When a few months after his fourth birthday, Imad Dalil, he left Fquih Ben Salah, a city at the foot of the Middle Atlas, in Morocco, he certainly did not imagine that this would be such a long journey that could change his life forever. From the heart of the North African country to Italy andAbruzzo, in an area that is all in all similar to L’Aquila, to join his father who had arrived in Italy less than ten years earlier thanks to an amnesty and worked there. Today Imad Dalil is 36 years old and in the last ten days he has become the first foreigner and migrant to be named director of a hotspot in Italy, that of Taranto.
After studying and working as a mediator between Abruzzo and Puglia, now the culmination of a professional dream: “My career has reached an important peak, for me it is a source of pride to manage such a structure, a piece of the country system on the front of the answer to migration issue. When the approval of the choice made by the managing body for which I work came from the prefecture and police headquarters of Taranto, I felt great satisfaction. True, it was my dream, ever since, after finishing high school, I undertook a language mediation course at the University of L’Aquila and then attended a training course for the management of immigration services.
I had this goal in mind and now I have achieved it ”. Imad arrived in Italy in the late 1980s and followed the entire course of study, from elementary school to graduation. Married and with two children, Dalil, who speaks five languages (Arabic, French, English, Spanish and Italian) after his studies went to practice. In 2011 the shock of Arab Springs and the migratory consequences: “While I was still at university I started working as mediator at the police headquarters in L’Aquila, then at the end of 2010 I moved to the reception center in Manduria, in Puglia – adds Dalil -.
With the revolts in North Africa and Syria, migratory flows have increased and Italy has been one of the countries most affected by the phenomenon. I witnessed on my skin a real boom of the phenomenon. Thousands of migrants arrived in the tent city of Manduria, in some periods it was not possible to face the impact of such a situation. That’s where I cut my teeth. Later I worked in other centers, from Brindisi where I also played the role of legal informant for migrants, without forgetting the experiences in Sprar and in Case always in Puglia. All this until 2018, then I moved to the Taranto Hotspot where I am now the director “. Taranto is thethe only center of the peninsula since the other three still active are all in Sicily, in Trapani and Pozzallo, and in Lampedusa.
In the fifteen years of work in the field Imad Dalil has created a wealth of important experience: “I have been working in the immigration sector for more than ten years and still today I hear talk of ’emergency’. Italy’s problem is always the same, having to work in emergency when, on the contrary, the phenomenon should now be manageable. Missing the planning, the flow policy is only on a seasonal basis and there are two alternatives at the end of the six months: returning home or going into hiding, that is, what happens on time “. For Dalil, the main solution is one: “Strengthen the resettlement policy – explains the new director of the Taranto Hotspot -, invest in Humanitarian Corridors. The European Union has understood this, but the application in the various countries has not started vigorously “.
Then a harsh and shareable criticism on the narrative of the migratory phenomenon: “The cemeteries of the sea are an epochal tragedy, but there is not only that type of story. Perhaps it is convenient for Italy and the Italians to see only that phenomenon, perhaps we pretend not to know what happens on the ground, in Africa come in Asia e Middle East and along the Balkan route. Migrants treated as slaves, violence in Libya, abuses in Turkey, deaths that no one will cry. As they say, ‘out of sight, out of mind’, it seems to us that the only victims are those of the Strait of Sicily, but unfortunately this is not the case ”.
And Imad Dalil of people, families and individuals, who have experienced hell on their own skin along the path of hope, has seen and met many: “Dramatic stories, of those who have risked their lives several times to have a better future . The mother with six underage children, the eldest was 16, who fled her country in the southern Sahara and arrived in Italy after the nightmare and fear in Niger, Algeria and Libya. She passed here, opened up, took confidence and told the story. Today he lives in Germany and is a linguistic mediator. Or a wealthy Syrian family, almost bourgeois, hostile to the Assad regime and therefore forced to flee. The father from Syria, through Turkey and the Greek islands to Italy, carried his 10-year-old daughter with severe disability in his arms and on his shoulders. Today they are doing well and living in Austria. Two happy ending stories representing all migrants, the real heroes ”.
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