Post-colonialism and migration in Italy

An article about the recent surge in boat migration from Africa to Italy caught my attention with an interesting comparison.

Italy has declared a state of emergency on the southern island of Lampedusa and appealed to the rest of the EU for help following the arrival of up to 5,000 people fleeing the political upheaval in Tunisia.

Silvio Berlusconi's foreign minister, Franco Frattini, said he had contacted Catherine Ashton, the European Union's high representative for foreign affairs, to propose a blockade of Tunisian ports by the EU's Frontex agency which could "mobilise patrols and refoulement [the forcible return of would-be migrants to their country of departure]".

He said a similar exercise was carried out by Italy when 15,000 Albanians arrived in 1991. "I hope the Tunisian authorities accept the Albanian model," Frattini said in an interview with the Corriere della Sera newspaper.

The Albanian model? Frattini's comparison made a certain amount of sense, in that migration from Albania to Italy only began after the collapse of Communism in Albania let Albanians leave their impoverished for work. Frattini might be imagining that Tunisia without Ben Ali would trigger similar migration. If so, his comparison is off-base: the collapse of Communism in Albania led directly to the collapse of the Albanian economy and border controls, creating the incentive and the means for Albanians to leave their country, while the end of the Ben Ali regime in Tunisia coincided with harder times, yes, but not with an economic collapse comparable to post-Communist Albania's.

After I blogged here about Malta last month, I made a tie-in post at another group blog, History and Futility. Malta's current status as a democratic European nation-state embedded in the European Union is grounded on a particular interpretation of Maltese cultural and geographic realities. Other interpretations are possible.

The small light green circle surrounding the archiepelago reflects Malta’s identity as small and unique, isolated in the Mediterranean on its small land base and with its unique culture; the large purple circle to denote Malta’s location within a sort of Italian sphere of influence, more vestigial than before, thankfully, when Italy lay claim to Malta (and the other territories within the circle) as rightfully Italian regardless of local opinion; red denotes Malta’s links with North Africa, low key and unemphasized but real as evidenced by the Semitic Maltese language and the apparent popularity of post-independence Malta’s flirtations with a radically anti-colonial Libya; black, to show Malta’s location within the European Union, its hoped-for final destination. Different people can agree that Malta is located at 35°53′N 14°30′E and disagree on the relative importance of the different human factors–language, religion, migration, history, trade, politics–which assign meaning to those geographic coordinates.

Much the same sort of thing can be said about Italy, which had its own maps, its own perceptions of its neighbourhood. These perceptions were more aggressive by far than anything of the Maltese, granted.



I copied this map of Italian territorial claims under fascism from the Wikimedia Commons. As described by the creator brunoambrosio, it is a map of "the 1940 project "Greater Italia", inside the orange line and dots, in Europe and North Africa. Self-made (I have based my work on the original Commons Image:Mediterranean Relief.jpg, licensed PD-USGov). The green line and dots show the biggest extension of Italian control in the Mediterranean sea in november 1942 (while the red shows the British controlled areas, like Malta)."

Albania, source of modern immigrants to Italy, was firmly in the Italian sphere; Tunisia, then (under French protectorate) not a source of immigrants but rather as a target for irredentist sentiment and in many ways an Italian settlement colony, was included briefly; Libya, the "Fourth Shore" of Fascist Italy and core of the Fascist Roman Empire, was Italian for thirty years. Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia are not shown here.

James Miller noted that for most of its history Italy was caught by the image of the Mediterranean as a forum for expansive imperialism, as a place where Italy could show off its emergent great power status and underline its modernity.

Students of literature often construct their understanding of a topic primarily from books and readings. But that’s not the case for students in Giuliana Minghelli’s new [Harvard] course on cultural migrations between Africa and Italy, where they have witnessed a performance by one of the assigned authors and have the opportunity to develop their own creative responses.

Minghelli, associate professor of Romance languages and literatures, found her interest in the subject piqued by her study of Italy’s early 20th century modernist writers. Many of them, she discovered, were either born in or had lived in Africa.

