Residents of L'Aquila angry over slow pace of reconstruction

Residents of the Italian city of L'Aquila angrily denounced local politicians at a council meeting on the eve of the first anniversary of the deadly earthquake there.

With hundreds of local people gathered under a tent for the meeting late on Monday, several shouted out their grievances against mayor Massimo Cialente and his team for the way they had gone about rebuilding after the disaster.

"The city is still stuck, emptied of its inhabitants," said one local campaigner, Anna Colasanto.

Others protested that the city's councillors had not even been able to provide enough space in the tent for people wanting to attend the meeting.

"How do you expect to rebuild the city if cannot even manage to organise a council meeting?" said Eugenio Colasanto, head of the committee for the protection of the old city districts.

The April 6, 2009 earthquake killed 308 people and devastated the region, leaving 80,000 people homeless.

With large parts of the media-eval walled city still off-limits because of the state of the quake-hit buildings, frustration has been steadily growing at what some people see as a lack of progress.

Defending themselves at the meeting, Mr Cialente and his team said that they had to give priority to the most urgent matters first.

But the critics say that of the 120,000 people in L'Aquila and the surrounding quake-hit towns and village, more than 52,000 have still not been able to return home.

In what has been dubbed the "wheelbarrow revolt", some displaced residents spend Sundays loading wheelbarrows with rubble in L'Aquila's off-limits "red zone" in a bid to shame officials over the slow pace of reconstruction.

They are angry too about the decision to build new homes at great cost far from the city centre instead of focussing on rebuilding L'Aquila.

Although 14,000 people have been rehoused in the new housing estates, nicknamed "Berlusconi homes", campaigners say that they are in the middle of nowhere.

They have no supporting transport links, no public services - or even shops, say the critics.

"This money could have been used differently, especially since these homes cost three times more than planned," said Eugenio Carlomagno, a co-founder of an advocacy group called L'Aquila, A City Centre to Save.

"With that sort of money they could have housed 45,000 people, not only 14,000," he added.

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and President Giorgio Napolitano both sent messages of support to Monday night's council meeting, which was opened by music from a local choir, followed by a minute's silence.

The mayor called on those attending to look forward to the future: Up until now, he said, it had been a time of grieving.

And he called on the government to set up a special solidarity tax to help finance the reconstruction work, as has been done after other earthquake disasters.

"The historic centre is in the same state that it was in a year ago," local councillor Carlo Benedetti lamented, while noting that the university, schools, some factories and public services had all reopened.

Following the meeting, thousands of people started on a torch-lit procession to commemorate the disaster.

Locals were joined by volunteers from the emergency services, the Red Cross and other groups still working in the region.

Men and women of all ages marched in silence and in the cold, bearing candles or torches through the streets.

Four separate lines of people set off with the aim of converging on the city's cathedral at 3.32 a.m., the exact time the quake struck.

There, the names of the dead were read out to the sounds of the pealing bells, followed by a Mass in their memory.

Yestyerday's other ceremonies included a human chain and the releasing of balloons.