want to. They all had contact numbers to call. Joy was afraid to get too friendly in case one of them worked for a competing hair salon.
Migrants like Joy who have applied for asylum are given a few euros of pocket money, paid for by the Italian state, which gives each center a sum per asylum seeker. The reimbursement is meant to cover the expenses of running the facility, though many facilities spend far less, cutting corners on food and other amenities, and pocket the residual profits. Some asylum seekers save up the money for train fares or to pay smugglers for the next leg of their journeys. Joy used hers to buy a new braiding comb at the makeshift Suk bazaar inside the camp, since she had had to leave hers at the safe house in Libya, and she knew she would need one for her new job.
When I asked Joy what she thought would happen when the person she was waiting for picked her up, she said she was sure she would be taken to a beauty salon owned by her maman’s sister, where she’d be given a job as a hair braider like she’d had in Benin City. She said she might have to start by cleaning floors like she did then, but that eventually she was sure she could work her way up because she was very precise with her work.
I asked her if she knew that a lot of girls like her ended up as sex workers. She said she had heard about the Nigerian women who end up as prostitutes when they came to Italy, and she said that she would “never do that” no matter how desperate she got. I left it at that, but later I would regret not trying to warn her in a more concrete way. At the time, however, she was just one of so many young women I saw sliding into the abyss.
Eventually, she had to go back inside the compound or she risked not getting back in time for her evening meal. Once again, her ride had not come. I wished her good luck and gave her my phone number, which she saved in her phone before walking through the sliding metal gate back into the center.
The CARA Mineo reception center, down the hill from the village of Mineo in central Sicily, is a hellish ghetto where the vast majority of African migrants who arrive by sea start their lengthy journey to either asylum or the criminal world. It is often so overcrowded that people have to sleep on the floor or outside in tents during the summer months.
The center is known locally as Cara Mineo, which is grimly ironic, given that CARA, which stands for Centri di Accoglienza per Richiedenti Asilo, or welcome center for asylum seekers, is also an Italian word (cara), meaning “beloved” or “dear” in English. The center fits neither description. Instead, it is overrun by cockroaches and rats that feed off the garbage that is left festering in piles. Mangy, flea-infested dogs duck in and out of holes in the razor-wire fence that runs along a pocked road leading to Mount Etna, Sicily’s live volcano, with its steady stream of smoke clearly visible in the distance.
It is a punishing purgatory for migrants hoping to become refugees. It is als
o a hotbed for illicit activity, effectively sponsored and paid for by the Italian state. Organized thugs working with the Sicilian mafia known as the Cosa Nostra, the ‘Ndrangheta criminal network based in Calabria, and the Camorra based in Naples easily find recruits to work as drug mules and petty criminals among the bored and idle men who have given up hope for the life they dreamed of before they crossed the sea.
Islamic State sympathizers are among the desperate, too, hoping to recruit fighters and haters of the West. In March 2017, Catania’s chief prosecutor Carmelo Zuccaro, who has campaigned against the legality of NGO charity ships rescuing migrants at sea and bringing them to Italian shores, gave Il Giornale, a right-wing newspaper owned by Italy’s flamboyant former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s brother, an interview. In it, he revealed that the state had started investigations into prisons and refugee camps where extremists were recruiting migrants awaiting word on their asylum procedures. “We have received very specific reports of recruitment activities and radicalization,” he told the paper. “There are radicalized individuals who attract foreigners in order to incite them to fundamentalism.”
The fear of radicalization is quickly overshadowing the fact that the center has also become a haven for its own internal traffickers, who, posing as asylum seekers, facilitate the transfer of Nigerian women to their madams who will act as their pimps.
The center’s population is transient. Those from Syria, Eritrea and Somalia, who are often given asylum semi-automatically, rarely spend more than a night, if that, at the camp. Families and unaccompanied minors are moved out quickly, too, often housed in centers sponsored by the Catholic Church on the Italian mainland. Nigerians make up the bulk of the residents at the center, just as they comprise the largest demographic group of all irregular migrants arriving in Italy, followed by those from other sub-Saharan African nations, especially Guinea and Ghana. Around half of the Nigerians in the center are Muslim and a little less than half are Christian, reflecting the demographic makeup of their home country.9
The rest of the CARA Mineo residents are Bangladeshi, Afghani and Pakistani single men who were working in Libya when the country fell into disarray, and who often languish for months, or even years, waiting for their asylum requests to be heard. Once they have applied for asylum, they are free to leave the center during scheduled rotations. They must sign in and out. If they don’t come back to the center, generally after a five-day grace period, their asylum requests are pulled and they are quickly forgotten. There is no effort to find them and bring them back or deport them to their country of origin.
When asylum requests are rejected, as they often are, the applicant used to have the right to appeal the decision twice, which, if nothing else, bought them more time to make an alternative plan to stay and move north into Europe. In 2017, the Italian government changed the rule and applicants can only appeal a rejection once, after which they are given a slip of paper that says they have five days to leave the country, though they are given no means to do so. Torn up shreds of those papers are a common sight along the road ditches to and from the center.
The complex that houses CARA Mineo was built in 2005 by the Pizzarotti Company of Parma, which is still the primary contractor for American defense logistics in Italy. It was designed as luxury off-base family housing for American military officers stationed at the Sigonella Naval Air Station base about forty kilometers away. The Americans who lived there called it the “Village of Oranges,” named after the Sicilian blood orange and citrus groves that line the provincial highway that winds its way through the flat plains near Catania.
