Deutsche Welle (English edition)
Italy: Palermo puts migrant children center stage
Veteran mayor Leoluca Orlando has transformed the Sicilian capital from a Mafia stronghold into a beacon of migrants' rights, and opera has been key. But Palermo's inclusive vision may be about to die.
When the Rainbow Choir reunited for its first rehearsals after the pandemic last summer, the sense of excitement was palpable. "Louder," bellowed the ensemble's maestro, snapping his fingers as he paced around the room. The young singers needed little encouragement — grinning in unison, they soared through another verse of an Italian movie soundtrack.
Run by the Teatro Massimo, Palermo's majestic opera house, the Rainbow Choir unites children from the city's many migrant communities, from Romanian to Philippine to Bangladeshi. The ensemble's appearances in concerts and international opera productions can provide lifechanging experiences for its often disadvantaged members. And, after a long, grueling lockdown, the young singers were keen to get back to work.
"When I sing, I feel like I have been reborn," said Carmela, an 11-year-old Ghanaian member (photo above). "I want to do opera, I hope to become a professional [...] I also want to go to the conservatory."
The choir was launched in 2014 by the Teatro Massimo and the Consulta delle Culture, an elected body representing migrants' interests. Initially intended to draw migrant parents into the theater, the ensemble ultimately became a lifeline for many of its young members.
The initiative is a testament to the pioneering vision of Leoluca Orlando, Palermo's veteran mayor. Since freeing the city from the grip of the Mafia in the 1980s and 1990s, Orlando has sought to transform the Sicilian capital into a beacon of migrants' rights. However, with Italian right-wing leader Matteo Salvini's popularity growing locally, and Orlando preparing to step down before local elections in spring 2022, the long-term survival of the mayor's project hangs by a thread.
Migrants find a home
Few Italian cities appear as welcoming to migrants as Palermo. With residents from 127 countries and an immigrant population that has almost tripled in nearly two decades, to 24,000, Palermo is Italy's most ethnically diverse city. The walls of its historic center are plastered with multilingual street signs in Italian, Hebrew and Arabic. An architectural patchwork of Moorish domes, sweeping Norman arches and dazzling Byzantine mosaics testifies to centuries of sociocultural and ethnic mixing.
Yet Italy's bureaucracy turns many undocumented migrants
— they numbered roughly 600,000 in 2020, according to government estimates — into second-class citizens. Those without work or residence permits are often forced into illegal employment and barred from access to public health care and social services, said Ibrahima Kobena, president of the Consulta delle Culture, in an interview. Moreover, Italy's birthright laws do not bestow citizenship on children who do not have an Italian parent. Despite being born in Italy, Carmela, who lives with Sicilian foster parents, will not be entitled to Italian citizenship until she is 18.
The choir has helped redress the balance. "Italians feel like the boss. If your skin is a different color, they treat you badly," said Angela Assare, a 13-year-old member who is also from Ghana. "In the choir, we are all equals. It helps us understand that we are not animals."
Whole families have been lifted by the choir's work. One parent, Rudy Chateau, relocated from Mauritius to Palermo as an undocumented migrant in the early 2000s, picking up irregular work at a parking lot, and supporting his family on €500 ($587) a week. Rudy and his wife, Stephanie, would skip meals to feed their son, Niguel. Today, they have work permits and steady jobs. "When the conductor chose Niguel [to sing in the choir] we were so proud," said a beaming Stefania. "We entered the theater for the first time, and we were like 'Wow.'"
The choir is one of a rich array of local policies and initiatives benefiting migrants. Orlando has described Italy's residence permit as a "new form of slavery," offered newcomers to Palermo "honorary citizenship" and, in 2018, locally overruled the then-Interior Minister Salvini's order to close Italy's ports to migrant boats. Launched by Orlando's administration in 2013, the Consulta delle Culture has united Christian and Muslim leaders in mosques, organized multicultural parades through the city and helped draft Palermo's pro-migrant manifesto.
Populist politics threatens mayor
But a battle for the heart and soul of Palermo is brewing ahead of next year's elections. A string of defections of conservative politicians to Salvini's League hint that the party is on the way to becoming the dominant right-wing force in Palermo. Meanwhile, Orlando's popularity has slumped. After an economically suffocating pandemic and perceived chaos at city hall, which culminated a year ago with the resignation of two deputy mayors, in July the veteran was voted the third least popular of 105 mayors in a poll by newspaperIl Sole 24 Ore.
Last summer, many in the city's impoverished historic center voiced open dissent. "Pa
lermo is not like once upon a time. Now there are foreigners here, and we don't get on well," said Ottavio Pensionato, 70, in the working-class Capo district. "Orlando has abandoned us. He doesn't think about us Palermitans," said Francesco Paolo, an unemployed 30-year-old, in a piazza surrounded by crumbling buildings in the Vucciria district. "Salvini's first concern is the Italians. He's getting my vote."
Orlando remains resolute: "There is only one way to combat populism. By having respect for time," he said during an interview in the sumptuous villa of Palermo's mayors. Yet time may be running out. "There is no indication that the mayor's vision will continue," said Kobena. "If there is no successor, the Palermo he has created will die."
A victory for the right would spell the end of the Mediterranean's most ambitious integration project. Yet Orlando's legacy will live on in those lives that have been transformed. "We are all from different nations," said Carmela of the Rainbow Choir. "We are many different voices that come together as a single, more beautiful voice."
prop up an economy teetering on the edge of collapse.
