LAST Saturday thousands of refugees and their supporters marched through the streets of the Italian capital, Rome, venting their anger over the police attack last week on a group of refugees forced to camp out in a city square.
Firing water cannons and wielding batons, police broke up the group of around 100 refugees, mainly from Eritrea, who for several days had been camped in the square in protest at an earlier eviction of a community of 800 who had been living in a nearby building for five years.
These refugees, the majority of whom have been granted asylum, have jobs in Rome and whose children are enrolled in local schools, were forced out from the building the Saturday before in a dawn raid by police after the city council claimed they had refused ‘alternative accommodation’.
In fact no such accommodation existed. The sole intention of the authorities was to re-claim the six storey building and end the established collective that had run peacefully for years. That the elderly, disabled and children were thrown onto the streets with nowhere to live meant nothing.
Saturday’s march calling for evictions to be halted and for refugees to be properly housed carried banners proclaiming ‘refugees not terrorists’.
While the attack on refugees in Rome attracted world-wide condemnation, the Italian prime minister, Paolo Gentiloni, met with the French president, Emmanuel Macron and their counterparts from Spain and Germany for talks on how to cut migration from Africa to Europe.
In fact the decisions have already been made. Last month the Italian cabinet decided on a plan to send Italian warships into Libyan territorial waters allegedly to combat people smugglers – in reality they will be used to turn back boats with the agreement of Libyan authorities, who have granted the Italian navy a free hand to stop and turn back boats suspected of carrying refugees.
Returning refugees to hostile Libyan ‘authorities’ would be a death sentence for many of those trying to escape the terrorist gangs that run the country after the EU helped bomb the Islamist terrorists to power.
The EU is being torn apart with Italy warring with its EU partners, who have refused to share the burden of refugees fleeing the destruction of their countries by the same EU that now uses water cannon and batons against them.
The scale of the crisis was laid bare when Austria declared it was ready to send troops to the Brenner Pass, the border with Italy, in order to stop refugees entering their country. So much for the boast that the European Union is the greatest bulwark for peace and unity in the continent.
Workers across Europe can clearly see what the EU has always been, an organisation of bankers and bosses set up with one aim only – to exploit the working class at home and throughout the world for their own profit.
Faced with the deepest economic crisis capitalism has ever faced, the EU enthusiastically joined with US imperialism to help overthrow the legitimate government of Libya and attempted to do the same in Syria.
In the process they recruited thousands of Islamists who were sent in to Libya and Syria as allies of imperialism and so encouraged the destruction of the economies of these countries, forcing millions to flee for their lives and the hope of any kind of future.
Now the crisis that the EU caused has returned to create a huge crisis within the EU itself, pitting nation against nation at a time when they have a working class that is rising up and demanding an end to capitalist austerity.
The workers of Europe are learning that refugees are not ‘terrorists’, the real terrorists are the bosses and bankers who in their crises have declared war on the workers at home and the peoples of the world.
The only way out of this crisis is for the working class of Europe and the UK to come together to overthrow the European Union of bankers and bosses and replace it with the United Socialist States of Europe. A socialist Europe will welcome the free movement of people and end all borders.