As mentioned in last night’s news feed, Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini presided over the closing of the migrant reception center at Mineo in Sicily, which used to be Europe’s largest. Below are excerpts from the occasion, as posted by Ruptly.
Many thanks to FouseSquawk for the translation, and to Vlad Tepes for the subtitling:
The following article from Breitbart (hat tip JD) reports on the closing of the Mineo center:
‘Promise Kept’: Salvini Makes Personal Appearance as Migrant Centre, Once Europe’s Largest, Closes
MINEO, Italy: AFP — What was once Europe’s biggest migrant reception centre, in Mineo in Sicily, is to officially close on Tuesday in the presence of its biggest critic, far-right Interior Minister Matteo Salvini.
“Promise kept,” Salvini, in government also as deputy prime minister for the past year, said last week when the centre’s final inhabitants were removed, to be sent to another centre in Calabria.
This reception centre, a former housing complex for the US military that resembles an American suburb, is now guarded by Italian troops who block access under a roasting Sicilian sun.
At its peak in 2014, Mineo housed more than 4,100 people.
Its population then steadily dropped. When anti-migrant Salvini and the populist Five Star Movement came to power in June last year, it housed 2,500.
Video transcript:
| 00:43 | “Left in underwear” | |
| 00:53 | “We want our money” “Workers and migrants in the middle of the street. Mineo closed” | |
| 00:56 | “Italians first, but we are…” | |
| 01:12 | ….big immigrant center of Europe, a business of tens of millions of euros. | |
| 01:18 | It had been proved by the prosecutor | |
| 01:21 | to be a base center for the Nigerian mafia in drug dealing | |
| 01:25 | and prostitution, theft, receiving stolen goods, assault, violence, rapes and murders. | |
| 01:31 | [Unintelligible] a short distance from here, so | |
| 01:35 | they went crazy when, from the ministry, I had promised I would close it, | |
| 01:39 | because from a center that received 4,000 people in the past | |
| 01:43 | we have reduced, reduced, reduced, until today it is now zero. | |
| 01:47 | That means tranquility for the region. It means tranquility for the farmers. | |
| 01:51 | It means recovering many of the 150 policemen and -women | |
| 01:55 | who don’t have to be here at night controlling these people. | |
| 01:59 | And therefore… [Unintelligible] obviously | |
| 02:04 | We need to recover this area. There are already some projects to avoid | |
| 02:08 | that had be abandoned… there are some ideas to evaluate | |
| 02:12 | and create value attached to the work for the region, and we are analyzing them… |
Do we know if the migrants were deported back to Africa or just driven to another place in Italy?
I think they moved them to Calabria , I’m not sure will all of them go there..
Thank you. So it doesn’t really solve anything and that’s unfortunate. Unless Salvini manages to chase them back to Africa the problem remains, because other people might return them to Mineo or set them free elsewhere.
The first Italian PM the outside world can truly respect.
Not really, this was not the point. It was the closure of a center for refugee welcome in sicily famous for some “accidents”:
https://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/2017/05/25/cara-di-mineo-il-pm-di-caltagirone-numerosi-casi-di-stupro-molte-donne-hanno-paura-situazione-ingestibile/3614656/
https://www.futurapress.it/2019/01/28/cara-di-mineo-base-della-mafia-nigeriana-stupri-di-gruppo-traffico-di-droga-rituali-bevendo-sangue-16-arresti/
There are many others. The most famous I could remember of was a ivorian coast refugee who raped a 68 year old elder and then murder she and her husband and stole from their house in 2015. He was living in the CARA of Mineo. He was then given life sentence which is the max in italy.
https://www.fanpage.it/attualita/uccide-marito-e-moglie-donna-stuprata-ergastolo-per-livoriano-mamadou-kamara/
It is not easy to make a sense of it, but in the last 30 years the “detention” centers changed name and scope many times accordig to who was the ruling class in the government. So in Mineo there was a CARA (Centro di Accoglienza Richiedenti Asilo). This in fact was not a real detention center, illegals were put into it waiting for asylum request procedure (which can last long time), but because of their human rights they were no behind bars. Illegal immigration in italy in the past 30 years was removed from criminal list ( because the legal system could not process all the cases with mass illegal migration and it was simply wasting money and time of the courts: it was a total system failure which was “solved” by classical political solution just saying it was no more a crime). The people inside were actually free to enter and leave any time. There was no guards at all, no fences. The nigerian mafia became more famous in the island of sicily also thanks to this.
As you can imagine the italian people living next to this center was not at all happy. So this time the promise to close the center was kept. That’s all.
(You cannot send home one who ask for asylum until you have at least made all the (both time and money costly) procedure and give an answear either positive or negative. Tha is why the first rule is not to let any illegas / refugee wannabes to come in first place. Human rights organizations help these people (who are 100% not even able to write their namein italian), to make all the legal procedure.)
Also … note the verbiage used (by AFP ?):
” … far-right Interior Minister Matteo Salvini.”
“” … anti-migrant Salvini and the populist Five Star Movement came to power …”
I assume this is the language of AFP, not Breitbart.
Either way – it’s always good to smear somebody with the “far-right” epithet. Never enough of it.