ISLAND PRISON

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLIV, Issue 20931, 10 January 1938, Page 3

ISLAND PRISON

WHERE MUSSOLINI SENDS HIS FOES A former Italian Socialist deputy an:! four companions have escaped in a small boat from the penal island of Lampedusa to the Tunisian coast—the ) lost triumphant flight since that of Ros.selli, Lussu, and Nitti from Lipari a few years ago, says the London correspondent of the “Manchester Guardian.” Lampedusa is some hundred miles west of Malta on the same latitude and sixty miles from the nearest point in Tunis. Some of the Roman emperors sent prisoners there, and the pre-Fascist Governments also sent undesirable characters to this lonely and depressing island. But the Fascist Government keeps a round five hundred persons in compulsory domicile there, who far outnumber the local inhabitants. The island is without any drinking water except some brackish liquid which non-native dare not touch A weekly boat brings drinking water with other supplies. Lampedusa has had scarcely any rain for two years, and the scanty crops have almost wholly failed. The unwilling "guests” of the Government receive five lire daily per head of a household. With this they are just able to feed themselves and families .which many have with them) on an unvaried diet of bread and macaroni. An Englishman who has visited Lampedusa tells me that, walking up the main street of the little town, the only one on the island, one passes between ranks of listless yet inquisitive men of all ages and (as can be seen from their clothes) various ranks of society. Most of these can at once be identified as Sicilians. The authorities say that the “guests” of Lampedusa are not political offenders. The "guests” themselves usually insist that they are in confinement for no reason known to themselves. "The police came one night and took off half the village.” They are for the most part, perhaps, disaffected people who. by membership of forbidden societies, rank in the Government’s view as nonpolitical undesirables. The children of inhabitants and "guests” go to school together, but all suffer badly from wretched hygienic arrangements. Last summer many of the children were fever-stricken, and the worst cases had to be sent 120 miles away to Sicily.