Pope Francis has not forgotten Lampedusa. The sovereign pontiff denounced this Wednesday "hell" of detention camps for migrants in Libya, in a homily on the occasion of the seventh anniversary of his visit to the Italian island first European land on the way of migrants. François, who has already called for the closure of these camps, went even further, comparing them to German "lagers".
From his residence in Saint Marthe, in the Vatican, the Pope delivered his homily, telling in particular an episode which had happened to him during this visit to Lampedusa, in the south of Italy, his first displacement out of Rome as Pope. "I remember this day, seven years ago, precisely in the south of Europe, on this island ... Some people (migrants, editor's note) told me their stories, how much they had suffered to get there. And there were interpreters, ”he said.
“One of them said terrible things in his language, and the interpreter seemed to translate well; but spoke to him a lot and the translation was brief. Bah - I thought - we see that this language to express itself has longer turns, "continued the sovereign pontiff who improvises regularly when he speaks in public.
"We are only given a watered down version"
“When I got home in the afternoon at the reception, there was a lady […] who was the daughter of Ethiopians. She understood the language and had watched the meeting on television. And she said to me this: Listen, what the Ethiopian translator told you is not even a quarter of the tortures, the suffering they have experienced, "assured François, going so far as to compare the camps of migrants, to Nazi camps.
"[…] You cannot imagine the hell that people are living in these detention 'lagers'," said Pope Francis, using the German noun for "camp" which appeared notably in the words "Arbeitslager" (camp work) or "Konzentrationslager" (concentration camp) during the Second World War. "We are only given a watered-down version" of what is happening today in these camps in Libya, said Pope Francis.
Already during his visit to Lampedusa on July 8, 2013, a few weeks after his election, the pope had denounced the treatment suffered by migrants passing through Libya.
