Italy Is About to Shut Down the Sea Rescue Operation That Saved More Than
90,000 Migrants This Year
By <
https://news.vice.com/contributor/alice-speri> Alice Speri
October 6, 2014 | 1:25 am
Watch these Videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEtNvMMwOP0#t=14
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1uWZ75dy50&list=PL2xVlk0vlMQz1vtABVHaRUWPJ
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A year ago on Friday, when a boat carrying hundreds of mostly Eritrean
migrants capsized just feet away from the Italian coast, killing at least
366 people, Italian authorities who came to the rescue of the few survivors
swore "never again."
But last year's tragedy, which a group is now
<
http://www.change.org/p/riconoscere-la-data-del-3-ottobre-quale-giornata-de
lla-memoria-e-dell-accoglienza> pushing to memorialize by making October 3
an international day of remembrance, was hardly the first such incident, and
it was not the last one. Just three weeks ago, up to 500 migrants, including
100 children, died trying to reach Italy -
<
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/15/migrant-boat-capsizes-egypt-ma
lta-traffickers> reportedly after their smugglers deliberately sunk the
boat, following a confrontation onboard.
Since January, more than 3,000 people have drowned in the Mediterranean,
many near the coast of Lampedusa, a tiny Italian island just 185 miles north
of Tripoli, and this, despite a rescue operation Italy set up following last
October's tragedy.
In less than a year, the rescue operation "Mare Nostrum" - Latin for "our
sea" - has brought more than 91,000 people safely to shore.
"A year ago, on October 3, all those people died at 200 meters from
Lampedusa, they had basically arrived," Gabriele Del Grande, a migration
activist and author of the blog " <
http://fortresseurope.blogspot.com/>
Fortress Europe," told VICE News. "That shipwreck caused a public opinion
scandal. Not because it was so big - it wasn't the first or the biggest one
- but because for the first time people saw the bodies."
"Three weeks ago when 500 people died, it happened on the high seas, so we
didn't see the bodies and nobody felt indignant," he added. "October 3 was
when we first saw rows of corpses on the dock. Mare Nostrum was the direct
result of that indignation."
<
https://news.vice.com/article/more-than-2-000-migrants-rescued-off-italy-in
-the-last-two-days> More than 2,000 migrants rescued off Italy in the last
two days. Read more here.
But the initiative is massively expensive - more than $11 million a month -
and politically controversial, with migration opponents claiming it
encourages smugglers, while Italian authorities complain they were abandoned
by the rest of Europe and left to deal with the problem alone.
Italy is set to shut down the operation in November. Another border control
initiative by the European Union, with significantly reduced capacity, is
supposed to partially replace it - but human rights and migration advocates
are saying the end of Mare Nostrum will only cause more deaths.
"We are proud of the lives we saved," Italy's interior minister Angelino
Alfano said at a
<
http://www.corriere.it/politica/14_agosto_15/alfano-l-operazione-mare-nostr
um-deve-finire-subentri-l-europa-5ea53f04-246d-11e4-a121-b5affdf40fda.shtml>
press conference in August. "But Mare Nostrum won't live another year,
because however commendable, it was meant as a short-term operation.
Responsibility for the Mediterranean frontier rests with Europe. These
migrants don't want to come to Italy, they want to come to Europe."
Shutting down Mare Nostrum at a time when sea arrivals in Italy are at their
highest ever - 120,000 this year alone - is dangerous, critics say.
"The risk is that more people will die of course," Carlotta Sami, a
representative for the UN refugee agency in southern Europe,
<
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/29/un-eu-mediterranean-frontex-ma
re-nostrum-italy> told the Guardian.
<
https://news.vice.com/article/north-african-migrants-are-dying-in-droves-on
-the-mediterranean> North African migrants are dying in droves on the
Mediterranean. Read more here.
"In response to this tragedy, one year ago, the European Commission and EU
member states promised to do more to prevent deaths at sea," Judith
Sunderland, a researcher with Human Rights Watch' European division, wrote
in an
<
http://www.hrw.org/news/2014/10/02/dispatches-honor-lampedusas-dead-sustain
ing-boat-rescue> open letter on Thursday. "A task force was set up, meetings
were held. But it was Italy, on its own, that launched a massive naval
search and rescue operation."
