Along the banks of the Rhine, stood a shantytown where the undesirables live, as usual, on the fringes of the society, clandestine immigrants who provide the workforce that bosses and little bosses need in order to multiply their profits.
On the night of 10th April, as the river had fearfully swelled with the risk to sweep away the fragile little houses made by cardboard and corrugated iron, the shanty-dwellers called the fire brigade. The firemen arrived along with the cops, who dismantled the houses and took nine Romanian immigrants without papers to the concentration camp in Via Corelli (Bologna) so that they could eventually been deported. The morning after, the duty judges wasted no time in ratifying the ‘arrests’ of the day before, apart from the one of a boy whom they released owing to some legal flaw. In the meantime, an uprising broke out inside the detention camp: the prisoners went on hunger strike and, after they held a meeting, drew up an open letter to the citizens of Bologna and Europe in which they exposed the reasons for their struggle, following the example set by the immigrants imprisoned in the Via Corelli detention camp in Milan. The jailers’response arrived soon: cops and staff of Misericordia (the religious association which runs the camp), armed with truncheons, raided the camp, just to remind everybody what can happen to those who dare to protest. Despite the actions carried out in the town and outside the camp to support the protest and denounce the situation inside the camp, the prisoners’ sensation that they were isolated must have prevailed and the protest was over in a couple of day.
On Saturday 14th May, an information point and an exhibition in the centre of the town reminded the inhabitants of Bologna what detention camps are like and why the horrors that happen inside such places cannot be ignored. Moreover, struggles inside and outside the other detention camps in Italy were mentioned, including those concerning Regina Pacis in Lecce, where a few comrades had been arrested two days before owing to their struggle against the concentration camps for immigrants. Demonstrators distributed leaflets, spoke with a megaphone and played music for a couple of hours. Afterwards they marched noisily up to Piazza Maggiore, showing the banner ‘Close the detention camps, the terrorists are those who run them’.
Finally, on 24th May the press reported the news that a young Moroccan girl who was about to be deported had been taken to the hospital with a broken vertebra and bruises all over her body, two weeks before the day scheduled for the deportation. Police claimed she had hurt herself pretending she was having an epileptic fit. On the contrary, the girl claimed she had been beaten by the cops; but a few hours before the officer who was supposed to listen to her denunciation turned up, she disappeared. The press and the cops claim she ran away, we are afraid someone made her disappear.