“People like Futurism founder Filippo Tommaso Marinetti chose Africa as the stage on which to perform the speed, modernity, action, and violence of his Futurist poetics,” Minghelli noted. “That is quite intriguing. Why Africa?”

On the one hand, she said, Africa represented a blank canvas onto which Italian writers could project their wildest fantasies. At the same time, the continent functioned as a land of exile and escape, initially from the fascist regime that controlled Italy in the decades leading up to World War II.

Later, in the 1960s, writers fled from the homogenization of capitalist consumer culture. For instance, author and film director Pier Paolo Pasolini traveled to Africa in search of an alternative, uncontaminated world.

Indeed, despite a desire on the part of many Italian authors to paint Africa as a primitive and exotic world, the continent is very close to Italy, perhaps uncomfortably so for many at the time. After the unification of Italy in 1861, Italians strove to present themselves as a thoroughly European culture, repressing what Minghelli calls “the Africa within Italy.”

Yet Italy also needed Africa, for economic reasons and because it was felt practicing colonialism would establish a stronger sense of national identity. The Italians were late to the “scramble for Africa,” waiting until 1936 — after the conquest of Eritrea, Somalia, and Ethiopia — to proclaim an official Italian Empire. The desire for conquest was buoyed by archaeological excavations in Africa that unearthed Roman ruins, which Italians used to link their colonizing activities to the glory of the Roman Empire.

“If you’re interested in the question of Italian nation-building and identity formation, Africa is really central,” Minghelli said.

The post-colonial element in Italy's relationship to once-subordinate and migrant-receiving, now independent and migrant-sending, countries on its frontiers is something that doesn't seem to have been investigated that much, notwithstanding the origins of many of these unpopular immigrants in former Italian colonial or near-colonial countries (Tunisia, Eritrea, Somalia, Ethiopia) and the importance of post-Italian Libya as a corridor. It played a role: see how Italian links encouraged a relatively much greater volume of post-colonial immigration to Italy from Eritrea as opposed to Somalia. Where else does it play a role, though? What networks have been established? What attitudes are there in Italy towards migrants from ex-Italian colonies: empathy, dislike?

On Libya as an immigration country

The large numbers of refugees crossing from Libya into Tunisia or Egypt has been prominently featured in international news media. Over at BAG News photographer Alan Chin has a couple of photoessays from the border-region up (1, 2), the below evocative picture being located at the second post.



A very high proportion of these refugees aren't Libyan citizens, but rather, immigrants of greater or lesser permanency, illustrating the extent to which Libya's oil-driven economy made it a society of mass immigration.

The refugee agency says some 55,000 people have arrived in Egypt in the last 10 days, one-third of them Asian workers. Fifty thousand others, including 2,000 Chinese, have entered Tunisia. And it said a group of people from Bangladesh, Thailand and Pakistan were marooned without papers in a no-man’s land between Libya and Egypt.

Meanwhile, UN humanitarian chief Valerie Amos said those who remain in the Libyan capital Tripoli may not get badly needed aid because it’s too dangerous there. Aid groups fear that food stocks will run out as the violence continues between President Moammar Gadhafi and rebels who are fighting to oust him.

“Libya’s economy was strong compared with countries further south,” said Jean-Philippe Chauzy, an IOM spokesman in Geneva. “A guesstimate would be about 1.5 million migrants in Libya before the current trouble. They were working overwhelmingly in the informal sector.”

Migrants from countries like Bangladesh and the Philippines, he added, were usually registered and came with documents and contracts. But now they, too, are scrambling for the borders and begging for help to get back home.

Those who have fallen through the cracks the most, Chauzy said, are West and Sub-Saharan Africans lured by Libya’s relative prosperity.

The millennia-old migrants' routes connected the west African interior with the Libyan coast were supercharged via Gadaffi's pan-Africanist flirtations, as described in a 2004 Washington Post article.

