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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsSicilian Town on Migrants’ Route Cares for the Living and the Dead. (well worth your time!)
POZZALLO, Sicily The 18 coffins were placed in two neat rows beneath the late-afternoon sun as the mayor and other dignitaries took their seats inside the hilltop cemetery. A Catholic vicar-general offered a homily. A Muslim imam unfurled a small rug and knelt in prayer, his singsong voice rising above the stone mausoleums toward the blue of the Mediterranean.
They had come to mourn strangers. Inside the coffins were the bodies of Africans who died in August, collected from the smuggler boats that were carrying them into Europe. Eight of the coffins bore small plaques that stated, simply, Sconosciuto, or Unknown.
The opposite of love is not hatred, Msgr. Angelo Giurdanella said toward the end of his homily, but indifference.
No one could accuse Pozzallo of indifference. This small Sicilian town, like Italy itself, has staggered its way through a skyrocketing migration crisis in the Mediterranean that has seen roughly 120,000 migrants rescued by Italian ships this year, almost triple last years figure, while nearly 2,800 have died in shipwrecks or in transit, a fourfold increase. And more bodies may be coming. Rescuers are searching in the waters near Malta after reports this week that more than 750 people may have died in two shipwrecks in recent days.
Over the past three years, Italian authorities have swung from a hard-line policy to push back migrant vessels to Libya, to a search-and-rescue program to deliver them safely to Italian ports like this one. Migrants still keep coming.
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Much more: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/18/world/europe/sicilian-town-on-migrants-route-cares-for-the-living-and-the-dead.html#
Love in action.
Good on you people of Pozzallo!
msanthrope
(37,549 posts)And yeah...the people there are great.