"The most important way Europe should honor all those who have died trying
to reach its borders is with concrete action," she added. "Until that
happens, Italy should continue Mare Nostrum."
Our Sea
Refugees fleeing wars and migrants looking for a better life in Europe have
been taking their hopes and desperation to the waters of the Mediterranean
for decades, with most over the last 10 years making their departure point
in Libya, where controls are loose and human smugglers best organized.
"Libya is easier because it's basically in a civil war, smugglers do what
they want and police can't stop them," Del Grande said. "And you can't
really coordinate with a non-existing government."
Previous Italian administrations adopted a policy of sea patrol and
"repulsion" of migrant boats - forcing them to turn back. For a while that
reduced the flux of migrants, but the practice was condemned as violating
both maritime and asylum law, as collective rejections got in the way of
individuals' potential cases for asylum.
And inevitably, people trying to make it to Europe found ways to get there,
taking increasingly dangerous routes to do it.
"There will always be reasons to leave, always be smugglers, patrols are not
the solution," Del Grande said, and he added that so long as there are boats
arriving, someone will hopefully come to their rescue. "It's like the ER. It
doesn't matter how much it costs, you just do it because it needs to be
done."
Depending on the year, and the most patrolled routes, boats packed with
migrants aimed for Spain, Greece, Cyprus, and Malta, but in recent years
Italy, and Lampedusa in particular, have become the primary destination -
accounting for
<
http://www.ilsole24ore.com/art/notizie/2014-04-25/immigrazione-flop-mare-no
strum-111329.shtml?uuid=ABBzBfDB> 70 percent of all sea arrivals to Europe
in 2013.
<
https://news.vice.com/article/hundreds-of-african-migrants-are-still-jumpin
g-fences-into-europe> Hundreds of African migrants are still jumping fences
into Europe. Read more here.
While most migrants used to come to Europe from sub-Saharan African
countries, now many are refugees of wars in North Africa and the Middle
East. Surges in arrivals were directly proportional to the political unrest
that gripped the region over the last few years.
In 2011, during Libya's civil war, 1 million people - Libyans and foreign
workers - fled the country, with 25,000 making it to Italy on boats. This
year, as the number of Syrian refugees has reached a record 9 million, more
than 30,000 have followed that route - including many Palestinian refugees
in Syria, fleeing the besieged camp of Yarmouk, in Damascus.
But while coping with the arrivals to the best of its abilities, Italy has
also been engaged on heated debates on the question - with Mare Nostrum
coming under attack by the country's anti-immigration right, and with
supporters of the initiative trying to step up their pressure on other
European countries to do their part.
"On the one hand the government claims this is an honorable mission, they
are saying this is good because we are saving lives," Del Grande said. "But
the Lega Nord, Italy's xenophobic party, are saying, 'We opened the highway.
We're spending a ton of money and they are coming because they know we are
going to rescue them.' That's what the polemic boils down to. They want to
shut down the mission because they say it brings more migrants."
"On the other hand, there is a debate between the government and the EU,
with Italy saying, 'This is a European frontier, not an Italian one only,
and Europe should pay for it," he added.
As Mare Nostrum shuts down next month it will be partially replaced by
operations run by Frontex, a Poland-based European coordination agency that
will channel EU funds into sea patrols and run interventions by different
countries' militaries.
Few details have been revealed about the new operation, dubbed Frontex Plus,
but the agency behind it is not equipped to carry out the kind of
humanitarian assistance Mare Nostrum has provided. Its primary goal is
"border enforcement, not saving lives," Sunderland wrote.
"Frontex is simply a coordination agency, they don't have ships and
helicopters," Del Grande said. "They are an office in Warsaw and they
coordinate efforts."
Frontex Plus won't enter international waters - which Mare Nostrum did - and
it will receive significantly less funding.
