dell'11 febbraio 2001

The open door to Fortress Europe

JACK Straw has never met Luigi Zoff. But when the Home Secretary goes to Stockholm tomorrow to discuss the EU’s immigration crisis, he could do worse than suggesting they all hop on a train to Gorizia.

So much for ‘Fortress Europe’. In these parts it amounts to 18 in blocks sticking out of the ground at irregular intervals. Carefully numbered, they track the seemingly arbitrary route laid down by the map-makers who created the post-war border in 1945 when Italy’s alliance with the losing side cost it territory to Yugoslavia.
Luigi stands astride block 58/8 as he tells how this modest smallholding has been in the family since the 19th century. While Jack Straw was last week backing Tony Blair’s immigration initiative with Italian Prime Minister Giuliano Amato, Luigi was observing the reality.

The Goriziani and their Slovenian neighbours in Nova Gorica are issued with mini-passports granting everyday passage through the many little vallicoli - barriered checkpoints - on local roads, often manned only during office hours.
Border security has gone from one extreme to the other. "Before Slovenian independence in 1991, I couldn’t do this," says Luigi, taking three strides forward into Slovenia to uproot a weed from his tomato patch.

Instead, he and his 64-year-old brother, Dario, had to take the tractor on a detour of more than a kilometre to cross the border underneath the low railway bridge. Then all the way back round again. Yugoslavian frontier guards occasionally opened fire from the railway embankment 150 yards away, aiming at the odd individual trying to make it to the Italian side. "It was bad. But now it’s worse. There’s nothing. Nobody does anything."
It is a lament oft-repeated in this town of 38,000 inhabitants 50km north of Trieste. The local population at times feels vulnerable, with police overwhelmed by the sheer weight of numbers. Four thousand illegal immigrants were stopped from January to June last year. In the second half of the year this exploded to 12,000. "But it’s anyone’s guess just how many we don’t catch," says Angelo Obit, a local police inspector. Anecdotal evidence suggests it is probably several times as many again.

"The passeurs don’t stay here in Gorizia, they go on to Udine, and then to other parts of Italy and beyond, so there is no concern here about associated criminality, as there is in say, Milano," says Roberta Missio, a reporter on Gorizia’s daily paper, Il Piccolo. Obit claims the same attitude is reflected at national level: "The Italian state turns a blind eye because the illegal immigrants go north to Germany and the UK."
Preventing the illegal influx is a mammoth task. In places the winding border is represented by flimsy six-foot wire fencing. Gaping holes are numerous. Under nearby bushes lay signs of immigrants desperate to hide their country of origin - discarded clothes, bags and shredded Slovenian customs documents.
A pitiful number of police officers are devoted to handling illegal immigration. At its peak last year they were detaining 150 immigrants per day. Currently, 30 are detained per day.

Gorizia has no detention centre so detainees are put up in former police barracks. But detention does not lead to repatriation. Whether or not their real identities are established, after 30 days detainees lacking the necessary entry papers are issued with a decreto di espulsione. The notice to quit gives them 15 days to leave the country. "They celebrate right in front of us when we give them the document," says Obit. The clandestini then go on their way, free to exploit the Schengen zone’s open borders.
Computer records of fingerprints and photographs of illegals detained by other forces have been rendered useless by a six-month backlog. Even if Italy copied the blanket security of the old Yugoslavia days, it would not be enough, says Obit. An EU problem requires an EU approach. "They need to make sure these people don’t leave their country in the first place."