Italy’s new Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has already faced her first conflict with a community partner over immigration. Given his conception of the phenomenon, it was only a matter of short time. The German government has urged Italy to “quickly” assist the more than 100 unaccompanied minors who are aboard the NGO SOS Humanity ship, which is awaiting authorization to take 179 rescued migrants and refugees to the Mediterranean port. Humanity 1, sailing under the German flag, has been waiting for days for the Italian authorities to decide whether it can call at one of their ports. MSF’s Geo Barents and SOS Mediterranée’s Ocean Viking are in the same situation. A total of almost a thousand migrants. But Meloni has already warned that countries flying the ship’s flag must be responsible for the passengers rescued.
Meloni’s opinion is similar to that of his league partner Matteo Salvini during his turbulent time as interior minister. Basically, they only want to let in ships whose passage has been previously reallocated with community partners. The Italian Prime Minister has once again expressed her opinion in a book which has not yet been published (to be published on November 4) and whose testimonies were collected three days ago, when SOS Humanity was already at sea. “We need to remember what the law of the sea is, which is often misapplied. If you find a ship in distress at sea, you are obligated to rescue everyone on board. But when it serves as a ferry between the African and Italian coasts to transport migrants, it openly violates the law of the sea and international law,” he stressed in the book by journalist Bruno Vespa. “If an NGO ship also has a German flag, there are two options. Either Germany recognizes her and adopts her, or she becomes a pirate ship.”
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni this Wednesday during the swearing-in of the undersecretaries of state of the new government DPA via Europa Press (DPA via Europa Press)
In this interview, Meloni explains his plans, which consist in promoting a development plan in Africa while encouraging these countries to prevent the departure of this type of boat. She calls it the Mattei Plan (after the founder of the energy company ENI, which promoted development in these countries in exchange for the exploitation of their energy resources). Meloni also calls for the activation of Operation Sophia, born in 2015, which in its third phase caused what she calls a “naval blockade”. In this section, he saw things differently from his government partner Matteo Salvini, who limited himself to the closure of the Italian ports during his time as interior minister.
Competition in this area in Italy is a bit blurry. Salvini is the head of the transport and infrastructure sector, which has power over the ports. A new Ministry of the Sea was created, which also has a say. And the interior continues to channel the edicts related to security. Its current owner, Matteo Piantedosi, defended the same position this week. “We cannot bring migrants who are rescued at sea by foreign ships operating without any coordination with the authorities,” he said, according to the Corriere della Sera newspaper. Piantedosi argued that migrants who arrive in the country after being rescued by these ships account for 16% of arrivals. “Italy will not give up its duty to rescue at sea, but European solidarity must become a reality,” he stressed.
Arrivals double
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The same music continues to play in the central Mediterranean. Thousands of migrants are leaving Libya and risking their lives in small boats to try to reach European soil. Despite the fact that arrivals of migrants leaving Libya en route to Italy have doubled this year (from about 23,000 in 2021 to 40,000 so far in 2022, according to European sources), Giorgia Meloni just got the controversial deal signed by her predecessor Paolo Gentiloni with the Libyan authorities in 2017 to curb irregular immigration and has been harshly criticized by human rights NGOs, think tanks and even the United Nations. Meloni had until midnight Wednesday to denounce the pact, but the recently installed leader’s silence once again makes clear her migratory trajectory – and that of the EU, by the way – in the central Mediterranean for the next three years: that Libya will be controlled, that migrants cannot reach Italy.
The North African country is fundamental to the EU’s migration strategy, and Italy, a country with which it has strategic ties due to its colonial past, knows it. Not only is it a transit point for people from Sub-Saharan Africa risking their lives in extremely poor boats – 15,200 have done so in the first six months of 2022 according to Frontex – to seek an opportunity in Europe, it is also a country full of mafias, to whom migrants pay thousands of euros for a place on a boat. Libya is also a country of returnees. Since 2016, more than 100,000 people have been intercepted at sea and returned to Libya with subsequent internment in dodgy detention centers, where they remain overcrowded and in unfortunate sanitary and sanitary conditions for months.
Kouassi (not his real name) told Doctors Without Borders (MSF) that he spent three months in one of those detention centers in shackles. “I have many scars. They beat us with wooden and metal bars. It was a prison in the desert, an unfinished house that we were sold to. There were about ten of us in the room and there were several rooms. They took everything from us.” In an October 2021 report, the UN Human Rights Office said these practices, carried out by Libya, constitute “crimes against humanity”. These centers are “under the exclusive control” of the Libyan Interior Ministry, according to the disputed agreement, although, according to the just renewed agreement, they will be financed with Italian and EU funds.
The United Nations and NGOs such as MSF, Oxfam or Amnesty International, among others, believe that Libya is neither a port nor a safe place for migrants and that the repatriation policy implemented by the Coast Guard of the Maghreb country is legal, thanks in part to the framework of the agreement with Italy (the so-called Memorandum of Understanding, MoU) that Meloni has ratified must be broken immediately.
The agreement, signed in 2017 by Fayez Mustafá Serraj (Libyan government representative for national reconciliation, recognized by the UN) and then Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni, provides for the outsourcing of migration management to Libya. In return, the Libyan Coast Guard and the African country’s immigration authorities are receiving training and education alongside funds – some of which come from the European Fund for Africa – which is why NGOs point to the EU as an accomplice to the tragedies in the Mediterranean. In fact, the Italian authorities have just authorized the dispatch of 14 speedboats to the Libyan Coast Guard to monitor the actions of the mafia and the departures of small boats on the central Mediterranean route, the deadliest in recent times, where they are 18,841 people according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM) died since 2014.
Another controversial point of the MoU is that a Libyan SAR (Search and Rescue) zone and a MRCC (Maritime Rescue Coordination Center) were created ad hoc in Tripoli, things that did not exist before. In turn, the MRCC in Rome, which previously coordinated all rescues with all ships of all kinds that were near a distressed boat in the vast territory of the Sicilian Canal, left a vacuum which, prompted by this agreement, was filled by the Libyan MRCC has been filled.
Last week, the German NGO Sea Watch used the cameras of one of its surveillance planes to capture how the Libyan Coast Guard intercepted and brought back a small boat with dozens of migrants on board in international waters – the organization claims they were in Maltese waters – to the Maghreb country . Surprised, the Libyan Coast Guard threatened Sea Watch: “If you don’t leave Libyan territory, we will fire at you with rockets.” When the NGO reported that they were indeed in the waters of a community country, the Libyan Coast Guard responded by shooting into the water . as seen in a video posted on Twitter by the organization itself.
Fifty NGOs met in central Rome last week to protest against the continuation of this migration pact between Rome and Tripoli, which marked, marks and will mark a clear migratory line in Europe: to train the Libyan Coast Guard and endow them with the power, means and Legitimacy to prevent, in their own way but with community funds, migrants and refugees from entering the waters of EU countries.
Circular Violence
For Sara Prestrianni, an expert at EuroMed Rights, Libya is the clear winner of the migration pact. First, because an agreement of this level “will bring some international recognition” to a totally broken country. And second, because Libya has seen money circulating around the country: the migrants pay the mafia to go to Europe in small boats, while the Italian and European authorities inject money and provide material to Serraj’s Libyan government for them to intercept , return and lock up migrants in detention centers in the North African country. And so again and again. Critics of the pact call this “circular violence.” According to the IOM, since the agreement came into force, 107,437 people have been intercepted by the Libyan Coast Guard – and brought back to detention centers.
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