"Frontex Plus is not a replacement for Mare Nostrum. What exactly will
happen to Mare Nostrum is an Italian issue, it is not for us to decide,"
Cecilia Malmstrom, the EU's home affairs commissioner, said
<
http://euobserver.com/justice/125456> earlier this month. "Frontex does not
have the capacity to do Mare Nostrum. We don't have the same amount of
people. We don't have the mandate. We don't have the money. We don't have
the resources."
And she, like some in Italy, expressed concern that the Italian rescue
mission encouraged immigration.
"The tragic backslide of this is that it has also increased trafficking
intensity on the other side of the Mediterranean," she said, "Which means
that people have been put in even more unsafe vessels and even smaller boats
because of the likelihood of them being saved."
<
https://news.vice.com/article/the-unaccompanied-minors-crisis-is-not-really
-about-border-enforcement> The unaccompanied minors crisis is not really
about border enforcement. Read more here.
But shrinking down the rescue is not a solution either, critics worry.
"Mare Nostrum showed it was possible to rescue tens of thousands of people,
especially vulnerable people like pregnant women and children," Michele
Prosperi, of Save The Children Italy, told the
<
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/29/un-eu-mediterranean-frontex-ma
re-nostrum-italy> Guardian. "Whatever shape or form the new system takes, it
must guarantee the same capacity."
Solutions
During the last year, in an attempt to put pressure on other European
countries to do more, Italian authorities have stopped fingerprinting all
the migrants that arrive on their shores - in violation of the Dublin
Regulation, which establishes that non-Europeans be registered at their
first port of arrival.
A migrant arriving in Italy is technically only entitled to seek asylum
there, though many, if not most, hope to continue their journeys north.
This year, Italy only fingerprinted those that intended to stay in the
country - and up to 50,000 of those that arrived were never registered, Del
Grande said.
Other European countries downplay Italy's migrant crisis as a "false
emergency," citing their own numbers of asylum claims. Even without a
Mediterranean border, Germany gets up to 100,000 claims a year, Del Grande
said, and most of the Syrians that arrived in Italy eventually moved north -
with 50,000 Syrians claiming asylum in Sweden last year.
"The truth is, this Europe is selfish, each government looks after its
interest," Del Grande said. "All it would really take is a serious reform on
asylum law, and a unified European approach. Instead, everyone looks at
their own numbers: 'I have 100,000, you only have 20,000, you need to take
more.' That's the level we're at."
<
https://news.vice.com/article/these-guys-faked-a-wedding-to-smuggle-syrian-
refugees-and-filmed-it> These guys faked a wedding to smuggle Syrian
refugees and filmed it. Read more here.
A unified European approach has been long on the table - with no concrete
plans in sight.
But arrivals by sea, the most dangerous and often tragic, only account for a
tiny fraction of immigration to the union, and Italy itself, which is home
to nearly 5 million foreigners.
Many migrants come to Italy from eastern Europe and the Balkans, also thanks
to the EU's inclusion of some eastern European countries, and its relaxation
of visa policies.
"Visa liberalization was a brave policy, and it's working," Del Grande said,
citing the example of Albania. Through the 1990s, the crammed, capsized
boats we now see coming from Libya came from Albania, and thousands died
crossing the Adriatic Sea.
Then, the EU opened up its borders, and the boats from Albania stopped. "And
we didn't see an invasion of Albanians," Del Grande said.
Instead, he noted, the countries from which most migrants leave are those
where it's hardest to obtain a Schengen visa - the sought-after European
passe-partout. A
<
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/28085/1/hobolth_Submit_your_poster_here__Poster_Ho
bolth_26-04-2010_A1.pdf> study by the London School of Economics showed that
the countries with high rates of Schengen visa refusal were often the
countries of origin of most migrants arriving in Italy by boat.
"Where it's hardest to get a visa, people eventually will choose to travel
by boat," Del Grande said. "But instead than addressing the cause and
simplifying the visa process, we respond with military boats. We've been
doing that for 20 years and for 20 years we have been counting the dead."
Received on Mon Oct 06 2014 - 17:45:29 EDT