This part of the reports aims to untangle the
intricate web of the violence and dangers present at the franco-italian
border and contextualize them into the broader phenomenon of border
militarization. Read more ☟
On Monday February 6, 2023 a commemoration of migrants who lost their
lives attempting to cross the border took place in Menton Garavan, an
area in the town that lies around 1km from the border. This
commemorative event was a memento of a horrendous killing of at least 15
migrants at the Spanish border in Ceuta, which took place on the same
day in 2014. However, even the local Franco-italian border has already
claimed many lives.
On November 7, 2022, 19 years old Ahmed Safi died on the highway
after a collision with a truck. Yet
another death
at the franco-italian border occurred on January 9, 2023, when a
suspected migrant was found dead on the roof of a train at Menton train
station and the likely cause of his death was electrocution.
Those are no isolated incidents, as according to the NGO Caritas in
Ventimiglia at least 33 people died trying to cross the border since
2015, and other estimates are as high as 50 deaths connected to the
border.
Electrocution and incidents on the highway are
not the only threats for migrants seeking to cross the border to France.
Strengthened police and military presence spurs migrants attempting to
cross the border to resort to more and more dangerous means of doing so,
such as taking unsafe mountain paths at night and facing ever-present
hazard of falling to their death from a cliff, hiding on top of the
trains with the high risk of being electrocuted or walking on the tracks
and facing potentially deadly collision with a train. Crossing itself is
not the only danger migrants coming to France might face, as reports of
police violence
are numerous.
“We encountered a 19-year-old Tunisian man who was injured. A van
with military men (presumably Italian military) dropped him off. He
was not asked to sit at the border police station but was directly
given the paper that explained why he was rejected. He walked
towards us with a limp, his ankle was wrapped, and he had one crutch
that was visibly too short for his height. When we approached him,
it was clear that there were new scars over both his arms. These
scars were visibly very new and red. His foot, with the broken
ankle, had turned another color. We asked if he wanted us to call
him a taxi, but he had no money. When we talked to him, he told us
he had fallen while crossing the mountains that morning. When he saw
the military approaching him, he ran and slipped down a slope. It
was the military that helped wrap up his ankle. The Italian police
could clearly see that he was in pain and had difficulty walking,
yet they still did nothing to help him. He told us that they did not
call an ambulance for him.”
Even on these dangerous roads, militarisation is becoming more and more
omnipresent. Crossing itself is not the only danger migrants coming to
France might face, as reports of police violence are numerous. After the
series of terror attacks between 2015 and 2016, French laws concerning
when police officers can shoot their weapons changed from strictly in
cases of self-defense to “in cases of absolute necessity and in a
strictly proportionate manner.”
One of the most
infamous cases in the area was the shooting of
Omar Elkhouli. On Sept. 7, 2022, another fatal
shooting occurred in Nice. The victim was a 24-year-old Tunisian man,
who police allege was driving a stolen vehicle and refusing to obey an
order to stop. A video circulating on social media shows an officer
firing his gun towards the car’s windshield as it backs away from him.
On the same day, a 22-year-old woman was fatally shot
by Police in Rennes during an anti-drug operation. A report from the
IGPN published in 2021 found that the frequency of officers “firing at
vehicles in motion” has increased from an average of 119.2 instances
annually from 2012-2016 to an average of 165.8 from 2017-2021. This is a
statistically significant increase of approximately 39% from 2012 to
2016. Other times when migrants are not subjected to outright violence,
they might face psychological abuse or cruel treatment, as this
observation from April 30th shows.
Another implication of the Schengen suspension and its consequent
systemic border control is the arbitrary basis on which identity checks
are effectuated. Systemic controls don’t signify that the police are
forced to check everyone’s documents, but simply that they can perform
them at their individual discretion, which has brought about a pervasive
issue of racial discrimination and racial profiling. This dynamic is
felt by migrants especially, but by inhabitants of the region alike, who
have reported being subjected to ID checks more often if they displayed
a “non-western” anatomy.
In the Garavan train station, an undocumented
person was reported by a volunteer to have been stopped and forced to
get off the train by French police. The person was demanded aggressively
to move towards the police van that takes people from the train station
to the PAF. The police officer screamed at the person that he was saving
his life by not allowing him to get to Nice. He further insulted him by
calling him "Y a bon banania" repeatedly. This is an advertising
character for the Banania brand of cocoa powder, drawn in 1915 by the
artist Giacomo de Andreis.
In summer 2023, part of the Stories In Motion
team will work with the Italian ASGI Medea association (a group of
migration jurists), to expand this section on racist border controls by
collecting quantitative and qualitative data that will be compiled into
a report and sent to the Committee on the Elimination of Racial
Discrimination.