Europe’s once biggest migrant centre closes

WHAT was once Europe’s biggest migrant reception centre, in Mineo in Sicily, officially closed on Tuesday in the presence of its biggest critic, farright Interior Minister Matteo Salvini.

“Promise kept,” Salvini, also in government as deputy prime minister for the past year, said last week when the centre’s final inhabitants were removed, to be sent to another centre in Calabria.

This reception centre, a former housing complex for the US military that resembles an American suburb, is now guarded by Italian troops who block access under a roasting Sicilian sun.

At its peak in 2014, Mineo housed more than 4,100 people.

Its population then steadily dropped. When anti-migrant Salvini and the populist Five Star Movement came to power in June last year, it housed 2,500.

Psychologist Massimiliano Terrasi stood amid the arid countryside outside the centre where he worked since 2011, disappointed at what he said could have been.

“Hopes were high when the centre first opened and we grew professionally,” he said.

“Well managed, it could have been an asset for the area and for people’s mutual understanding,” he lamented, voicing anger at the abrupt end to his years of work, final wages still unpaid.

In the beginning, care and hygi e ne c ondit i ons were decent, he said. But things started to deteriorate when the population went over 3,000.

“If you look at how the centre was in the end, it’s a good thing that it closed. But if you think what it could have been, it’s a pity,” he said.

Built ‘on numbers’

Local resident Sergio Mastrilli was more critical, as he drank a beer on a Mineo bar terrace.

“When the centre first opened, I immediately thought it wasn’t a good thing,” he said.

“It wasn’t a reception centre built on integration but on numbers.”

Mastrilli, a 25-year-old law student, is a supporter of Luigi di Maio’s anti-establishment Five Star Movement, which has been in a ruling coalition with Salvini’s Lega for the last 13 months.

“There were more than 4,000 people from 85 different ethnicities, while Mineo has around 5,000 inhabitants,” he said.

He called for a Europe-wide solution to migration, and suggested “many migrants would like to stay in their own countries,” if they could.

The centre’s 400 small yellow and pink houses lie in tidy rows, a reminder of the time when US families from the neighbouring base at Sigonella called it home.

But the US military gave up its lease in 2010, and the arrival of the reception centre and migrants made Sicilians in the area both worried and jealous.

The migrants were notably prepared to work for € 10 or 20 ($11-22) a day during the orange harvest, angering locals who could not work for so little.

‘A big illusion’

B u t t h e c e n t r e a l s o employed 400 people in t he a rea, a nd Mineo’s c u r rent mayor, Giuseppe Mist ret ta, has threatened to resign if the state doesn’t help wit h t he post-migrant transition.

“Mineo’s closure is the inexorable epilogue of a big illusion, in a region starved of jobs,” said Sicily’s conservative regional president Nello Musumeci.

Severa l judicia l probes are cur rent ly under way, i mplicating notably Mineo’s former mayor and the centre’s former director.

Allegations include preferential awarding of contracts, and an exaggeration of migrant numbers to attract state subsidies that accompanied each new arrival.

In January, police broke up a Nigerian organised crime drug dealing group based within the centre and a prostitution ring.