The American-style boulevards and tree-lined streets of the compound were meant to replicate a sterile American suburb to make the military families feel more at home. And it was just that, complete with all the trappings of suburbia. In the center of the complex was a mini city, with a recreational center, supermarket, American-style steakhouse and a local coffee and pastry shop. The complex had an office suite and an internet point. There was a baseball diamond and American football field, too, along with a non-denominational house of worship that was used for weekly services by Baptists, Catholics, Protestants and Lutherans and doubled as a cinema, where American movies were shown on a big screen in the evenings.
More than four hundred two-level ochre, yellow and single and duplex villas, most with three bedrooms and three bathrooms, were built to accommodate the standard family of five comfortably. Large sloped terracotta awnings gave way to manicured lawns with massive American-style barbecues. The whole setup looked ridiculously out of place in southern Italy.
The off-base housing was intended for around two thousand inhabitants, but it was never very popular, and most American military families chose to live in the similar Marinai housing complex, which was much closer to the Sigonella base.10 In 2011, the US Navy gave up its $8.5 million annual lease and returned the expansive property to the Pizzarotti Company.11
The same year, Silvio Berlusconi’s government decided to lease the complex as an asylum “hot spot” to process a growing number of Arab Spring asylum seekers who were coming to Italy in droves. At that time, the complex was completely locked down and the mostly Tunisian and Moroccan migrants were held until they were repatriated to their countries. Now the people inside are called “guests” and are free to come and go as long as they have applied for asylum.
Ghosts of the center’s former life remain, but everything seems askew, as if a movie is being filmed against the wrong backdrop. The compound’s football field and baseball diamond have been repurposed for soccer, the old goal posts and gravel infield awkwardly out of place. The playground equipment scattered throughout the sprawling compound is rusty and in disrepair, now primarily used by young men in their twenties who sit in the swings and lie on the slides to pass the long hours. The compound’s bar is now the medical center, the restaurant a canteen where migrants pick up rations of rice and bananas. The recreation room is a makeshift school for illiterate adults and young migrant children, and the office suite has been turned into a housing dorm for nearly four thousand people.
The entire compound is lined with tall razor-wire fences that used to keep intruders out, but have now been turned to keep migrants in. The inhabitants often hang their laundry to dry alongside disparaging signs against the Italian government, condemning the bad food and the time it takes to process asylum requests. The center is guarded by armed military police who check the asylum seekers in and out and keep out anyone who isn’t registered. The incentive to return each night runs beyond the food and shelter. They come back for the promise of documents that will allow free movement through Europe’s Schengen territories and give them monthly stipends to rebuild their lives. Still, dozens of people disappear each month, quickly replaced by new arrivals fresh from Sicily’s ports.
During harvest seasons, many of the men leave CARA Mineo during the first furlough rotation in the early morning and gather along a triangle of bare dirt where State Highway 417 meets the provincial road. They wait for local farmers who come with open-backed pick-up trucks looking for “i neri,” the blacks, choosing the biggest and strongest for temporary labor harvesting tomatoes and citrus fruits. It is a scene that could be straight out of a slave trade movie. The farmers call them ragazzo or “boy,” asking them to turn around or show them how straight their backs are. It is a degrading display made worse only by the fact that they are paid slave wages, a mere fraction of what Italians would be paid for the same work. Their wages are part of the illegal black-market economy that makes up around twenty percent of Italy’s overall GDP.12
Those who don’t want to work or leave the compound simply do nothing all day long until they are eventually lured into the underworld. The conditions are deplorable. Most of the villas house fifteen to twenty people, who sleep in bunk beds or on mattresses arranged on the floors throughout the houses, even in the rooms that were originally intended as the living-area units. The villas are falling apart and the migrants,
many of whom are unfamiliar with European plumbing and electricity, are left to do what they can to take care of the maintenance with scant tools. Toilets are almost always blocked and the stench of sewage permeates the grounds, attracting rodents and insects. There is no cleaning service on the premises outside of the administrative and kitchen areas.
Some of the villas are burnt out. Others are missing windows and doors that have been replaced by sheets of plastic or faded blankets. The Pizzarotti Company removed all the air-conditioning units, washing machines, barbecues and most of the valuable amenities like ceiling fans and bathtubs when the Americans left, leaving raw wires and holes in the walls and ceilings. The migrants and refugees have to wash their clothes by hand and hang them to dry.
Most of the residents live divided up according to their ethnic or religious background, which fosters tension and infighting. There are many different communities, but no real sense of community. The camp’s rules are strict and troublemakers are sometimes shipped off to local jails and are rarely heard from again, although, for some reason, those working as on-site traffickers never seem to get caught unless they break other rules.
In December 2016, four Nigerian asylum seekers led by a twenty-five-year-old man named Godswift Chukuma were arrested in their run-down villa in CARA Mineo, accused of drugging and raping a female resident in what was a noted deviation from the normal types of criminal activity in the center.13 The other men, Solomon Obuh, twenty-one, Michael Okova, twenty-five, and Fedricic Johnson, twenty-three, had threatened her with death, beating her with iron rods and promising to kill her if she went to the police, which she did anyway.
Francesco Verzera, a bespectacled prosecutor in the region of Caltagirone, which has jurisdiction over criminal cases inside CARA Mineo, used the incident to plead with the Italian government authorities to close down the lawless camp, stating that overcrowding and lack of supervision is creating a dangerous criminal environment. “This sort of advocated violence that goes unchecked will soon become the norm if you continue to operate a community-based asylum center with nearly four thousand people like you do now,” he warned. “The crimes continue to get more violent and the growing disregard for life is a clear sign of a deteriorating situation.”
Roadmap to Hell Page 3