Red t-shirts to remain human

An initiative launched in Italy to protest repressive immigration policies.

The initiative has been promoted by ARCI (the former Communist Party Cultural Association), ANPI (the Partisans Association), Libera (an anti-mafia association) and Legambiente (environmental association).

Luigi Ciotti, founder of Libera and a ‘fighting’ priest, explained the sense of the initiative like this: “Welcoming is the basis of civilization. We are wearing a red shirt because red is the colour that invites us to stop, asks us to stop, to reflect, and then to commit ourselves and work”.

Work to “stop the bleeding of humanity”, against “the closure of ports and rampant cynicism” displayed by the Italian government and many others in Europe towards the immigration question.

Red was the t-shirt little Ailan Kurdi, the three-year-old Kurdish boy whose lifeless body on a beach of Bodrum three years ago, has moved the whole world.

Red are the t-shirts mothers put to the children before getting on the rafts to make them more visible.

Red were the t-shirts the three children who died in the shipwreck last week, were wearing.

Father Ciotti reminds that “If there is a people that should remember what it means to be forced to migrate, that is ours, the Italian people. We have a recent, impressive history of immigration also made of suffering, humiliation, and many "no" slammed in the face”.

A lack of culture and memory that translates in a deficit of sensitivity. said Ciotti and certainly not just in Italy.

“We must also analyze and denounce what lies behind the fears, prejudices, racisms and fascisms that re-emerge: social inequalities, the loss and degradation of labor, an economy that the Pope has defined in no uncertain terms "of robbery" and "unjust to the bone”. Large migrations are largely induced deportations. No one abandons his land, home and affections unless forced by poverty and wars for which the West is largely responsible”.

The r-shirts initiative reminded that “welcoming is the base of civilisation, a duty written in conscience before than in rules and codes. If this duty fails, the hemorrhage of humanity risks being unstoppable”.

So the appeal to wear a red t-shirt is an appeal to stop, to reflect, “to look at ourselves no longer in the mirror but in depth and ask ourselves what we have done with our humanity and what world we are delivering to young people, our children”.