From the Horn of Africa to the Boot of Europe

From the Horn of Africa to the Boot of Europe:


War refugees are stranded on Rome’s wastelands



ROMA OSTIENSE – As the train slowly entered the station, I spotted laundry at the end of a platform. Are they back? Would he be among them?



I knew the authorities had cleared the station. Though the excited tourists and busy commuters had never minded the lethargic refugees, the police had evicted them. The stakes were high: food chain “Eataly” was to open its flagship store in a terminal. The refugees who were fainting from hunger had to make room for a gourmet store.



I met Haile four years ago, the day I had to get my “codice fiscale”. When I asked him for directions, he was keen to walk me to the tax office. “I know all about paperwork,” he said. Haile, a friendly young Ethiopian with funny dreadlocks, enjoyed asylum status. Italy had become his home country, a railway platform his home.



He advised me to take a ticket for a corporate “codice fiscale”. This way, I would avoid the long queue and the public officer would still help me. Barely half an hour later, we were having coffee. Haile did know about paperwork!

Walking back to the station Haile, wearing a ragged woollen sweater and corduroy trousers, asked me to buy him a meal: “I feel ashamed having to queue at the food bank.”

Although I would meet many immigrants during my further stay in Rome, I would not again get to know a refugee.



I jumped off the train just before the doors closed. Apart from the laundry, the platform was clear. A railwayman told me that the authorities had moved the refugees to a makeshift camp. I knew that Rome counted 6000 homeless refugees. I had noticed homeless immigrants roaming the centre by day and always wondered where they spent the night. What would have become of Haile?



In Via Carlo Tommaso Odelscalschi, a man was sitting on a chair before an entry in the stone wall. He became weary when I enquired about the refugees –the neighbourhood protests against the camp.

I told him I was looking for an old friend. He then informed me that asylum seekers could only spend the night in Rome’s nineteen refugee centres. By day, the centres do not accommodate them. Moreover, the accommodation is only temporary: documented refugees can stay up to thirty days. After that, they are on their own. They squat large buildings in the East of Rome. Best chance I would stand in the biggest of them all, near the Romanina shopping centre.



Riding my bike on the bridge across the orbital road, I could see a massive building complex. It contrasted with the surrounding office buildings: whereas many of its reflecting windows stood open, curtains and newspapers covered the windows that remained closed. Cables hanging from the windows ended in satellite dishes on the lower entry’s rooftop.



On the parking lot, medical units were buzzing. Two men tried to repair the engine of a van. Movers had put up an electronic ladder to the second floor.

All the time, people were entering and leaving the estate. At the gate, everybody greeted "Salam".



Salam Palace takes its name from the Arab word for peace. A thousand Ethiopians and Eritreans, nationalities that quarrel at home, live here in harmony.

Since the city council tried to clear the building and cut off the electricity, the residents are diffident towards strangers. Newcomers need an introduction.

I passed the gate.



Lately, the EU human rights commissioner visited Salam Palace and wrote a report. He points out Italy’s “serious shortcomings” in the integration of refugees. Compared to Northern European countries, Italy hardly provides welfare benefits such as housing, training or employment.

Italy approves thirty percent of all asylum requests, but provides only three thousand beds. The Arab Spring, however, turned Italy into Europe’s main gateway, and Rome in its waiting room. The numbers exploded: from 10,050 requests in 2010 to 34,120 in 2011. The government immediately declared a North Africa Emergency period and provided an extra thousand beds.

Because the homeless and squatters do not have a valid address, they cannot claim the benefits their papers entitle them to. The commissioner mentions “lives below minimal subsistence standards.”



The Salam Palace organisation keeps a register. There were many Haile’s. I did not know Haile’s last name or his birth date but none of them was in his age category. If he is Ethiopian, the responsible suggested, than I might try an older squat, Natnet.



On Via Emilio Longoni, I was pedalling on the narrow bicycle lane. Almost too late, I noticed two young men walking towards me. I pulled my breaks a few inches short of them. We nearly bumped into each other.

