YET AGAIN - MIGRATION UPDATE

On the day when the Italian Coast Guard has completed the rescue and bringing to safety of 941 migrants in the Mediterranean, we are once again witnessing politicians arguing about who should carry out patrol and rescue missions in these waters and the scale of any such operations. The Italian Mare Nostrum operation having been wound up in October, the Triton operation [coordinated by the European External Borders Agency Frontex, which may have different priorities] has been working on a much smaller scale and its ships have not patrolled near the Libyan coast, as the Italian ships did. Italy, to its credit, continues to send in rescuers close to the Libyan shore after alerting Libya to migrant boats in danger in its waters.

Thus it has been over the past two days, during which Italian Coast Guard vessels, three  merchant ships and one Triton naval unit rescued migrants in seven different operations. The migrants were travelling in five dinghies and two other boats. Sadly, one of the larger dinghies, which was carrying around 130 people, capsized 50 miles north of Libya and ten bodies were recovered.

The rescued migrants are said to be of Syrian, Palestinian, Tunisian and Sub-Saharan nationality. Among them were 30 children and 50 women, one of whom is pregnant and needed urgent medical evacuation by the Coast Guard on Lampedusa.  The migrants have been brought to Porto Empedocle, Augusta and Pozzallo today. Pozzallo has again received the saddest delivery - that of bodies - a sight which always causes great sorrow in the town.

The Court at Siracusa has opened an investigation into the deaths and it is being treated as a murder enquiry. That said, just what is it going to take to get the EU as a whole to act on the Mediterranean migration issue? How much longer are other countries,including my own, going to stand by and watch desperate people die?  Italy has said it will not abandon migrants in danger at sea but the rest of the EU continues to abandon Italy.

Gauri van Gulik of Amnesty International said today,

"Merchant vessels and national Coast Guard have again responded valiantly to the immense and growing challenge of saving the lives of vulnerable migrants but that falls far short of sufficient in the face of this growing humanitarian crisis. Without a European search and rescue operation, the European Union's approach looks increasingly haphazard and negligent."

Update at 15.15 on 5.3.15
The death toll from the capsized boat now appears to be around 50. Two people have been arrested on suspicion of people-trafficking.

UPDATE ON LAMPIONE TRAGEDY

Image: Wikipedia Italia

Mystery continues to surround the case of a migrant boat which, according to its surviving passengers, sank off the Island of Lampione on Thursday night.  So far 56 survivors have been saved and helped by Italian and NATO authorities but, since no one knows how many passengers the boat was carrying, Coastguard, Naval and Finance Police crews have no idea how many people they are looking for in what has now become a recovery operation.  Yesterday a second body was found in the area but police cannot be sure that it is the body of one of the migrants on the boat.

Stranger still, no flotsam or items belonging to the passengers have been found in the area, which lends weight to the theory that the passengers may have been deliberately abandoned off the island, whilst the people traffickers who had brought them there sped back to Tunisia.  An enquiry by the Prosecutor's Office of the Province of Agrigento is underway.

On Friday Nicholas Beger, Director of Amnesty International's European Institutions Office, said,

"“The EU is failing these migrants – European countries must make concerted efforts to prevent deaths at sea by stepping up capacity and coordination for search and rescue operations.

While the number of migrants arriving at Lampedusa has ebbed since a peak during unrest across North Africa last year, this latest shipwreck shows that authorities need to remain vigilant and ready to assist large groups of people – potentially including many asylum-seekers and refugees – in vessels that are often overcrowded and unseaworthy.”

Image: Wikipedia Italia

La Repubblica's Palermo edition reports that another 81 migrants were rescued after an inadequate boat ran into trouble 35 miles off Lampedusa yesterday and that last night 11 Tunisians were saved off Pantelleria.