An informal refugee camp in Rome which opened at the height of the crisis in 2015 was evacuated on Novermber 13, sending several vulnerable people onto the streets as winter sets in.
Located in an empty car park near one of Rome’s main train stations, the Baobab camp would normally host around 300 people, mostly transiting for a few days or months.
While the eviction had been expected for weeks, around 150 people were still at the camp on Tuesday morning when police vans surrounded and closed the area.
Some residents loaded suitcases and plastic bags with their belongings onto police vans before being driven away to a police station for identification.
While the Rome municipality offered places in reception centres to some of the refugees, not everyone will have a place to go after bulldozers finish clearing their tents.
“We have been negotiating with the municipality for the past week,” said Andrea Costa, one of the activists running the camp. “We thought they’d take a few more days as we were promised 120 places. Up to this morning, the number of people relocated was 65.”
According to the Rome municipality, 75 people were assigned alternative accommodation this past week, meaning at least dozens have nowhere to go.
Said* (not his real name), an Egyptian man in his fifties who has lived in Italy for 20 years, dragged his few belongings on a shopping trolley down the street leading out of the camp. Some of the bags contained goods he sells without a license on the streets of Rome.
He has been homeless for the past 10 years after personal difficulties, and said he was heading to the municipality’s social services to see if they could find a temporary solution.
“There’s no place for all of us, not just from Baobab. You go there and they tell you, come back tomorrow,” he said.
It is the twenty-second time the camp is dismantled since it was opened.
The Italian railway company, which owns the land, had recently started building a fence around the camp as part of a plan to turn the area into a public park.
“It has been weeks that [far-right Interior Minister] Matteo Salvini and others in the governing coalition attack Baobab directly as one of those examples to persecute ‘accomplices’ of the migrants,” Costa told Al Jazeera.
Source: Aljazeera
