Another saddish story today

I look for these stories; I read and collect them almost everyday... and yet I cannot get used to them... and perhaps it is not a bad thing.

This is related to a place which I hold dear thus I feel I need to write.

"A 44 years old woman was found hanged in her cell at the CIE (center or better prison for migrants' identification and expulsion) of Ponte Galeria in Rome".

That's what I read this morning.. I am pouring my black coffee while I go through the most popular italian newspapers and I am sad because I can read between the lines ..'a woman died" or in same better cases.."M.M."is what they write.

Her name is Nabruka Mimuni.

How can you misspell an acronymous ....How much respect you have for your work as a journalist, for your being human, when you do not even find the time to check the initials of a person who has just died and you are writing about? Well, perhaps she was not fully a person.

Even after death she cannot be granted of any sort of visibility. She cannot be, as much as she could not be.

I dislike all of this: institutions and people that claim and pretend to have moral standard of decency ...

Decency is a short blanket that leaves exposed your hypocrisy.

Hypocrisy, that's what it is.

Nabruka Mimuni was born in Tunisia and she had been living in Rome for 30 years. She left a kid and a husband behind. Thus, was she less roman then "us"?? Because she not a "native"? It is time to reverse this concept.

Nabruka has chosen to die here. So as far as I am concerned, screw the "nativity"concept, the birth and its link to the wretched nation, and its ius sanguinis because the only blood that counts is the blood you shed to survive on the land that you live, which where you have decided that is there that you wanna die. The rest is just liquid red... and it stinks.

Nabruka was on her way to renew her permit to stay and work in Rome. She has been arrested while she was waiting in line. Smart, isn't it? You wanna catch some clandestinos!? Wait 'til they come to you, do not waste time and resources (taxpayers first!).

It would be easy , too easy to blame the Government and even the Holy Italian Red Cross which like an acrobat around international conventions, functions nowadays as the sole manager of all the CIEs... we share the shame and the responsibility to live in the same place which often we are proud of.

Today I feel less proud ... and more blue.

Lorenzo Rinelli,
Dept. of Political Science
University of Hawai'i at Manoa