Time Running Out for Refugees Seeking Asylum in Italy
By <
http://www.ipsnews.net/author/silvia-giannelli/> Silvia Giannelli
LUCCA, Italy, Aug 1 2014 (IPS) - His journey started four years ago in
Conakry, Guinea. Now that Mamoudou* has finally reached Italy, he hopes this
will be his final stop.
When he first left his home, his plan was to stay in Libya, but after the
2011 crisis, when Gaddafi’s government was overthrown, life in the country
became very hard for migrants. “I was jailed 28 times, and tortured,” he
told IPS, “so I decided to come to Italy, because it’s a democracy and I
hope I will have a peaceful and secure life here.”
Together with 13 other asylum seekers from Mali, Pakistan and Bangladesh,
Mamoudou is now living in a tiny village in the Tuscan mountains, where the
‘Partecipazione e Sviluppo’ association is taking care of his application.
They all arrived between April and June from Libya, where they had migrated
to escape conflicts and hunger and it is now painful for them to recall how
their voyage took. “
In order to smuggle me to the Libyan coast, they put me in the boot of a
car,” says Mamoudou. “I don’t know how many hours I spent there and what day
I left Libya, but my registration documents say I arrived in Sicily on April
11. “
He paid the equivalent of 1,000 dollars to human traffickers to share a boat
with 80 people and no skipper. “They told us where the North was and that we
should have taken turns steering. When the Italian Navy found us, we had no
idea where we were and the boat was already sinking.”
Since the tragedy off the Italian island of Lampedusa, which left more than
350 migrants dead in October last year, the Italian authorities have started
a rescue operation called ‘Mare Nostrum’ (Our Sea). Mamoudou is one of the
more than 80,000 migrants that have been saved since the operation started,
winning appreciation from human rights NGOs and European Union authorities.
“Mare Nostrum is extremely important because it has saved many lives,”
Benjamin Ward, Deputy Director of Human Rights Watch, told IPS. “We think it
is something that needs to continue and we are among other groups calling
for the European Union to respond positively to Italy’s call for European
support for the operations”.
Given the high costs of the operations – about 9.3 million euro a month,
according to Italian Navy – the Italian Minister of the Interior, Angelino
Alfano, who is also leader of the New Centre Right (NCD) party, has stressed
on several occasions the need for <
http://frontex.europa.eu/> Frontex, the
European Union border management agency, to take over Mare Nostrum.
“Mare Nostrum was set up as an emergency operation. It can’t last forever,”
the minister
<
http://www.ansamed.info/ansamed/en/news/sections/politics/2014/06/26/immigr
ation-mare-nostrum-must-become-eu-operation_cf3f7547-8abe-4b07-a742-1e97118b
3851.html> told G6 interior ministers in Barcelona in June. ”Europe must
replace Italy in this effort, and Italy will continue to make its
contribution,” he added.
“Europe must come up with a clear strategy to regulate the flow of migrants.
The Mediterranean that unites us is a European sea. It does not just belong
to Italy, Spain, or any of the other countries that look onto this
extraordinary body of water,” said the minister.
Yet, the answer of the European Commission leaves little room for
negotiation. “Mare Nostrum is a very broad and expensive operation and
Frontex is a small agency, it cannot take over Mare Nostrum,” Michele
Cercone, spokesperson for EU Commissioner for Home Affairs Cecilia
Malmström, explained to IPS. “Of course Frontex can and will contribute and
can do a lot, but we don’t have the means to totally substitute it.”
Despite the widespread approval that the Italian rescue operation enjoys,
Italian right-wing party Northern League has been calling for its
termination since its early stages. “The only real outcome of Mare Nostrum
is the favour we make to the traffickers, who can now leave tens of
thousands of people at risk of dying, because they know the Navy will come
and rescue them,” Massimiliano Fedriga, party leader in the Chamber of
Deputies, told IPS.
“The only real solution is to have EU observatories in the North African
countries to verify who has the right to receive asylum, which must be a
European asylum and not the asylum of a single country. The others, the
illegal migrants, who are the majority, should not come and must not come to
our country,” he concluded.
Yet, in April Alfano had already said that “immigration is deeply changing
profile […] there are increasingly more asylum seekers than economic
migrants.”
Riccardo Noury, communications director of Amnesty International Italy,
confirmed. “The migrants who arrive, when they manage to survive, at the
European border, which is often the Italian and the Greek border, are mostly
people who would have the right to asylum or other types of international
protection,” he told IPS.
Both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch seem to be mostly
concerned by Europe resistance to changing its approach towards migration.
“Obviously there are other aspects like border enforcement, like taking
action against dangerous smuggling, which are important and need to
continue, but we do think that saving lives should be the top priority,”
said Ward.
“While trying to look at tackling the root causes in economic disparity may
be a laudable objective, it is not going to make a difference any time soon
[…] Without an effective rescue response people are going to drown, and they
have drowned, and more will drown. That in our view is something that has to
be engaged. The European Union can’t simply say that it’s Italy’s mess to
fix,” he added.
According to Noury, there are several reasons why Italy’s requests have not
been heard.
“In the past years, Italy has lost the chance to show credible policies
while asking for Europe’s support. We have been the country of push-backs,
the country that threatened to release fake residence permits during the
2011 crisis to allow migrants to cross the Italian Northern border… we
haven’t been a reliable partner when it came to reform the EU’s migration
policies,” the Amnesty International spokesperson commented.
“But we now have another opportunity, with the EU presidency [which Italy
assumed for a six-month period at the beginning of July], to assume a
leadership role.”
If Italy fails to obtain strategic and financial support from the European
Union, it will be soon forced to scale down or discontinue its rescue
operations. One year after the Lampedusa tragedy, exactly same conditions
might be in place, and the consequences could be deadly once again.
(Edited by
<
http://www.ips.org/institutional/our-global-structure/biographies/phil-harr
is/> Phil Harris)
* Name changed to protect his identity.
Received on Fri Aug 01 2014 - 08:42:13 EDT