FINIAN CUNNINGHAM | 17.06.2018 | WORLD / EUROPE | FEATURED STORYItaly Wins First Showdown over MigrantsOnly days after coming to power, Italy’s new populist government has won in an early showdown with the European Union establishment over the contentious issue of migration.
This week, Italy refused to let a search-and-rescue ship dock in Sicily with over 600 refugees onboard. The stranded people mainly from Africa had been picked up in the coastal waters off Libya and were being transported to Italy.
Italy’s interior minister Matteo Salvini pointedly refused to let the ship disembark. He said: “Saving lives at sea is a duty, but transforming Italy into an enormous refugee camp is not… Italy is done bowing its head and obeying. This time there’s someone saying no.” After a 24-hour period of uncertainty over the destiny of the wretched passengers – including pregnant women and children – the vessel was in the end agreed to be received by Spain at its port of Valencia. One may surmise that the European Union establishment in Brussels intervened hurriedly to avert a public relations disaster from a ship crowded with refugees being stranded on the high seas. In that way, Salvini, the leader of the League party – which is a coalition partner in the new Italian government – was fulfilling one of its main election promises: ending the flow of migrants into Italy.
Since 2104, Italy has received some 600,000 refugees who have come to its shores from the Middle East and North Africa after making perilous journeys across the Mediterranean. Thousands have died from drowning while trying to make the crossing in overcrowded and leaky boats.
When Salvini refused the docking of the vessel this week in Sicily, media reports initially portrayed the response as heartless and a transgression of international maritime law. His party is routinely described as being “far-right” and “anti-immigrant”. It seems those sinister epithets are used in the media as a way to undermine Salvini and the new government in Rome from holding their objections to the influx of refugees. But let’s look at the issue from a broader point of view as the Italian government seeks to do.
Salvini and his coalition partner Luigi Di Maio, of the Five Star Movement (M5S), contend that Italy is bearing the burden of receiving unprecedented numbers of migrants, numbers that are way beyond what other EU countries are accepting.
Geographically, Italy sits as a frontline state on the route for refugees from the Middle East and Africa. Under EU rules, the country which is the first point of arrival is obliged to accommodate the refugees. The Italian government argues that those rules are null and void given the unprecedented numbers, and given that the 28 EU member states should allocate a fairer distribution of refugees.
Also, and this point is badly overlooked in media coverage, the vast majority of migrants are the result of wars and conflicts that have been sponsored by NATO powers, either directly or covertly, as well as by illegal human trafficking networks which have metastasized out those wars.
The context is therefore not one of a simple humanitarian dislocation being met by a heartless “xenophobic” government. It is more a question of why one, or a few, European countries should be saddled with attending to such disproportionate human needs while other EU member states close their doors. Especially when those member states like Britain and France have taken such a prominent role in engaging in illegal US-led NATO wars that have led directly to the surge in refugees to Europe.
In other words, it seems grossly unfair, not to say futile, that some countries like Italy are being obliged to cope with a refugee crisis on a national basis when that crisis has been engendered on an international basis through NATO wars in Central Asia, the Middle East and Africa.
There is also a big unasked question about illegal human trafficking. We are dealing here with systematic collusion between human traffickers, governments and so-called humanitarian NGOs which are aiding and abetting the flow of migrants to European frontline states like Italy.
This author personally learned of the plight of Ethiopian refugees who were being held in a Libyan state military camp in Sabha. The refugees ended up there after being passed on by trafficking gangs. The detainees were eventually released after families back in Ethiopia paid out ransoms – a few thousand dollars which is huge money for these people. The released migrants then end up being taken to Italy under the auspices of the UN.
In the latest episode this week, the Aquarius search-and-rescue ship with over 600 refugees onboard is co-owned reportedly by a Franco-German civic group called SOS Méditerranée and Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres, or MSF). The latter is funded by the shady multibillionaire financier George Soros who seems to have an agenda of promoting large migration flows into Europe. Several other so-called rescue NGOs operating in the Mediterranean are funded by Soros’ Open Society Foundations. Surely a question is: by what authority are self-appointed private groups picking up refugees off the coast of Libya and then transporting these wretched people to Italy?
Surely an international response must be organized to stabilize countries racked by war and other deprivations by mobilizing massive debt-free financial investment; just as importantly, where NATO powers have been involved in waging wars and conflict as in Libya, Mali, Ivory Coast, Central African Republic, and covertly in Syria, those perpetrators must be prosecuted and compelled to pay reparations.
Italy’s new government has right. Why should one country be forced to become a dumping ground for refugees from illegal wars and illegal human trafficking? In particular, when there is a collective responsibility of culprit states, like the US, Britain and France, which skulk off into the shadows.
The showdown this week between Italy and the EU establishment was an important victory. Not a victory about spurning humanitarian need, but rather about overhauling the narrative of the refugee crisis to a more accurate perspective of what it is really about, who is really to blame and who should be really held to account?
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