State deportations:
a tool of dictatorships and capitalism which Italian governments have always loved

On 25th June 1930 in an attempt to deny popular support to Libyan rebels, Graziani and Badoglio decided to set up concentration camps near the coast for the people of the Jebel, Cyrenaica, who had been lending support to the anti-Italian resistance. These camps not only broke the links between the local people and the rebels, but also destroyed any chances of self-subsistence by semi-nomadic communities. Between 100 and 120,000 people, together with all their belongings and their flocks (around a million animals) were force-marched distances of over 200km through the desert and locked up in the six main camps and around ten minor camps. Here, they were forced to live in restricted spaces and conditions were very soon at the limit for survival.

Living conditions in these concentration camps quickly worsened thanks to the lack of food and resources. Humans and animals were forced to live on top of each other with no space.

Once locked up in the camps, the people of the Jebel became an easy source of low-cost manpower for Italian industry, with wages three times lower than for Italians, and were used for public works, especially in road construction.

In August 1956 in Martinelle, Belgium, 139 Italian miners died after they were trapped after an accident at a coal mine.

No-one can forget the Marcinelle tragedy, which was emblematic as far as Italian emigrants were concerned. Given the demand for cheap coal by Italian capitalism for its industries, and therefore for its profit, the Italian government, a bourgeois, Christian Democratic government, decided to stipulate an agreement with Belgium whereby Italy would receive 2 tonnes of coal per year for every worker it sent. Taking advantage of the desperate demand for work in the south it created incentives and organized, with the help of the mafia and labour gang leaders, the deportation (sorry, State-sponsored emigration) of 50,000 miners to Belgium.

The Italian miners, who only sought a better future and were unaware of what awaited them, were forced to work at depths of a thousand metres and to live in isolated colonies, despised by the majority of the Belgian people who saw them as a threat, given the work and living conditions they accepted.

And their job contracts were fully binding - it was not possible for them to hand in their notice. Miners who wanted to stop working and go back home were arrested and sent to prison for 5 years. Many of them were to die of lung cancer. The luckier ones got away with asthma.

2004-2005: The Italian government signs a treaty whereby Libya agrees to defend the borders of Fortress Europe, to become a barrier to migrants and indiscriminately repatriate them, in exchange for arms sales and new business agreements. Italy deports men, women and children to Libya, thus becoming accomplices to the deaths of hundreds of migrants, such as those deported in 2004 who were sent into the desert without any means of survival.

from Alternativa Libertaria April 2005
News-sheet of the Federazione dei Comunisti Anarchici