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Refugees, Institutional Invisibility, and Self-Help Strategies: Evaluating Kurdish Experience in Rome
London Centre of International Relations, University of Kent r.puggioni{at}tiscali.co.uk
The article investigates the way in which asylum reception has been organized in Italy in response to Kurdish refugees. The analysis suggests that Italy, as compared to northern European countries, has failed to develop a public system of reception, which has been counterbalanced by the parallel development of a private one. The abandonment of the vast majority of asylum seekers to their own survival strategies should read as an institutional failure to develop adequate reception policies and serious protection plans. The ‘Kurdish crisis’ has exposed the importance of state intervention in providing reception, which could no longer be left to local NGOs, self-help strategies and migrants' networks. In particular, the article looks at the way in which Italy, during the 1990s, has organized refugee reception; the (non) reception system in the municipality of Rome; and finally some private survival strategies that Kurdish asylum seekers have resorted to once no public help was made available to them.
Ms received November 2003; revised MS received April 2005
1. The ‘Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees’ was adopted by the UN Conference on the Status of Refugees and Stateless Persons at Geneva 2–25 July 1951, and entered into force on 22 April 1954. The Italian Parliament ratified the Convention on 24 July 1954, law no. 722, Gazzetta Ufficiale no. 294, 23 December 1954.
2. Article 1(3) does not contain the wording ‘refugees under mandate’, but simply ‘foreigners’, despite the special protection received from UNHCR.
3. Translations from Italian into English, except where noted, are the author's.
4. Social Adviser, Centro Servizi—Consiglio Italiano Rifugiati, interview held in Badolato Superiore, Catanzaro, 22/05/2001.
5. The Convention determining the ‘State Responsible for Examining Applications for Asylum Lodged in one of the Member States of the European Communities’, signed in Dublin 15/06/1990, entered into force on 01/09/1997 in twelve countries, while in Sweden and Austria on 01/10/1997 and, finally, in Finland on 01/01/1998.
6. Italian Official at the Ministry of the Interior and member of the Central Commission, interview held in Rome, 22/06/2001.
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