23/08/2015
With no let-up in the flood of would-be refugees
crossing the Mediterranean, the Italian coastguard is reporting having rescued about 3,000 boat people, after receiving distress calls from more than 20 overcrowded vessels drifting in waters off Libya.
One of the biggest single-day rescue operations to date appeared to have been concluded on Saturday without any reports of casualties, when two navy vessels, the
Cigala Fulgosi and the
Vega, picked up 507 and 432 people respectively from two wooden boats in danger of sinking just off Libya.
At least another 1,000 rescued migrants and refugees were reported to be headed for Italian ports on other boats.
However, Prime Minister Matteo Renzi is not getting an easy time of it. The wave of new arrivals has triggered virulent attacks on his handling of the crisis. Senator Maurizio Gasparri, from Silvio Berlusconi's centre-right Forza Italia party, says: "This must [be] a joke. We are using our own forces to do the people smugglers' business for them and ensure we are invaded".
Matteo Salvini, leader of the anti-immigration Northern League, is calling on the government to park the migrants on disused Italian oil rigs off Libya. "Help them, rescue them and take care of them: but don't let them land here", he writes.
Of course, this sort of rhetoric is not new. In
June 2003, Umberto Bossi, then head of the Northern League was quoted as saying that boats carrying migrants should be shot out of the water. He was "sick" of illegal immigrants, the
Corriere della Sera newspaper had him as saying, then recommending that weapons should be used because there was no other solution. "After the second or third warning, boom... the cannon roars", he said.
Twelve years later, the problem has vastly intensified, but at least the politicians are no longer talking about blowing the boat people out of the water.
Humanitarian organisations, on the other hand, are calling on EU Member States to shoulder more of the burden of absorbing the waves of asylum-seeking migrants and to help create safer routes for them to reach Europe.
Those things aren't going to happen in the near future either, which means there is no possibility of immediate relief. But things can't go on like this â sooner, rather than later, something is going to have to give.