“Sorry,” one of them said in English.

I told them not to worry and asked whether they were all right.

They asked me where I am from. The men, apparently African refugees, seemed eager to speak English.

“Belgium,” I said. “Up north.”

“The North,” they sighed. “Norway, the UK, Denmark. That’s where we would like to be. But we can’t. Because of Dublin, you know.”

“Dublin?”

In the following ten minutes, I learnt about the Dublin Regulation. This law obliges European countries to deport refugees to the country where they first applied for asylum. The border police fingerprint upon arrival in Europe. Refugees compare the Dublin fingerprint identification system with a virus: “Dublin is AIDS.”



I turned into Via Collatina. On the court of a service station, Blacks were offering to clean cars for money. A large worn-out building was looming across the street –a fortress, its gate closed and its reflecting windows impenetrable.



Over seven hundred Ethiopian and Eritrean refugees are squatting this building which they baptised “natnet”, freedom. The building, however, is unstable: built on a water slope, it risks to collapse.



Satellite dishes seem to be the only connection to the outside world. Some of the squatters live here since a decade and still do not speak Italian. Families with children cohabit with former child soldiers suffering from severe psychological disorders.



If I would enter the building, the two men had told me, I would discover an interior city: a Pentecostal church, two restaurants and a supermarket. The door numbers act as house numbers.



Will Natnet share the same faith as Pantanella? Early nineties, 2500 squatters turned the abandoned Pantanella pastry mill into Europe’s largest squat. Starting as a modern Tower of Babel, the various ethnicities gradually organised themselves and rearranged the building. It housed a mosque, an Italian language school, restaurants and a food market.

The authorities eventually evicted the squatters. Many of them dispersed over Rome’s periphery.



Up the road, on the terrace of bar Valery, all day refugees kill time drinking beer. Many use Natnet as a base to try their chance in Northern Europe. Some manage to settle abroad. But when their fingerprints are run against the database, the authorities deport them to Italy. Some families end up living in two different countries. It takes an asylum seeker 15 years to acquire Italian citizenship and hence freedom of movement. In order to bypass the Dublin Regulation some refugees burn their fingertips.



Haile might be anywhere. I could try Rome’s other squats: 200 persons occupy an old factory in Via Prenestina, 120 families a former rest home in Casal Boccone,…

I last time saw Haile in San Lorenzo, near the Salvation Army. Most refugees do not remain in large squats, but move to micro sediments or survive on their own on the streets. Near Ponte Mammolo lives a commune of Eritrean and Ethiopian men.



Palmiro Togliatti Avenue shoots over Ponte Mammolo station. Noisy cars and lorries rush over the avenue, below it lies a settlement. In 2003, five Peruvian families settled here. Ethiopian and Eritrean refugees soon joined them and founded the Peace Community.



Under a drizzle, young men were sitting idly on the parking lot facing the settlement. Suddenly, one of them crossed the road. First, he looked left and right as to ensure nobody saw him, and then he sneaked in the camp. I followed him at a distance.



The camp’s entrance is a breach between two rusty corrugated iron sheets, one carrying a No Entry sign.

The Peace Community breaths a peculiar silence. Elementary brick constructions, shacks of corrugated iron, wooden sheds and tents alternate. Shaky garden screens separate the units. Dozens of shopping trolleys cling together. Rats cross the dusty paths. Although I did not pass anybody, I could feel eyes on me.



The Peace Community is hardly organised. It lacks electricity, heating and running water.

The refugees, who started a new life in Rome, do not receive any medical care. Ironically, the camp borders a research centre of the San Gallicano hospital. This hospital initially treated pilgrims; now it provides health care to Italy’s immigrant populations.



When I walked through a stretch that separates the camp from cosy cottages, three hounds of Baskerville broke the silence. No sign of the inhabitants behind the barricaded windows and high steel fencing. Perhaps they fear another Rosarno? After the infamous shootings, many refugees who worked the plains of Rosarno bought a one-way ticket to Rome.

