The Italian government should think of the thousands of lives saved when considering the future of the Mare Nostrum search and rescue operation, the UNHCR’s Italy protection officer, Ricardo Clerici said yesterday.
Addressing a conference to mark World Refugee Day, Mr Ricardo declined to speculate on the future of the programme but said it had been a “great humanitarian success”.
Mare Nostrum, the European Union’s largest search and rescue operation, began last October after 366 migrants drowned when their boat capsized a mile off Sicily.
After the tragedy, the EU pledged about €30 million in emergency assistance, mainly targeted to fund immigration facilities on land.
The Italian government also launched a comprehensive rescue operation at a time when the international community had raised concerns over the lack of humanitarian aid to migrants.
Boat migrants have topped 40,000 this year
The programme, however, is not expected to run forever and the Italian government has already described its as “unsustainable”.
Mr Ricardo said that if the authorities were considering terminating the programme, thousands of lives could be in jeopardy.
Mare Nostrum was estimated to have saved at least 5,000 migrants who would have perished in sea crossings this year, he added.
The number of boat migrants who have reached Italy this year has already topped the total of more than 40,000 for the whole of 2013.
This, together with the high cost of running the programme, has seen increasing pressure being piled on the Italian government to cease the rescue missions.
Mare Nostrum has also had a significant impact on the influx of irregular immigrants to Malta, with practically no landings being recorded for months on end.
Organised by the UNHCR office in Malta, yesterday’s conference was also given a detailed account of the migration situation in Libya.
Research firm Altai Consulting studied the different migration routes that are available to sub-Saharan migrants in the North African country.
The study’s author Arezo Malakooti, said Libya had long been established as the main entry point into Europe.
Political shifts in neighbouring countries, however, had seen smugglers increasingly turn to Egypt for new routes.
The conference also heard first-hand accounts by two migrants who had dared the perilous clandestine voyage to Malta.
Hannah Abraham Beraki, an Eritrean, said she had crossed the desert in a pick-up truck loaded with more than 30 people before eventually paying smugglers to bring her to Malta.
Mohamed Hussein Mohamed, a Somali, thanked the Armed Forces of Malta for saving his life.
Fighting back tears, he described how he had spent six days at sea with about 40 people crammed on a small, engineless dinghy.
Before that, he had buried two friends himself. They had died while walking across the Libyan desert, where they had been abandoned by human traffickers.