‘Share migrants or we won’t give €20bn to EU’ – Italy’s deputy PM
ITALIAN Deputy Prime Minister Luigi Di Maio said yesterday his party would vote to suspend funding to the European Union next year unless other countries agreed to take in migrants being held on a coastguard ship in Sicily.
Three days after Italy’s Diciotti coastguard vessel docked in Catania, 150 adult migrants remained on deck. After seeing hundreds of thousands of sea arrivals in recent years, Italy wants other EU nations to accept them.
The European Commission has said repeatedly that it is working to find an agreement. Other such deals were found in June and July for ships carrying rescued migrants that docked in both Italy and Malta.
“If nothing comes out of a European Commission meeting on redistributing migrants from the Diciotti ship, the 5-Star and I will not be willing to give €20bn each year to the EU,” Mr Di Maio said in a video posted on Facebook.
Mr Di Maio is the leader of the anti-establishment 5-Star Movement, which is in coalition government with the far-right League and its leader, Matteo Salvini, who has championed a hard line against immigration since taking office in June.
Mr Di Maio said he agreed with Mr Salvini’s position that the migrants should stay on the ship until there is an EU agree- ment, a day after the 5-Star speaker of the lower house of parliament criticised Mr Salvini, who is also interior minister.
He was defiant yesterday in the face of a criminal probe into possible kidnapping charges for forcing the migrants to remain on the vessel. The chief prosecutor from the Agrigento court, Luigi Patronaggio, had boarded the Diciotti on Wednesday and said afterwards he had opened a probe against “unknown” persons for holding the migrants against their will.
“There’s a court that is investigating whether those illegally on board the ship have been kidnapped,” Mr Salvini said in a radio interview.
“I’m not unknown. My name is Matteo Salvini... I’m the interior minister and I think it is my duty to defend the security of this country’s borders.”
A public backlash against the arrivals of hundreds of thousands of seaborne newcomers in the past five years helped put Mr Di Maio and Mr Salvini – who allowed 27 unaccompanied minors off the ship late on Wednesday – into office.
Humanitarian groups – including United Nations refugee agency, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) and Médécins Sans Frontières – renewed calls for the migrants’ release from the vessel.
“Migrants who arrive from Libya are often the victims of violence, abuse and torture,” IOM Italy mission head Federico Soda said.
A Médécins Sans Frontières psychologist said in a video that she had spoken with the minors who had disembarked from the ship. They had told her they had spent more than a year in detention, where they were abused and mistreated.