Selective landings: “A tragic mess of the Meloni government”, a disconcerting, in some ways grotesque approach

ROME – The situation is serious but it is not serious, Flaiano would say. It is serious because it plays on the fate of hundreds of migrants who have survived torture and extreme violence. It is not serious because the new approach of selective landings prepared by the Meloni government has disconcerting and in some ways grotesque characteristics. In a nutshell, the recent decrees of the Italian government prohibit NGO rescue ships from “stopping in Italian territorial waters … beyond the deadline necessary to ensure rescue and assistance operations for people in emergency conditions and precarious conditions of health”.

That “residual load”. NGO ships SOS Humanity And Doctors Without Bordersdocked in these hours in the port of Catania, after having disembarked the people considered fragile by the Italian authorities, should therefore leave in international waters still with shipwrecked on board, those that the Minister of the Interior Piantedosi has defined with a chilling bureaucratic-prefectural term , “the residual load“. The selection of the undeclared and rescued is entrusted to health criteria, that is to say to the evaluation by the doctors of the USMAF (Maritime, Air and Frontier Health Unit of the Ministry of Health), of conditions of sufficient vulnerability, such as to to be able to “deserve” the landing.

The “scientific criterion” to decide who lands and who doesn’t. The strategy was clarified even better by Claudio Pulvirenti, general manager of SicilyUSMAF, Maritime, Air and Border Health Offices, that is peripheral structures of the Ministry of Health that deal with health checks on passengers and goods passing through cross-border entry points. According to the official, the decision of who to land and who not would be entrusted to “a scientific criterion“, Or those who do not have emergency clinical conditions, such as fever, infectious diseases, pregnancy, chronic diseases in the acute phase, would still be able to remain at sea. To the journalists who rightly pointed out that all the castaways are in conditions of extreme stress, the doctor clarified that, except in acute psychiatric cases, stress is a generic risk and that “the psychological problem is a second level problem”: ergo, not emergency and therefore not such as to necessarily require disembarkation.

The violation of numerous rules. Now it has been highlighted by various and authoritative sources, including the president emeritus of the Constitutional Court, Zagrebelsky, that the decrees on selective landings violate numerous norms of international and domestic law. For the part that belongs to me, as a doctor and humanitarian worker, I will limit myself to pointing out the inconsistency from the point of view of health protection and human rights. The supposed scientific nature of the approach of the new Italian government with the aim of humanitarian protection appears to be completely fallacious from many points of view. In the meantime, it is necessary to remember once again that the migrants who arrive by makeshift boats from the coasts of North Africa, and in particular from Libya, have in almost all cases survived months, if not years, of torture and violence. unheard of.

“Libya, the torture factory”. The latest report by Doctors for Human Rights, The Torture Factory, demonstrates this unequivocally on the basis of thousands of direct testimonies collected by the migrants assisted in the last seven years. That Libya is today a sort of immense concentration camp where crimes against humanity against migrants and refugees are committed is not naturally affirmed only by NGOs but above all by the United Nations itself in all the most recent reports. All this obviously the Italian government knows well. The reasoning of the decrees should therefore be reversed since all castaways are vulnerable subjects until proven otherwise. Moreover, contrary to what Pulvirenti affirms, the same decrees do not speak only of emergency cases, but also of people in “precarious health conditions”. Are not those who survived torture and very serious abuses in a precarious condition, those who carry the indelible results on their body and psyche, those who survived a shipwreck and saw other people die in an atrocious way? Are these risk factors generic?

“In short: a bad improvised mess”. It is also known to any doctor or psychologist who deals with these issues, that a serious or very serious post-traumatic stress disorder can manifest itself not only through an emergency situation, or an acute psychiatric decompensation, but also, and often, through a profound withdrawal and a behavioral inhibition difficult to detect in a generic triage implemented in a few hours upon landing. It is therefore evident that the ingenious invention of selective landings, touted by the Italian government as an innovative tool capable of combining firmness and humanitarian protection, is nothing more than an ugly mess, somewhat improvised, which tramples on the fundamental rights of the person, in which the grotesque the final outcome could be that the most severely traumatized people are “scientifically” considered capable of being sent back to the high seas. The only honorable solution that now remains for the Italian government is to have all the castaways disembark immediately and examine, this time seriously, their requests for international protection.

* Alberto Barbieri, general coordinator of Doctors for Human Rights, independent humanitarian organization that aims to bring medical aid to the most vulnerable populations in crisis situations in Italy and abroad