Spain to take in rescued migrants
People on duct-taped boat joyful; 2 vessels going to Barcelona
ABOARD THE OPEN ARMS IN THE MEDITERRANEAN SEA — A Spanish rescue boat on Saturday plucked 60 people from a rubber dinghy held together with duct tape in the Mediterranean Sea near Libya, igniting another political row between Italy and Malta over who should let the aid boat dock. Later on, Spain acted as savior.
The vessel, the Open Arms, run by Spanish aid group Proactiva Open Arms, said it rescued the migrants — including five women, a 9-year-old and three teenagers — after it spotted the rubber boat just floating in the sea. Later in the day, Spanish authorities reporting saving 63 other people trying to reach its southern coast.
Those rescued by the Open Arms were jubilant, jumping, chanting and hugging their rescuers.
Bitcha Honoree said he knew the risk he was taking when he boarded the dinghy with 59 others in the middle of the night with only the full moon illuminating the dark water. Some of his friends had survived past crossings from Libya and made it to Europe, but others had drowned.
But after having been sold as a slave, kidnapped and tortured in Libya while awaiting his chance to get aboard a smuggler’s boat, the 39-yearold Honoree, from Cameroon, decided he needed to try.
“It’s better to die than to continue being treated this bad,” he said just moments after being rescued some 30 nautical miles off the coast of Libya.
Krisley Dokouada, a 9-yearold boy from Central African Republic, was rescued along with his parents. With sparkling eyes, the only child among the migrants smiled shyly after the rescue crew called him “captain.”
For months, his family had lived in Libya, while they awaited their chance to make the Mediterranean crossing. His mother, Judith Dokouada, said she never left the shelter for fear of being kidnapped or sold as a slave, a fate many African migrants have spoken of to human-rights advocates.
“There is war at home. They kill people, they beat people, they rape women, they kill boys,” said Dokouada, 32. “We don’t have peace.”
Others rescued Saturday included six Libyans and people from Mali, Eritrea, Egypt, Bangladesh, South Sudan, and Guinea.
But Matteo Salvini, the rightwing chief of Italy’s Interior Ministry, quickly declared that the Spanish rescue boat “can forget about arriving in an Italian port” and claimed it should go to Malta, the nearest port.
Malta swiftly pushed back, with its Interior Ministry contending that the tiny Italian island of Lampedusa, south of Sicily, was closer to the boat.
“Quit spreading incorrect news, dragging Malta into it for no reason,” Maltese Interior Minister Michael Farrugia tweeted, attaching a map that he said indicated the rescue occurred in waters between Libya and Lampedusa.
By nightfall Saturday, Spain agreed to let the Open Arms dock in Barcelona, where Proactiva Open Arms is based, the Spanish government said.
The Open Arms and its companion ship, the Astral, likely will need four days to reach Barcelona, said the Astral’s captain, Riccardo Gatti.
To the west, Spain’s Maritime Rescue Service said it picked up 63 others Saturday trying to reach the country’s southern Mediterranean coast while authorities looked for another missing boat. It said 58 migrants were found in the Strait of Gibraltar while five more were rescued farther east.
Salvini contended Saturday on Twitter that the Open Arms had taken on the migrants before a Libyan boat in Libya’s search-and-rescue zone could intervene.
But the Open Arms’ captain, Marco Martinez, said he told the Rome-based Maritime Rescue Coordination Center about the migrants and was instructed to call Libyan maritime authorities, who didn’t answer. The captain said officials in Rome then told him it was up to him to decide whether to carry out the rescue.
“I took the decision to save these human beings,” Martinez said
In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel has reportedly secured agreements with 14 EU countries to rapidly return some asylum seekers as she seeks to end a schism in her government over migration policy.
Merkel says she also wants to establish “anchor centers” to process migrants at Germany’s borders, the dpa news agency reported Saturday.
The announcements came in a letter Merkel wrote to leaders of her Christian Democratic Union’s Bavaria-only sister party, the Christian Social Union, as well as to her junior coalition government partner, the Social Democrats, after she attended a two-day EU summit in Brussels.
Merkel is seeking to end a three-week standoff with the hard-line chief of her Interior Ministry, Horst Seehofer, who heads the Christian Social Union.
Seehofer has been threatening to turn away migrants at Germany’s border who have already been rejected by the country or who have registered for asylum elsewhere in the EU.
Merkel has rejected that approach, instead insisting on a European-wide solution to migration to preserve EU unity. The dispute has raised the possibility of an end to Germany’s decades-old conservative alliance between the Christian Social Union and Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union if Seehofer goes ahead with the unilateral move, which could topple her government.
Both parties are holding separate meetings today to discuss Merkel’s latest efforts on migration and plot their next steps.
Merkel on Friday came away from an EU summit with agreements from Greece and Spain to take back migrants previously registered in those countries, and an overall agreement by the 28-nation bloc to ease the pressures of migration into Europe.
In the eight-page letter obtained Saturday by dpa, the chancellor said she also had secured agreement with half of the EU nations to return migrants to them if they’d first registered in those countries.
Officials in Hungary and the Czech Republic — two of the countries on the list — said later Saturday that they had not signed any deal on migrants.
Asked about the Czech comment, Merkel’s spokesman told dpa that the country “had expressed a willingness to negotiate an administrative agreement on improved cooperation on repatriation.”