The Italian government of Giorgia Meloni is reluctant to welcome the survivors rescued by the NGOs, including those on the “Ocean Viking”. However, he assigned a port to the SOS Humanity boat on Friday evening. The French and German governments said they were ready to take care of part of the migrants pending on humanitarian ships.
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Nearly a thousand migrants rescued in the central Mediterranean by humanitarian ships awaited, Friday, November 4, a safe landing place in Europe. Four and a half years after Matteo Salvini, the Italian Interior Minister at the time, announced that he wanted to close his ports to rescue NGOs, the government of Giorgia Meloni in turn reluctant to welcome them.
Friday evening, Italy, however, assigned the port of Catania, Sicily, to the Humanity 1 ship of the German NGO SOS Humanity to verify the state of health of the 179 migrants on board. Three other humanitarian boats, including the Ocean Viking, the NGO SOS Mediterranean and the Red Cross, and the Geo Barents, of Médecins sans frontières (MSF), were still waiting to be able to disembark people rescued at sea after They fled Libya or Tunisia.
It was when the deputy (La France Insoumise, Val-d’Oise) Carlos Martens Bilongo evoked the situation of the Viking Ocean that the deputy (National Rally, Gironde) Grégoire de Fournas, sanctioned Friday by the ‘National Assembly, pronounced his sentence: “which he returns to Africa”, Thursday, November 3. “The humanitarian emergency is increasingly acute,” said Sophie Beau, co -founder of SOS Méditerranée. While the weather is deteriorating, 234 survivors are on board the Viking Ocean – including seventeen women and fifty minors, some since October 22. She denounces a “non-compliance with maritime law”.
“Ultra-toxic” file
The fact that humanitarian ships are waiting for several days before being able to disembark is not new. The situation has been recurrent since 2018. “It is the statements of the Italian government that have changed,” said Claudia Lodesani, of MSF, whose ship Geo Barents is waiting to land 572 people, including sixty minors and three pregnant women. The Italian Minister of the Interior, Matteo Pierdosi, announced to consider a ban on entry into the territorial waters of humanitarian ships.
“We are in a political impasse”, regrets Sophie Beau. However, NGO rescue operations represent only 15 % of the 85,000 people arrived this year in Italy by sea, half of which is from Bangladesh, Tunisia and Egypt. “The majority of people are rescued by the Italian authorities or arrive directly in Lampedusa,” said Flavio Di Giacomo, spokesperson for the International Organization for Migration. Moreover, the arrivals remain almost twice lower than what they were in 2016. “We saw with the war in Ukraine 170,000 people arriving in Italy in four months and no one spoke of a crisis” , he adds.
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