During the 1990s, in the name of African unity, Gaddafi opened the borders to tens of thousands of sub-Saharan Africans to live and work in Libya. For the past four years, resentment over the policy has led to occasional riots and frequent bitter confrontations between the immigrants and Libyans.

In effect, the problems mark the end of an officially ordained dream.

Last month participants at an African Union meeting in Libya's coastal city of Sirte, Gaddafi's home town, rejected his proposal for a continent-wide army. A few days later, the General People's Congress, a consultative assembly that meets annually, ratified laws to restrict immigration and to expatriate Africans and other immigrants who live in Libya but have no steady jobs.

"You have work, you stay. You don't, you go home," said Giuma Abulkher, a government spokesman. "There will be strict controls."

The closed door is part of a shift in Libyan priorities. After decades of presenting himself first as a leader of the Arab world and then the African continent, Gaddafi has turned to the West. He is giving up chemical and nuclear weapons programs and declared that Libya would no longer support rebel movements across the globe. The United States is moving to restore diplomatic and trade relations cut off during decades of hostilities. Libya plans to privatize its state-dominated economy.

Shutting out other Africans will probably prove popular. In a closed, politically fearful society, opposition to Gaddafi's immigration policy is one of the few outward signs of discontent with his government. While Libyans are usually reluctant to openly discuss such issues as democracy, succession and economic policy, the immigration question provides a vent for complaints that quickly spill over into expressions of general unhappiness.

"It's about time. How can we have all these poor people here when we are poor ourselves?" said Osama Tayeb, a tout at a chaotic taxi stand in the old city. "First we help revolutionaries everywhere, then we give Libya to the Africans. Enough of this. Libya for the Libyans."

Mohammed Mabrouk, a waiter, blamed immigrants for a wide variety of societal problems -- crime, prostitution, dirty streets. "Look, they get away with everything. We could not touch our African brothers. They bring drugs, they smuggle people. We don't need this," he said.

[. . .]

About 600,000 sub-Saharan Africans are estimated to live among Libya's population of 5.5 million. They were lured by a relatively stable currency and jobs that many Libyans, in their highly socialist economy, decline to do. They sweep streets, work in restaurants and peddle a dizzying collection of merchandise -- cosmetics, pirated recorded music, clothes and secondhand auto parts. Raggedy men selling single articles of clothing and knit caps stand in line inside an arched stone gateway to the old city.

Their headdresses and wool or cotton robes indicate origins across a wide swath of Africa: Nigeria, Ghana, Chad, Mali, Somalia, Sudan and Congo. Some of the migrants come to make the perilous journey to Europe across the Mediterranean Sea. Last summer, 200 Africans traveling to Italy by fishing boat drowned when their rickety craft capsized. During peak summer season last year, as many as 2,600 Africans arrived each month by boat on the Italian island of Lampedusa, an isolated stop between Libya and Sicily.

Later on, as part of his turn to3wards the West Gadaffi later signed accords with Italy which triggered the regime's very harsh controls over illegal migrants. The marginalization faced by this community was dramatically worsened when Gadaffi, not trusting his regular army, instead recruited thousands of sub-Saharan Africans as mercenaries to use against his subjects. These seem to have been pawns.

"A man at the bus station in Sabha offered me a job and said I would get a free flight to Tripoli," said Mohammed, a boy of about 16 who said he had arrived looking for work in the southern Libyan town only two weeks ago from Chad, where he had earned a living as a shepherd.

Instead of Tripoli, he was flown to an airport near the scruffy seaside town of Al-Bayda and had a gun thrust into his hands on the plane.

[. . .]

In halting Arabic, Mohammed, the young Chadian, tried to explain how he had ended up on the wrong side in somebody else's revolution.

Mohammed drifted into Libya looking for casual work, like many sub-Saharan Africans, perhaps with the hope of eventually finding people smugglers who would take him across the Mediterranean to Europe.

"I wanted a better life, not war and destruction," he said. He insisted that he had been treated well since his surrender, with regular meals, and said he hoped he would be allowed to return home soon.

"I didn't really know what was going on. They told me to do these things and I was really scared when the shooting started."

