Italy’s maritime search and rescue service has saved 3,500 migrants and found 19 corpses in the Mediterranean since Friday, as thousands attempted to cross to Europe by boat during the weekend, the Italian navy said yesterday.
Calmer summer seas have led more people to make the perilous crossing this year from North Africa, where a breakdown of order in Libya has been exploited by human traffickers, pushing the number of arrivals into Italy since January past 100,000.
The Italian ship Sirio recovered 18 corpses and 73 survivors from a raft, the navy said on Twitter yesterday, after a frigate picked up one corpse along with 1,372 survivors on Friday night.
The deaths were reported shortly after a boat carrying migrants sank off the Libyan coast on Friday. The Libyan coast guard originally estimated the boat had held 150-200 people, but an official said yesterday that further checks showed it was bigger than first thought, and more than 250 migrants may have died.
The Mare Nostrum search and rescue mission began after a shipwreck near Italy’s coast killed 366 people last October. The UN refugee agency said around 500 migrants had died in the Mediterranean between January and July this year.
A breakdown of order in Libya has been exploited by human traffickers this summer
The mission costs around €9 million a month and has sparked fierce debate in Italy, which slipped back into recession in the second quarter after years of stagnation.
The flood of migrants has helped revive support for Italy’s anti-immigration Northern League party, whose leader Matteo Salvini is an outspoken critic of Mare Nostrum. Salvini wrote “Stop the invasion” on his Facebook page yesterday.
Interior minister Angelino Alfano said in an interview with the Corriere della Sera newspaper yesterday that Mare Nostrum was intended to be a temporary measure which could not continue until the second anniversary of the October shipwreck, and voiced concern about the Northern League’s vociferous opposition.
“Either Europe takes responsibility or Italy will have to make its own decisions. Sadly, Salvini’s words show that in Italy an ugly extreme right wing is being born,” Corriere quoted Alfano as saying.
EU Home Affairs Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom said in a statement later yesterday that she would meet Alfano in Brussels next Wednesday “to better define priorities and provide assistance”. At the frontier between Europe and Africa, Italy has long attracted sea-borne migrants, but the number of arrivals this year is already above a previous record of just over 60,000 for all of 2011.