Italy, EU clashover funds threat

ROME: Italy’s government said on Friday, it would cut funds for the EU unless other states took in boat migrants stranded in an Italian port, earning it a rebuke from Brussels for making threats.

Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said envoys from EU states who met in Brussels on Friday did not reach a deal to share out the 150 migrants on board the Diciotti, an Italian coastguard ship docked in Catania since Monday.

Italy would “act accordingly”, he said, noting the EU failed to live up to its principles of “solidarity and responsibility”, and there was a gulf “between words and actions” coloured by “hypocrisy”.

More than 650 000 people have reached Italian shores since 2014 and Rome has begun to take a rigidly anti-immigration line, saying it would not let any more rescue ships dock unless other EU states agree to take the people in.

Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, who heads the anti-immigrant League party, has insisted they would not be allowed ashore until other EU states agreed to take them in, prompting a criminal investigation into whether the migrants were held against their will.

Salvini seemed to give some ground in a radio interview on Friday evening, suggesting he might let migrants off the Diciotti once it had been ascertained whether they were “real refugees”.

“I’m considering the possibility of carrying out identification and recognition procedures to identify real refugees, who are the minority, from fake refugees before they disembark,” he said.

Salvini’s government ally, Deputy Prime Minister Luigi di Maio, who leads the 5-Star Movement, said his party would not approve next year’s EU funding if there is no action soon.

“The soft line does not work, the hard line will be to withhold funds if they don’t listen to us.”

Rejecting the Italian threats as unacceptable, the EU’S executive European Commission said a solution to the Diciotti case was its “main priority”.

“Unconstructive comments, let alone threats… will not get us any closer to a solution,” spokesperson Alexander Winterstein said.

The issue of how to handle migrants has bitterly split the EU, although arrivals are down dramatically from their 2015 peak of more than a million.

Southern states such as Italy and Greece feel overrun and the bloc’s eastern members refuse to host any of the new arrivals.

The easterners, who face cuts in EU development aid over their refusal to help, did not attend the Brussels meeting on Friday. Malta, Italy, Spain, Greece, Luxembourg, Belgium, Germany, France, Ireland and the Netherlands were present.

In Italy, a campaign promise to further curtail arrivals helped propel the 5-Star and the League into office in June. Deals were reached in June and last month to distribute people from ships that carried rescued migrants to Italy and Malta. But Salvini said countries were failing to keep their promise. – Reuters