Al Jazeera and All Africa both carry reports of sub-Saharan African immigrants, whether legal or otherwise, being subject to attack by angry Libyans.

The Egyptians seem less vulnerable, likely becaquse of their perceived similarities to the Libyans, their lack of involvement in the revolution, and perhaps because of the concentration of this Egyptian migration beginning in the 1960s professional categories of employment. These Egyptians are still returning to their homes, however, hitting the economy of their homeland further.

"Losing these remittances will of course make the situation worse here," Rashad Abdu, a professor at the University of Cairo, said. "Libya is an important and close destination for hundreds of thousands of Egyptian workers who could not find jobs in their country."

About 1.5 million Egyptians work and live in Libya, and send an estimated 1.5 billion Egyptian pounds (US$254 million) in remittances back home every year, according to the Egyptian labour ministry. Many sought work in Libya because the local economy could not absorb them.

"The sorry thing is that it will take most of these people a long time to find jobs in their home country," said Saleh Naser, chairman of the Labour Section at the independent Egyptian Chamber of Commerce. The chamber is composed of company owners and businessmen who try to coordinate the government and the business community.

"The only way out now is for the government to try to open new markets in the Gulf for these people," he said. According to the Chamber of Commerce, an estimated 10 percent of Egypt's 26 million working population are unemployed.

Egyptians working abroad remit about US$12 billion annually to their country. The state-run National Planning Institute, however, expects a decrease during the third quarter of the current financial year because of political turbulence in the Middle East.

Protests against the Hosni Mubarak regime in Egypt forced the Central Bank to shut banks for more than three weeks; they only resumed normal operations on 20 February.

The sorry thing is that it will take most of these people a long time to find jobs in their home country

"Egypt has a budget deficit and a government debt load that are teetering on the edge of sustainability," says think-tank Stratfor and the fall-off in remittances will only make matters worse.

Some of those who have returned are the family's sole breadwinner. According to 59-year-old Youssef Fawzi, his son Marwan, used to work in Libya, and household would now struggle without that financial support.

The Egyptians working in the east of Libya, adjoining their homeland, seem to have been able to escape. The Egyptians working in the west, along with other migrants, seem less fortunate.

More than 100,000 people have fled Libya in the past seven days. As the final battle for Libya looms, the crowds of escapees become bigger and more desperate.

Almost half of them have come through this narrow stretch of road leading across the northern Sahara into Tunisia. There are teams of Chinese oil workers in identical uniforms, large packs of Bangladeshis, scatterings of Japanese, and mostly thousands and thousands of Egyptians, who have provided the bulk of Libya’s labour force for years.

“We’re getting out because we’re scared, but also because there won’t be any paycheques for a long time. We know there won’t be work until there’s a new government, which could be months from now,” said Haji Abasi, who took his wife and two small children on the frightening road journey from Libya.

At this point, there is no violence along the three-hour drive from Tripoli to the border. Only at the border crossing is the solid green Gadhafi flag visible, a last stand for the regime, held by some of Col. Gadhafi’s most loyal security staff.

But the border guards – who systematically seize cellphones from refugees, strip them of their memory cards, and sometimes harass and humiliate the escapees – are not the final threat to the exhausted people carrying their possessions in oversized bags.

That came after the Libyan border, when on Sunday the Egyptians were blocked by aggressive crowds of Tunisian protesters who tried – usually successfully – to stop or sharply slow the flow of Egyptians, allowing only families and injured people through.

The protesters include residents of the nearby border town of Ben Gardane, who feel that they are being overrun with tens of thousands of homeless Egyptians, and members of the local revolutionary committee who believe they are helping the Egyptians by drawing attention to their plight and encouraging the Cairo government to send rescue airlifts.

“We don’t have any more space to accept the Egyptians – we are blocking the border until the Egyptian authorities find a solution for their transportation,” said Lutfi Tabeth, a member of the Ben Gardane revolutionary committee.