The North Africa Emergency period will end this year and the extra beds will disappear. In the Lazio region, another 2700 refugees will become homeless.



I noticed an iron gate with a nice bell on top of it. The letterboxes next to it carried Spanish names. The gate leads to the section of the original residents. Over time, they have raised brick houses. Children were playing on the stone parking lot. A car arrived. The residents were having visitors, just like an Italian family.



I went to the local supermarket to buy food. A tall Ethiopian security guard was watching the entry. When I greeted him, he looked puzzled for a moment, but then he smiled and greeted me back. “Salam”.



These people have crossed oceans and deserts. They do not want to be pampered in prison-like centres operating a schedule. Among them, there are qualified doctors and engineers. When the Association of Small & Medium Enterprises lately complained that it could not find the right people to fill thirty thousand vacancies, an aid agency remarked that many refugees would easily qualify.



By the time I left the supermarket, the drizzle had turned into a downpour. I went to Ponte Mammolo station to look for shelter. Passing under the avenue, I distinguished blankets and sheets of cardboard.



On the bus platform, a Rumanian man was shouting to a bus driver. The driver had told him to get off the bus. It clearly was a misunderstanding: the driver had finished his shift. As if to prove something, the man waved with his papers. When he finally gave up and walked away, he swirled a beer can towards the bus, leaving a trail of white foam on the pavement. Nobody paid the slightest attention.



Meanwhile, vendors were selling cheap clothes and electronics in front of the station. They gesticulated heavily. Among them were Ethiopians wearing the Brazil outfit. The commuters halted to inspect the wares. Italian women tried to bargain. The vendors flattered them the Italian way: “E’ buona come te!”



I did not find Haile that day. Nor have I run into him again in Ostiense or San Lorenzo.

Haile, clever as he is and having a good command of Italian, must have broken that vicious circle of refugee centres and illegal squats. A volunteer organisation most likely got him a job.

He might even be abroad –some European courts now refuse to send asylum seekers back to Italy.

I am quite sure that, sooner or later, he would cross that bridge between immigrants and natives. In San Lorenzo, he had become the mascot of two alternative female students. Maybe he has already settled and raised a family!

Beauty is Pain

Beauty is Pain:

Transsexuals do not go gentle into that good night

ROME, April 2009 – An ambulance arrives with screaming siren at the San Pietro hospital. The medical staff rush the patient to casualty. Overdosing on cocaine, he is about to exchange the temporal for the eternal. When the patient finally recovers, he rages: “It’s Marrazzo’s fault. It’s Marrazzo’s fault.” Nobody pays attention to the allegations against the president of Lazio –just another ranting transsexual.

Six months later, the Marrazzo scandal explodes. Collateral damage includes the carbonised corpse of a transsexual prostitute and a drug dealer who overdosed after a police officer had given him a lethal mixture of heroin and cocaine. Rome’s mayor announces he is planning a unit for transsexuals in Ponte Galeria, Italy’s largest detention centre.

July 2010, city councillor Pier Paolo Zaccai is standing naked on an apartment terrace in Via Manlio Torquato. Like a madman he shouts that two Brazilian transsexuals are holding him hostage. When the police take Zaccai to hospital, it appears he is high on cocaine. Falsely accused of kidnapping, the Brazilians remark: “That’s how Romans are: gay and malicious”.

***

"Sei operata? Sei dotata? Quanto costa?" Four youngsters in a sports car are hassling all prostitutes on the square in front of the abattoir. Valeria, an elegant mulatta, turns her head away and scans the square for clients. She has to make hundred fifty Euros tonight.

The youngsters look like students; the car is obviously daddy’s. Earlier this night, they tried their luck with tourist girls, now they are on a “puttan tour” –Via Salaria, the abattoir, Viale Guglielmo Marconi, EUR ... They are Valeria’s age. Later on this night, they will score drugs before going back to hotel Mum and Dad.

Valeria had to leave home when she was fifteen.