DW spoke to several Hazara men and women still in Afghanistan — none of them believed the assurances. Mahdi Raskih, a Hazara parliamentarian until the Taliban captured the capital, told DW that Hazaras face "ethnic and religious persecution" by the militant group.
They were, he added, "in mortal danger."
Massacres and a harrowing message
Amnesty International's latest findings seem to prove their worst fears. On-the-ground researchers documented brutal killings of nine Hazara men in Ghazni province in central Afghanistan, which took place in early July. Six of the men, according to the report, were shot; three were tortured to death by Taliban fighters.
The killings, Amnesty's report goes on to say, likely represent "a tiny fraction of the total death toll inflicted by the Taliban to date," as the group had cut mobile phone service in many of the recently captured areas, effectively controlling which photographs and videos are then shared from these regions.
Eyewitnesses who capture images on their phones are often too scared to keep them, lest they be found with evidence.
Habiba Sarabi, a Hazara political leader, told DW she had proof of more atrocities but could not share the details, as it might endanger surviving eyewitnesses. Sarabi was the first female governor of Afghanistan and one of four women representing Afghanistan in the negotiations with the Taliban in Doha.
When DW spoke with her, she was still reeling from the Taliban's takeover. She was, she said, "in shock."
Soon after the interview, Sarabi sent a link to a short, grainy video, which showed two Taliban fighters. Speaking into the camera, one of them says they are waiting for permission from their leaders to "eliminate" all Hazaras living in Afghanistan.
While DW was unable to verify the video, it nevertheless has been shared widely among Hazaras to whom it sends a chilling message.
"I'm numb," one Hazara told DW after watching it. It had taken her breath away, she said.
The looming resurgence of the "Islamic State-Khorasan" (ISI-K) following the withdrawal of US forces and de facto collapse of the Afghan army represent yet another threat.
Many fear that once the international community and media attention have shifted elsewhere, the Taliban will start a campaign against those who could lead a Hazara resistance.
A call to arms
One of them is Zulfiqar Omid, a former lawmaker turned resistance leader. He told DW he had established an armed Hazara resistance in Central Afghanistan, comprising some 800 regular fighters and 5,000 volunteers.
He had exhausted all other avenues, pleading with foreign governments to not abandon Afghanistan to the Taliban, he told DW in a recent WhatsApp call from an undisclosed location.
"Everyone claimed the Taliban is modern, it's changed," he said. "But it hasn't changed — the killing, the violence has increased." His men were "standing against terrorism," he said, fearing that new terror networks would now emerge in Afghanistan under the Taliban's leadership.
The Hazara resistance leader said he had recently held talks with Ahmad Massoud, whose father, an ethnic Tajik, became famous for leading the resistance against the Soviets in the 1980s and then the Taliban.
He was killed in a suicide bombing in 2001, but his son now leads the fight against the Taliban in Panjshir.
The resistance gains ground
For now, the mountainous province north of Kabul is the only part of Afghanistan that has so far resisted the Taliban's sweeping offensive. Surrounded by mountains, the small valley has held out against both Soviet and Taliban invaders in the past.
Zulfikar Omid said Tajik and Hazara forces would unite against the Taliban, which is now equipped with state-of-theart American weapons originally intended for the Afghan army.
While he admitted that the resistance fighters' weapons, readily sourced from a burgeoning black market and even Taliban sources, might not be the most modern, he said the men's "willingness" and desperation made up for it.
But the Hazara armed resistance could "be a recipe for disaster," fears Niamatullah Ibrahimi, a lecturer at La Trobe
University in Australia and author of The Hazaras and the Afghan State.
The Taliban could easily impose an economic blockade on the Hazara regions, he said, leading to mass famine. It may also result in more widespread massacres and revenge acts against the community.
Many Hazaras are fleeing, among them most of the well-educated, and that exodus would, Ibrahimi said, result in the Hazaras losing their voice in Afghanistan.
Seeking refuge in Pakistan
Up to 6,000 refugees, among them many Hazaras, have already made their way to Quetta in Pakistan, a city with a sizeable Hazara community, according to sources on the ground.
Many are being housed in local mosques, others by local residents.
DW spoke to one man, a 27-year-old laborer from Nimroz province in southwest Afghanistan, who had fled to Quetta in mid-August.
The man had found refuge with a local mechanic, who had said he had taken in the man and seven other family members, including one child, as he had a spare room.
When the Taliban arrived in Nimroz, the Afghan man said, "everyone started running, trying to leave the country."
At the border, he noted, there had been "chaos." The family had to bribe officials to cross into Pakistan, although the man was unsure whether they were Pakistani or Afghan border guards.
Pakistan has its own history of bloody sectarian violence against religious minorities, including Shiites. But, he said, as long as the Taliban rule Afghanistan, they would not return.
Left behind
Back in Kabul, the 19-year-old Hazara woman was equally desperate to flee the Taliban's rule, even though her family did not qualify for evacuation.
So far, while civil society activists, journalists and those who have worked for foreign militaries qualified for evacuation, the Hazaras as an ethnic group have not been awarded such status by any foreign government.
They are, desperate Hazara men and women told DW, left to fend for themselves.
The avid cinephile, whose WhatsApp profile showed a smiling young woman, her scarf pushed back to reveal her long hair, was terrified she would no longer be able to continue her education under the Taliban.
"As a woman, an uneducated woman, the only thing expected from you is to bear children, to be a sex slave," she said, sobbing.
She did not appear to harbor any hope that a freedom fighter would swoop in to save her and topple the regime, like in her favorite movie.
She continued to cry, then tried to compose herself. "You cannot run away from the Taliban in Afghanistan," she said quietly.