Italy urges tighter border security in North Africa

ROME — Italy’s firebrand interior minister visited Libya on Monday and returned home emboldened with his decision to close Italian ports to immigrants, demanding Europe step in to accept them and help Libya better secure its borders and screen immigrants for asylum before they leave home.

Matteo Salvini made his first official visit abroad as interior minister to Tripoli, Libya’s capital, to hammer home his commitment to ending the migration flows that have fueled antiimmigrant sentiment across Europe and brought his xenophobic party to power.

He called for U.N.backed and EU-funded asylum-screening centers to be erected on Libya’s external borders, primarily in Chad, Niger and Sudan — not in Libya itself or Italy. And he vowed to help Libyan authorities assume control over their territorial waters to prevent refugees from leaving and keep European aid groups out of the way.

“This is the point of absolute convergence with Libya: Block the business of clandestine migration,” Salvini told reporters in Rome after he returned.

Libya was plunged into chaos following the 2011 uprising that ousted and killed longtime dictator Moammar Khadafy and is now split between rival governments — one, backed by the United Nations, based in Tripoli, and the other in the country’s east — each supported by an array of militias.

Since then, it has been frequently used as a route to Europe for people fleeing poverty and conflict in Africa and the Middle East.

Recently, there has been an uptick of immigrants leaving from other North African points who have been rescued by Spain in the Straits of Gibraltar. On Monday, Spain reported it rescued more than 600 people, bringing to 1,400 the number of those rescued in three days. Spanish Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska is traveling to Morocco on Thursday to discuss the influx.

Libya’s coast guard itself on Sunday rescued some 1,000 migrants, including dozens of women and children. Ahmed Maiteeg, deputy prime minister of the U.N.backed Libyan government, told a press conference in Tripoli with Salvini by his side that all of them were given humanitarian and medical aid, and were taken to a naval base in Tripoli and a refugee camp in the town of Khoms.

Salvini praised the Libyans for their “excellent work” and vowed to halt European aid groups that have been rescuing migrants. Italy is committed, he said, to “blocking the full-on invasion of those associations that would like to substitute the government and authorities and in fact help illegal migrant traffickers.”

Salvini has accused the NGOs of operating as taxi services for Libyan-based smugglers and has closed Italy’s ports to their ships.