Her father had gone berserk when he discovered that his son Valerio liked dressing up as a girl, to become Valeria. Whereas her classmates were going through puberty, Valeria was thrown straight into adulthood. No holding hands, no romantic strolls, but impersonal paid sex: thirty reais for a blowjob, fifty for the full menu.

Unlike her peers, Valeria never used drugs. Violence became part of everyday life. She carried a razorblade to cut her forearms in case the police would arrest her –in Brazil it was safer ending up in hospital than in a police station. In Europe, however, life would be better.

Hot air twirls the smell of meat, excrements and waste around the abattoir. Shattered glass, empty perfume sprays and used toilet paper clutter the pavement along the graffiti wall. Valeria tries to balance herself in high heels. Cars are jamming the square. Motorcycles roar through. The students turn around the corner. Almost midnight and it is like rush hour!

Neither clients nor prostitutes care about the camera surveillance. When the previous city council installed CCTV, the Casale Rosso neighbourhood hoped that recording licence plates would deter clients.

Below the windows of the apartment buildings, clients and prostitutes are having sex. Valeria knows that the residents, mainly young families, are trying to sleep. Her gaze slides over the playground and its iron fencing. She would never want to live in a place like this, let alone raise a child.

Yet, Valeria has to make a living. She will have to earn the money by dawn. Since her visa expired, every public space is off-limits by day. Especially in August, when the city is near empty, a tall mulatta does not go unnoticed. “Every morning I pay a private cab to go home,” she says. “Unemployed and retired Italians make fortunes driving us girls.”

Right next to the square a sandwich van radiates like a beacon in the night. A client drops Valeria off. She spots Paula standing at the van. Paula is Argentinean. Valeria and Paula occasionally chat in between tricks. At first, they communicated in a mix of Spanish, Portuguese and Roman dialect they picked up from clients. Still, they are not close. In this square nobody is. Here, everybody is either a client or a competitor.

“Look at them,” Paula kicks off. “Office workers, civil servants, builders: ordinary men longing for adventure. Europeans chasing tropical fantasies.” Turning to the row of cars, she yells “How does it feel, shagging the Third World at home?”

“Well Paula, the client I just had treated me really nice. He said I am very feminine. Maybe one day he’ll invite me for dinner.”

“No, my dear! Stop dreaming. Italians would rather be caught dead than being seen in public with a transsexual.”

Valeria knows. She once got involved with a client. She hoped that he would be her ticket out. But as soon as fresh meat had hit the abattoir, her beloved traded her in for the latest South-American plaything.

It is 2 a.m. A police car patrols the square. Instantly, clients stop examining the girls, accelerate their cars and leave the square hoping the police will not make them pull over. Valeria removes her high heels and runs off barefoot. In fifteen months’ time, the police have detained five hundred eighty transgendered prostitutes on this square.

She hides in the high grass on the hills. The neighbourhood committee periodically asks the municipal services to burn it. Crouched between used condoms and rubbish, Valeria considers working in an apartment. She could rent a room in a side street of Via Condotti. The authorities do not control this apartment: the owner is an ex-carabiniere.

The police car is gone. One by one, the girls resume their places. Despite the risk of being sent to a detention centre, Valeria enjoys working the streets. She likes being in the open.

All day she hides in a “monolocale” that is tucked away in a Pigneto backstreet –Italian women call the police right away when they spot a transsexual in their building. An aged Brazilian transsexual with Italian citizenship owns the studio flat. The previous generation still succeeded in sham marriages. These naturalized transsexuals buy property and set up businesses in Italy and Brazil. They pass customs and do not worry about police controls when driving –they even took their driving licence in Italy.

Meanwhile, the Mario Mieli volunteers are on their weekly tour. The organisation has been helping foreign transsexuals since Rome replaced Paris as the world’s capital of transgender prostitution. While some volunteers distribute condoms, others follow up on girls taking medication –half the girls have hepatitis, more than one in ten has syphilis and two-third of the older ones have HIV. The organisation helped Valeria to take a course. Valeria would like to become a hairdresser. But apart from the hair salon a Brazilian transsexual owns near Porta Maggiore, only one other salon in Rome, the one in Via Urbana, employs a transsexual hairdresser.