It became a frightening and dangerous scene on Sunday afternoon as several thousand Egyptians charged the border, pushing through the Tunisian protesters and attempting to charge into the camps, only to be stopped by Tunisian soldiers who raised their rifles and forced them to sit on the street, closing the border again.

At this point, assuming the stabilization of the Libyan situation I feel safe only in predicting the gradual return of the Egyptians and the further marginalization of sub-Saharan Africans in Libya. With these communities' association with a hated leader's brutality, however unearned and unfair, it seems safe to assume that sub-Saharan Africans will not do well at all.

On the Maltese immigrants in North Africa

The country of Malta has had many representations. Most recently, after its accession to the European Union in 2004 and to the Eurozone in 2008 while it became a major transit point and inadvertant destination for migrants, it has been imagined as a destination for migrants, perhaps peculiarly vulnerable owing to its small size and relatively tenuous economic state and national identity. Malta, as represented in the press, might be a beseiged battlement of Fortress Europe, located perilously close to the North African coast.

That's not the only way it's been seen. In fact, this time last century the situation was precisely the reverse. As small islands sometimes overpopulated relative to the productive capacity of their once-agricultural/military-driven economy part of the British global empire, from the mid-19th century on Malta experienced massive emigration, tens after tens of thousands of Maltese emigrants making their way throughout the British Empire and later Commonwealth and beyond. Some settled in Canada, for instance, the nucleus of the Maltese-Canadian community (as described by Shawn Micallef) lying here in Toronto just a couple of subway stops to the west of my home beyond its eventual dispersal. Many Maltese chose not to leave home so far behind and instead immigrated to French North Africa, to the Algeria colonized since 1830 and the Tunisia made a protectorate from 1881. There, Maltese immigrants came to play critical roles in the colonization of North African territories at a time when population pressures in Europe made the organized settlement of the southern rim of the Mediterranean Sea by Europeans seem a sensible idea.

Algeria was for many years the most important country for Maltese migration within the zone of the Mediterranean. Under various aspects it was also the most successful and statistics show that by the middle of the nineteenth century more than half of Malta's emigrants had chosen Algeria as their country of residence. Although the French conquest had began in 1830, some Maltese had found their way to the area around the city of Constantine before the French connection had began. In 1834 a French governor for North Africa had been appointed, and as the French consolidated their foothold on Algerian territory, Europeans followed the French tricolor. Among the Europeans the Maltese were one of the largest groups, being outnumbered only by Spaniards and Sicilians.

Like all newcomers, the Maltese in Algeria did at first encounter hostility from the French. Continental Europeans looked down on other Europeans who came from the islands such as the Sicilians and the Maltese. It is true to admit that most insular Europeans were poor and illiterate. Some did have a criminal record and were only too ready to carry on with their way of life in other parts of the Mediterranean where their names were not publicly known.

French official policy was dictated by sheer necessity. France was a large and prosperous country. Its population was not enormous and many French peasants were quite happy with their lot. If the French needed colonists to make their presence permanent they had to turn to other sources to obtain their manpower. The French Consul in Malta was in favour of encouraging Maltese emigrants to settle in Algeria. He believed that the Maltese showed a distinct liking for France and the French. Although the Maltese under the British, they were not politically active and the French could accept them without any fear.

Another important man who favoured Maltese emigration to North Africa in general and to Algeria in particular was the prominent French churchman, Cardinal Charles Lavigeric who had dreams of converting the Maghreb back to Christianity. Lavigerie saw North Africa in historical terms as he was professor of Church history. He founded a religious order which was . commonly called "The White Fathers" with scope of spreading Christianity among the .Berbers and the Arabs. Cardinal Lavigerie was archbishop of Carthage and Algiers. In 1882 Cardinal Lavigerie visited Malta. He immediately appreciated the Catholic fervour of the islanders. During his stay he talked of the Maltese as providential instruments meant to augment the Christian population of French North Africa. He saw the Maltese as loyal to France and to the Catholic Church and at the same time as being eminently useful in building some form of communication with the Arab masses.

