More than 100 rescued migrants from private cargo ship Alexander Maersk, picked up off the coast of southern Italy on Friday, yesterday arrived in the southern port of Pozzallo in Sicily.
The new Italian government has closed its ports to ships operated by charities in the Mediterranean, saying that the EU must share the burden of disembarking migrants rescued at sea, mostly off the Libyan coast.
Italy’s populist interior minister on Monday returned from a quick trip to Libya, expressing confidence in his decision to close Italian ports to migrants while pressuring the rest of Europe to help the North African country secure its borders.
Photo: AP
Italian Minister of the Interior Matteo Salvini chose the Libyan capital of Tripoli for his first official visit abroad to hammer home his commitment to suppressing the mass migration that has fueled anti-migrant sentiment across Europe and brought his xenophobic League party to power.
Salvini called for UN-backed and EU-funded centers to screen asylum applicants in nations that border Libya — primarily Chad, Niger and Sudan — but not in Libya itself or Italy.
He also vowed to help Libyan authorities assert control of their territorial waters to prevent Europe-bound migrants from departing and to keep migrant aid groups based in Europe out of the way.
Photo: AP
“This is the point of absolute convergence with Libya: Block the business of clandestine migration,” Salvini told reporters in Rome after he returned home.
The Alexander Maersk is a container ship owned by Maersk Line, part of Danish transport and logistics A.P. Moller-Maersk Group, and is not operated by a non-governmental organization.
The ship had been floating off the coast of Sicily since Friday as it waited to be assigned a port, the ship owner had said.
Pozzallo Mayor Roberto Ammatuna, who supervised the arrival, said he was happy that Salvini had allowed the Maersk to dock after he had made specific requests.
Italy has taken in 650,000 boat migrants since 2014, but its new, tough approach of turning away ships has aggravated EU tensions over immigration policy.
Ammatuna denied that Italy and Europe were living a “migrant emergency.”
“It’s a perceived alarm not a real one, numbers speak for themselves. In this city alone, we welcomed 22,000 migrants in 2016, 11,000 last year, and this year, so far, about 3,000 people,” Ammatuna told the Sky TG24 news channel.
An Italian doctor at the port, Vincenzo Morello, said that the migrants were mainly exhausted, but that there were a few cases of dermatitis, someone had been operated on for spine problems and another was missing an arm due to “previous problems.”
“They have eaten, and more than anything they have been calm, so even if they are psychologically tired, they are happy to have arrived,” he said.
EU leaders on Sunday failed to come up with a joint position to tackle migration, and are to try again at a summit this week.
A second rescue ship, the Lifeline, stuck in international waters with more than 230 migrants aboard, would be allowed to enter one of Malta’s ports after Italy refused, a French government spokesman said yesterday.
Earlier this month, a ship carrying more than 600 migrants, turned away by both Italy and Malta, the Aquarius, was stranded before it was accepted by Spain.
Additional reporting by AP
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