Italy rescues more than 3,500 migrants, Renzi asks for help
Sun, 01 June 2014 4:12pm GMT
ROME June 01 (Reuters) - Italian navy patrol ships rescued more than 3,500
migrants including hundreds of women and children from boats coming from
North Africa, authorities said on Saturday, while Prime Minister Matteo
Renzi called for help from the European Union.
The rescues, which the coast guard said have been going on since Friday
evening, are the latest in a seemingly endless succession as the chronic
migrant crisis in the southern Mediterranean has picked up this year.
A total of 3,612 migrants from Syria and North Africa were picked up from 11
boats and taken to ports in Sicily and the Mediterranean island of
Lampedusa, a coastguard spokesman told Reuters.
Some 43,000 people have crossed from North Africa to Italy so far this year,
the same amount as in the whole of 2013, the coastguard said.
That leaves the annual total set to surpass the 60,000 who made the trip in
2011 when the Arab Spring revolutions loosened border controls, according to
the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR.
The near daily arrivals of migrant boats, mostly leaving from ports in
Libya, was an issue in Italy in the European parliamentary elections on
Sunday.
The anti-immigrant Northern League, which had lost much of its support over
the last two years due to corruption scandals and leadership changes,
recovered to win more than 6 percent of the vote.
Renzi said in an interview with several European newspapers on Saturday that
the European Union and the United Nations were not doing enough to help
Italy handle the surge of migrants.
"Europe has to call on the United Nations to intervene in Libya and more
generally it must show a capacity to manage the immigration phenomenon," he
was quoted as saying in the Italian daily La Stampa. (Reporting By Gavin
Jones; Editing by Rosalind Russell)