Italy wants help with migrants

Four-way talks held to find coordinated response to crisis

PARIS: The French and German interior ministers met with their Italian counterpart Marco Minniti in Paris to discuss a “coordinated response” to Italy’s migrant crisis, hours after Minniti had called on other European countries to open their ports to rescue ships.

The working dinner at the French interior ministry – also attended by EU Commissioner for Refugees Dimitris Avramopoulos – was aimed at finding “a coordinated and concerted response to the migrant flux in the central Mediterranean (route) and see how to better help the Italians”, a source said.

The four-way talks between Minniti, Thomas de Maiziere of Germany, Gerard Collomb of France and Avramopoulos will also prepare them for EU talks in Tallinn this week.

“The talks went off very well,” a member of the Italian delegation said after the Paris meeting, with the “Italian proposals being discussed”.

The source offered no other details.

“We are under enormous pressure,” Minniti had said earlier in an interview with Il Messaggero.

With arrivals in Italy up nearly 19% over the same period last year, Rome has threatened to close its ports to privately-funded aid boats or insist that funding be cut to EU countries which fail to help.

“There are NGO ships, Sophia and Frontex boats, Italian coast guard vessels” saving migrants in the Mediterranean, Minniti said, referring to the aid boats as well as vessels deployed under EU border security missions.

“They are sailing under the flags of various European countries. If the only ports where refugees are taken to are Italian, something is not working. This is the heart of the question,” he said.

“I am a europhile and I would be proud if even one vessel, instead of arriving in Italy, went to another European port.

“It would not resolve Italy’s problem, but it would be an extraordinary signal” of support, he said.

More than 83,000 people rescued while attempting the perilous crossing from Libya have been brought to Italy so far this year, according to the UN, while more than 2,160 have died trying, the International Organisation for Migration says.

Italy’s Red Cross has warned the situation in the country’s overcrowded reception centres is becoming critical.

“What is happening in front of our eyes in Italy is an unfolding tragedy,” UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi said in a press conference here on Saturday.

One of the rescue organisations, SOS Mediterranee, which runs an aid vessel along with Doctors Without Borders (MSF), said forcing boats carrying migrants to go to other European ports would be logistically difficult.

If the order came, “we would have no choice, we would obey. But it would be completely impossible with more than 1,000 people on board”, SOS Mediterranee spokesman Mathilde Auvillain said.

“And then we’d need to make a stopover in an Italian port anyway to refuel, or we’d end up needing to be rescued ourselves.”

After weeks or months spent in Libyan camps – where many migrants are raped or tortured – those rescued are already traumatised, “imagine adding two or three more days at sea. Our priority is to protect them”, she said.

Minniti said Rome would be pushing for a way to shift the asylum application process from Italy to crisis-hit Libya, and safely bring to Europe those who win the right to protection. — AFP