[. . .]

By 1847 the number of Maltese living in Algeria was calculated at 4,610. The Maltese colony in Algeria had been realised as being of some importance by that date, so much so that Maltese church leaders decided to send two priests during Lent to deliver sermons in Maltese.

In a letter written by the Governor General of ,Algeria on June 17, 1903, it was stated that by then there were 15,000 inhabitants who claimed Maltese origin. Most of these were small farmers, fishermen and traders. As in other parts of North Africa, the Maltese ability to speak in three or four languages helped them to get on well with the French, Spaniards, Italians and Arabs.

In 1926 the number of ethnic Maltese living in Algeria and Tunisia was tentatively calculated at about 30,000. The exact number of Maltese in was impossible to arrive at because many Maltese had opted for French nationality. By 1927 the Maltese were considered as excellent settlers who worked very hard and were honest in their dealings with others. This was the judgement given by Monsieur Emile Morinaud, a Deputy for Algiers in Paris. In a speech delivered by Morinaud on November 30, 1927, the French politician declared the Maltese as being "French at heart".

Settlement in Tunisia began later.

When Napoleon Bonaparte captured Malta from the Knights of St. John in 1798 he ordered the Bay of Tunis to free all the Maltese slaves who languished in jail. At least fifty such slaves returned to Malta. For centuries the Maltese who found themselves in Tunis probably did so against their will. With the advent of the Napoleonic Era and the re-structuring of political power in Europe and along the shores of the Mediterranean, the pirates of Tunis lost their trade. The foothold gained by the French in North Africa changed the political framework of the Maghreb and some Europeans thought, somewhat prematurely, that the Mediterranean was to enter into another Roman Epoch. with peace reigning all along its coasts.

The Maltese were among the first to venture in their speronaras into Tunisian waters. They traded with coastal towns and with the island of Jerba. Eventually they established settlements not only in Tunis and on jerba but also in Susa, Monastir, Mehdia and Sfax. By 1842 there were about 3,000 Maltese in the Regency. In less than twenty years their numbers increased to 7,000.

[. . .]

The French had one serious preoccupation in Tunisia. Italian immigrants had settled there in their thousands and Italy had coveted Tunisia for a very long time. The French occupation of Tunisia had gone down very badly with the Italians. The French wanted the Maltese to act as a counter-balance to the Italians. British consular statistics show that by the beginning of the twentieth century there were 15,326 Maltese living in Tunisia.

The Maltese in Tunisia worked on farms, on the railways, in the ports and in small industries. They introduced different types of fruit trees which they had brought with them from Malta. Moreover contact between Malta and Tunisia was constant because the small boats owned by the Maltese, popularly known as speronaras, constantly plied the narrow waters between Tunisia and the Maltese Islands.

Paul Cambon referred to the Maltese living in Tunisia as the "Anglo-Maltese Element". He was grateful that such an element proved to be either loyal to France or at least was politically neutral. In spite of rampant anti-clericalism in France, the French allowed the Maltese complete freedom of their religion. Cardinal Lavigerie was respected. The fiery leader of French anti-clericalism, Leon Gambetta, did not hesitate to state that when French priests spread not only religion but French culture, then they were to be allowed to carry on with their work without any restraint.

After 1900 it became legally possible for foreigners to buy land in Tunisia. After that year there was a number of Maltese landowners in that country. In 1912 trade between Tunisia and Malta had risen to more than two million francs. Cultural ties were kept alive by the frequent visits brass bands from Malta which were often invited to cross the water to help create a festive -mood when the Maltese in Tunisia celebrated the feast of their parish. On April 10, 1926, a Maltese newspaper commented on a visit made by the French President to Tunisia. The newspaper claimed that the President, Emile Loubet, had eulogised the Maltese as "a model colony".

Go, read, and reflect on the interesting ways in which history can more than reverse itself in short periods of time. Malta wasn't the territory experiencing pressure from ill-regulated immigration; Maltese, rather, were settlers making new homes in the conquered territories just beyond the horizon.