A photo made available yesterday by the Italian navy shows illegal migrants, many of them already in life jackets, onboard a long dinghy-style vessel after being rescued over the past 24 hours in the Mediterranean.
DPA/Rome
Reports yesterday of more migrant deaths once again highlighted the plight of migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean to reach Europe, as Italian authorities announced the rescue of 600 people in the last 24 hours.
The new deaths were first reported on the weekend by the ANSA news agency, which said they were travelling on a boat that sank some 30 nautical miles (55km) from Libya’s shoreline.
According to ANSA, the shipwrecked vessel had been carrying about 100 passengers.
A navy spokesman could not confirm the report that 10 bodies had been spotted at sea.
However, the Italian navy said yesterday that it had picked up 55 people who had been on the doomed vessel.
According to the navy, they were first saved by a passing cargo ship – which had already taken on 105 migrants from another distressed vessel south of the Italian island of Lampedusa.
The spokesman indicated that the search was continuing for any missing.
The rescues announced by the navy – along with 463 others picked up by different navy patrols, cargo ships and coast guard vessels in the last day – helped contribute to the new figure of 600 rescued, which, while high, did not set any records amid this year’s rush of migrants attempting to reach Europe.
The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) has calculated that more than 2,200 migrants have died in the past eight months while trying to reach Europe via the Mediterranean Sea – three times the total in 2013.
“In the coming weeks, IOM now expects the death toll to pass 3,000 – with a quarter of the year remaining,” the Geneva-based organisation said on Friday.
Italy has faced a record inflow of migrants this year, fuelled by unrest in Syria, the Gaza Strip and elsewhere.
At least 120,000 have landed since January 1, compared to less than 43,000 for the whole of 2013.
On the weekend, German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said in an interview with Der Spiegel weekly that he had written to the European Union’s executive arm, the European Commission, to call for a more equitable burden sharing of asylum seekers within the bloc.
“It cannot be that four, five countries take the largest number of refugees,” de Maiziere said.
“This is not in line with the necessary pan-European solidarity that we need urgently,” the German minister added.
In Brussels, a commission spokesman said EU interior ministers would discuss the problem at their next meeting on October 9-10.
“We have been very clear on the need for ... at least 10 to 11 member states to do more effort,” he said.
According to EU data, last year Germany, France, Sweden, Britain and Italy accounted for 70% of all asylum applications in the bloc.
De Maiziere said steps were needed so that countries like Italy “can quickly detect those people who can make a claim for international protection and those who are not eligible for this can be quickly returned to their countries of origin or departure”.
Migrants who arrive in Italy are supposed to claim asylum there. But many slip through the net and travel to northern Europe, to join friends and relatives and take advantage of more generous welfare programmes and better work opportunities.
According to Florian Kronbichler, an Italian parliamentarian from the German-speaking region of South Tyrol, this year more than 3,000 migrants who had illegally crossed the border into Austria have been caught by police and sent back to Italy, up from 2,200 in 2013.
On Friday a top UN rights official has demanded that North African and European countries must bring to justice the people smugglers who allegedly killed up to 500 migrants in the Mediterranean by sinking their boat earlier this month.
“If the survivors’ accounts are indeed true – and they appear all too credible – we are looking at what amounts to mass murder in the Mediterranean,” said Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, the UN high commissioner for human rights.
In addition, countries in the region should clamp down on smugglers who exploit and endanger vulnerable migrants for financial gain, said Zeid, a former diplomat and member of Jordan’s royal family.
His warning came a day after prosecutors in Catania, Italy, said that they were investigating the ship’s sinking in international waters with the co-operation of authorities in Egypt, Malta and Greece.
The IOM had said last week that the accident could represent “the biggest shipwreck of recent years”.
The organisation said its Italian staff was told by two survivors who made it to Sicily that smugglers deliberately rammed their boat, possibly because migrants had refused to switch to a smaller, more precarious vessel.
The Italian Council for Refugees, a Rome-based group, said the migrants had already changed boats four times and had been asked to cram into a boat 20m long and 6m wide.
It said two more survivors are in Malta and six on the Greek island of Crete: four Palestinian men, a 17-year-old Syrian girl and a two-year-old girl of unknown nationality whose parents are thought to have drowned.
The shipwreck reportedly took place on September 10, four days after 500 migrants from Syria, Egypt, Sudan and the Gaza Strip had set off from the Egyptian port of Damietta.
Adults paid €2,000 ($2,600) each to get on board, the Italian Council for Refugees said.
“Survivors say that for three interminable days an ever-growing number of people lost their strength and disappeared in the waters,” it said. “They also say that they saw three different commercial ships pass by, that they were in turn spotted by their crews, which, however, did not intervene.”
The UN high commissioner for human rights charged that xenophobia was driving migration policies, preventing governments from finding real solutions to this issue.
