More than a thousand migrants have landed in Italy in recent hours, and hundreds of others are waiting on board humanitarian ships, a recurring influx every summer, but which comes this year in the midst of the legislative campaign for which the far right is given favorite.
Between 1er January and July 22, 34,000 people arrived by sea in Italy, compared to 25,500 in the same period of 2021 and 10,900 in 2020, according to the Interior Ministry.
More than 600 people trying to cross the Mediterranean aboard a fishing boat were rescued on Saturday by a merchant ship and the coastguards off Calabria, in the far south of the Italian boot.
They were landed in several ports in Calabria and Sicily, said a statement from the coast guard.
The authorities also found on board five bodies of dead migrants in still undetermined circumstances.
The Mediterranean is becoming the biggest graveyard of the desperate
“The Mediterranean is becoming the biggest cemetery for the desperate,” reacted the president of the Sicily region, Nello Musumeci, in a press release.
On the island of Lampedusa, 522 people originating in particular from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sudan, Ethiopia and Somalia arrived in the night from Saturday to Sunday on board about fifteen different boats, coming from from Tunisia and Libya.
According to the Italian media, the reception center of this small rock closer to Africa than to Italy is overwhelmed. With a capacity of 250 to 300 people, it currently houses 1,200, says the Ansa agency.
Migrants who manage to reach the shores of Lampedusa or Sicily travel on old and overloaded skiffs, in deplorable sanitary conditions, often without life jackets, with meager food and under a blazing sun.
The daily Sicily specifies that the last landings in Lampedusa saw ships with dozens, even hundreds of people on board, but also small inflatables.
Thus, four Tunisians, including a woman, were stranded in the night on the beach of Cala Pisana after crossing the small arm of the sea which separates Tunisia from the island. Simultaneously, the coastguards intercepted a 13-meter vessel, leaving Zawija, Libya, with 123 Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Egyptians and Sudanese on board.
most dangerous road
In addition, sea rescue NGOs continue to recover hundreds of migrants lost in the Mediterranean.
SeaWatch said on Sunday it carried out four rescue operations on Saturday. ” On board of SeaWatch3, we have 428 people, including women and children, a nine-month pregnant woman and a patient with severe burns,” she said on her Twitter account.
L’Ocean Viking, of the NGO SOS Méditerranée, said it had carried out two rescue operations during the day on Sunday.
He initially recovered 87 people, including 57 unaccompanied minors, crammed into “an overcrowded inflatable boat in distress in international waters off Libya”.
Then 108 people, including many women and children, were found in similar conditions. “There are 195 people who are now being taken care of on board theocean viking “, said the NGO in a press release.
The Central Mediterranean migration route is the most dangerous in the world. The International Organization for Migration estimates the number of dead and missing there at 990 since the beginning of the year.
This seasonal increase in arrivals during the summer coincides this year in Italy with a turbulent political context. The Prime Minister, Mario Draghi, dropped by several parties making up his government of national unity, has resigned.
The President of the Republic, Sergio Mattarella, dissolved the parliament and fixed for September 25 elections for which the right and the extreme right are given favourites.
Sunday morning on Twitter, Matteo Salvini, leader of the Lega (anti-immigration), deplored the arrival of “411 illegal immigrants in a few hours in Lampedusa”.
“On September 25, Italians will finally be able to choose change: for the return of security, courage and border control,” he wrote.
Mr. Salvini is responding to Italian justice for “sequestration” for having illegally blocked 147 migrants at sea in 2019 in disastrous sanitary conditions by refusing them to disembark, when he was Minister of Immigration. The next hearings are to be held in September before the court in Palermo.