Milan: On the mezzanine of Milan’s main railway station, a Syrian family of six sits among hundreds of refugees as Claudia Schiffer, dressed as a medieval princess, smiles at them from a Dolce & Gabbana poster.
“For the moment, we’re stuck here,” Ahmad, 42, a house decorator from Deraa in southern Syria, said as volunteers handed out sandwiches with chocolate spread. “We don’t know what do to. We are worn out.”
The grandiose railway terminal, replete with bas relief sculptures depicting Roman history and signs of the zodiac, has turned Italy’s fashion and business capital into an unlikely crossroads for thousands of people fleeing the Syrian civil war. Between platforms handling at least 600 trains a day and the polished white marble concourse, two worlds collide.
Ahmad, worried about being identified by his full name because of his illegal status, and his family are among the 28,000 Syrians who ended up in the station, Milano Centrale, over the past 12 months.
Rescued by the Italian navy after traffickers abandoned them in crammed dinghies in the Mediterranean Sea, they find themselves stranded en route to other countries as they struggle to navigate European Union asylum rules.
“These people are in a kind of limbo, a gray area of law that allowed a general hypocrisy,” said Pierfrancesco Majorino, the Milan official in charge of social policy. “The government stayed out of it and just let them pass.”
More than 3 million Syrians, one in every eight, have fled the country since the violence involving President Bashar Al Assad’s forces, opposition rebels and Islamist militants became more deadly in March 2011. Most of the departed have settled in neighbouring Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey.
There were 1,400 Syrians a day on average in Milano Centrale during the summer, turning one of Europe’s biggest railway stations into a different kind of junction. Most are waiting for passage to northern Europe, countries like Germany or Sweden, because they say their families already live there.
“Italy doesn’t offer us anything,” said Mohammad, 49, from Idlib in northern Syria, wearing a US Polo Assn. T-shirt. He wants to seek refugee status in Germany or the Netherlands. “Our guilt was to have asked for freedom,” he said.
Mohammad’s story is a familiar one in Milano Centrale, and like Ahmad he spoke in Arabic through an interpreter.
They were among the 138,300 migrants arriving this year on Italian coasts, almost a quarter of them Syrians fleeing the war, according to figures from the Interior Ministry in Rome.
They were rescued in a humanitarian operation triggered by the death of almost 400 immigrants in October off the island of Lampedusa. More than 3,000 migrants have drowned this year, according to the International Organisation for Migration, a London-based group formed in the wake of Second World War.
Of the Syrians that made it, just 400 applied for asylum in Italy, according to the Interior Ministry.
The authorities left most Syrians to reach Milan’s international train hub instead of registering them as asylum seekers, which would bind them to their country of arrival under EU rules, said Majorino.
Who is responsible
Interior Minister Angelino Alfano has said Italy can’t serve as prison for asylum seekers who want to go elsewhere and pledged to speed up procedures for Syrians to help them leave. He wasn’t available to comment further for this story and calls and emails to his spokeswoman weren’t returned. The government pays €30 ($37.90, Dh139.23) per refugee sheltered each day.
Also declining to give his last name, Mohammad said he was a military pilot and was persecuted for leaving the army. He fled with his wife and four children two years ago, to Antalya in Turkey. He then flew from Istanbul to Algeria before paying traffickers $2,000 to traverse the deserts of Tunisia and Libya by car. He paid another $3,500 for sea passage.
The journey of Ahmad, the house decorator, and his family also started two years ago. He took his wife, Ruqayya, whose purple hijab stands out against the station’s marble, and their four children to Jordan and then settled in Libya.
As the situation deteriorated there, last month they paid a trafficker $2,500 for seats on a boat crammed with 250 people to make the crossing to Sicily, which lies less than 160 kilometers from the north coast of Africa at the shortest point. They were rescued 16 hours later by the Italian navy.
“A mountain can never meet another mountain,” he said of his troubled journey and his welcome in Milan. “But two humans can always find a way to meet.”
Migrants wait for money from their relatives to buy train tickets or to pay a “passeur” anything up to €1,500 for a covert car ride to the border. Many get sent back at the Austrian or French borders.
Men outnumber women at the station. There are few suitcases, as traffickers usually throw them to sea. There are two missing men ads, one in Arabic. On the sides of the mezzanine overlooking the main concourse, some refugees walk without shoes. Others sleep in anti-hypothermia blankets.
A few dozen metres away down the escalators, men in Italian blue or gray suits drink up their cappuccinos in the bar before heading back to their offices. The city was just getting back to normal after the Spring 2015 Fashion Week.
Commuters from the Milan suburbs or as far away as Verona dodge tourists lugging suitcases on their way to the resorts of Lake Como for a late summer break. More than 320,000 passengers a day swarm through the 200-metre long Carriage Hall and the 42-metre-high ticket hall, opened in 1931 after the blueprint was embellished by fascist leader Benito Mussolini.
The reaction of locals has been mixed as the city authorities argue with the central government over who is responsible for dealing with the migrants. Volunteer workers and doctors assist the migrants during the day and approved charities or institutions shelter them at night.
The influx has waned recently as refugees get channelled legally and get taken to camps run by the Red Cross, including in a small airport in Bresso just outside Milan. Others remain in illegal limbo at the station, waiting.
Mustafa, 35, a carpenter from Aleppo who fled the Syrian city in 2012, was picked up by a Greek ship in the Mediterranean during a crossing from Libya. He eventually made it by train up the Italian peninsula to Milano Centrale. The next step is to reunite with people from his hometown.
“I want to go to Austria,” said Mustafa, also declining to give his last name. “My old neighbours live there.”