Hence, the beat goes on. “Sei operata? Sei dotata? Quanto costa?” Again and again. How much rudeness can a person take? Valeria is saving up for that last operation; she wants to become a woman. “But how then would I make a living?” she sighs. “I would lose all my clients!”

Around 4 a.m. loud and rasp voices fill the square. The girls, strung out on alcohol, drugs and hormones, are giving come-ons to the drivers and the passengers. Cars are speeding. One driver twirls his car in the middle of the square, making the tires squeal.

Albanian gangs encircle the square. At this time of the night, many girls carry in their purse a night’s takings. They leave the square in small groups. Empty spots appear. Valeria wants to leave but she still needs hundred Euros to send a remittance.

Valeria sends money home to help her mother out. Last time she called even her father spoke to her. They had not spoken since she had to leave home. He told her that he was sorry and that she was always welcome. He used the remittances to buy himself a car.

A 4X4 pulls over beside Valeria. The stereo is pumping electronic dance music. The passengers, a middle-aged couple, are visibly under the influence.

“Hey,” the woman shrieks. “Are you trans… gressive?” Her husband bursts out laughing. He clearly enjoys that his wife is doing the talking. At night, these women are more masculine, and these men more feminine than Valeria. By day, of course, they are beyond suspicion. “We’ll pay you a hundred Euros.”

“I don’t mind the two of you snorting cocaine,” Valeria says, “but I won’t. I don’t do drugs.”

“I see,” the woman says, turning a superior smile to Valeria. “Fifty Euros then. Take it or leave it.”

Valeria gets in the car.

Oh dear. They have dropped her on a desolate stretch of Via Emilio Longoni, two blocks east of the abattoir. Veteran transsexuals –women actually, since they are operated– are skulking the scarcely lit pavement. A motorist cruises down the street. Two parked cars have their headlights left on. Valeria distinguishes wooden shacks between the trees and the rubbish. Each time a client comes up, a woman walks him to the shacks.

The women live a hand-to-mouth existence. They also dwell in the shacks. Hardly a month after Gianni Alemanno had become mayor of Rome, and announced an anti-prostitution decree, the Tor Sapienza neighbourhood took to the streets to protest against the prostitutes. Ordinary family men raided the shacks. The prostitutes recognised several clients among them!

Valeria notices the women’s plastic surgery is unravelling. Clients solicit them “cabrio”, unprotected sex. Valeria shivers. These old women are at death’s door!

Valeria rushes up the road to where the lights are. In front of the American Hospital, barely thirty metres from the shacks, Rome’s most stunning transsexuals parade. Their silhouettes turn the pavement into an open-air catwalk.

Amid young colleagues and frenzied clients, Valeria looks back into the darkness, towards the shacks: “Ordinary people confine us to the pavement, night-time, and youth. Not beauty –dresses, hormones or a sex operation– but money will secure me a place in this world.”

Almost dawn. The early train passes the Palmiro Togliatti station. Heavy traffic is picking up on the Via Prenestina. The square in front of the abattoir looks desolate. Valeria is still short of eighty Euros.

An exclusive BMW approaches. It slows to a stop. Valeria sashays to the car. The driver is a distinguished forty-something wearing a suit. Valeria notices his wedding ring.

“Hi honey. Got lost? Next door, they do meat. Here, we trade in flesh.”

“Davvero? You must be Brazilian,” he says.

“No. Colombian, actually.”

“I see. So, you can get the best coke in the world, can’t you?”

“Of course I can.”

Sensing blood, the hunter moves in for the kill: "Let’s walk on the wild side!”

“Do you have eighty Euros?”

"Eighty? Vabbè. Tell me,” he pauses, “are you into kinky sex?"

"Yes my dear,” Valeria says, forcing a smile. “Sono come mi vuoi.*"

(* I am as you want me to be.)