BADOLATO, Italy (CN) — On a hot and still Sunday night in August 1997, a nameless ship silently beached at this town's sandy marina.
The captain and crew slipped off the vessel and disappeared into the darkness. Next, some 446 mostly young people climbed out of the ship's hull and stepped onto the beach here.
Many of the newly arrived wondered if they had reached Germany or Sweden.
No, they had landed on the doorstep of Gerardo Mannello, the communist mayor of Badolato, a small seaside town along the wild and empty eastern coast of Calabria, the southern tip of Italy.
Mannello was sitting on his terrace along Badolato's seafront when he saw the refugees who'd suddenly shown up on his town. He went out. There they were: tired, scared, hungry and wretched.
Most were young men but there were also women and children. They were in bad shape after several nights crammed inside the ship's hull as it crossed the Ionian Sea from Turkey.
“Almost no one in the town of 4,000 residents slept that Sunday night,” wrote Aldo Varano, a journalist for L'Unità, a Communist Party newspaper, at the time about the people of Badolato. “People emptied their refrigerators to find water, milk, clothes to cover the children.”
Mannello opened the town school to the refugees and the people of Badolato spent the night trying to talk with the foreigners, imagining the things and places they'd seen on their way from their war-torn and famished native lands.
The bulk of the refugees were Kurds, a very large but long-suffering ethnic group seeking a state of their own. In the 1980s and 1990s, millions of Kurds fled their homelands as their independence struggles were ruthlessly suppressed by Turkey and Iraq.
In the meantime, police and carabinieri, Italy’s military police, showed up and the process of deporting them all back to Turkey began.
For Mannello, that hot August wouldn't be the moment when he'd put into practice his experiment: Inhabiting the old town of Badolato, a largely abandoned Medieval burg perched on a ridge of the nearby mountains, with refugee families.
But only four months later, he'd get another shot at repopulating the old town, a crumbling and hard-to-reach place where fewer and fewer people lived.
On Dec. 26, another aging vessel crossed the Ionian Sea from Turkey — this ship had a name, the Ararat — and landed near Badolato. There were 836 refugees aboard.
A lot changed between August and December of that year.
Ever since the fall of Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, European politics had become consumed with what to do with the waves of asylum seekers from Eastern and Central Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Africa. Immigration worldwide shot up following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent breakout of regional conflicts that defined the 1990s: the Gulf War in Iraq, the Yugoslav Wars, conflicts over control of ex-Soviet states and numerous civil wars in Asia and Africa.
“Among all the other problems we face — [migration] is the most crucial,” Douglas Hurd, the British foreign secretary, said after a meeting of European foreign ministers in 1992.
Hurd said Europe was becoming a “magnet for people seeking greater opportunities” just like America had been in the 19th century. But, he cautioned, unlike 19th-century America “ours is not an empty continent.”
By 1997, a reunified Germany had been transformed by immigration. It had taken in millions of East Germans and other ethnic Germans from Eastern bloc nations. It'd opened its doors to hundreds of thousands of war refugees from Iran, Lebanon, Turkey and former Yugoslavia. Despite efforts to limit asylum claims and immigration, refugees continued to flow into Germany.