Italy pressed the EU on Wednesday to devise robust steps to stop the deadly tide of migrants crossing the Mediterranean, including considering military intervention against smugglers and boosting U.N. refugee offices in countries bordering Libya.
“We know where the smugglers keep their boats, where they gather,” said Defense Minister Roberta Pinotti. “The plans for military intervention are there.”
Some 90 percent of smugglers’ boats leave from Libya, where the lack of a central authority has allowed criminal trafficking networks to proliferate.
Pinotti said Italy, the closest European nation to Libya, was willing to take the helm of any military intervention if asked, as long as it is backed by the United Nations.
Pinotti spoke a day before EU leaders hold an emergency summit in Brussels called in the wake of a shipwreck off Libya last weekend believed to have killed more than 800 migrants. It would be the largest known loss of migrants’ lives in a single incident in the Mediterranean.
Ahead of the summit, Premier Mario Renzi called for EU leaders to approve three key proposals: doubling the resources and assets of the current EU border patrol mission, destroying smugglers’ boats and improving coordination across the EU for transferring asylum seekers.
“European Union naval operations in the Horn of Africa have successfully fought piracy — and a similar initiative must be developed to effectively fight against human trafficking in the Mediterranean,” Renzi wrote in a New York Times opinion piece. “Trafficking vessels should be put out of operation.”
In the latest arrivals of migrants, an Italian naval vessel docked in the Sicilian port of Augusta with 446 people who had been rescued off the southern coast of Italy. The navy said 59 were children.
“We prefer to die trying (to migrate) than stay back there and die,” said Emmanual, a Nigerian migrant who recently arrived in Sicily.
Later in the day, another 540 migrants arrived in Salerno. Some were in isolation under a tent of the main deck of the Italian navy ship that rescued them since they had scabies — underscoring a growing health threat that on Wednesday prompted Italian Health Minister Beatrice Lorenzin to convene a summit of EU health ministers in Rome.
Pinotti said she was cautiously hopeful that the EU summit today, solicited by Italy, would take tangible steps to deal with the emergency.
“We think it’s the moment in which Europe decides, forcefully, to have an international police operation, which will undo this band of criminals,” Pinotti said.
In a speech to Parliament, Renzi urged the EU to swiftly craft long-range, comprehensive policy on the migrants.
“When a person has to risk his life because he needs to escape from a situation where they are chopping off the heads of those near him, you cannot discourage departures with a generic statement,” the premier said. “You can do it by putting the (U.N.) High Commissioner for Refugees in Niger, Sudan” and elsewhere in Africa.
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