Migrants may well land in Malta in their thousands but not in the “biblical” proportions predicted at the start of the Libyan crisis, according to a top official of the International Organisation for Migration.
Venezuelan Josè Angel Oropeza, the organisation’s chief of mission for the Mediterranean and North African region, said Libya’s detention and reception centres held “much lower” numbers than the 300,000 mentioned by Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini at the outset of the conflict.
“I don’t think we will see outstanding numbers of people coming from Libya to other countries like Malta and Italy,” Mr Oropeza said from his office in Merchants Street, Valletta. “What we may eventually see after the conflict is people fleeing Libya for political reasons. That is something that will happen but we don’t know the numbers and we don’t know where they’ll go either. We’re led to believe that they’ll go to (neighbouring countries) Tunisia, Chad or Egypt.”
So far, this was where the real “biblical” exodus was taking place, with an estimated 1,600 people an hour crossing to Tunisia and Egypt, adding up to more than 300,000 so far. Both countries have just experienced political and social turmoil and Mr Oropeza hailed Tunisia for handling the situation so well: “We have to praise the Tunisians for their assistance, a country that was in political and social turmoil a few months ago and now has seen an influx of thousands of people at its border,” he said.
This, he added, was a side of post-conflict Tunisia that had sadly been overlooked due to the boatloads of migrants leaving the country for Lampedusa. The IOM has so far assisted 55,000 migrants at the Tunisian border, helping many to return home on chartered flights.
Asked to comment on claims that the Maltese armed forces occasionally waved boatloads of migrants towards Italy after giving them fuel, Mr Oropeza said he was not aware of anything of the sort.
He did, however, concede that countries of transit could not handle large number of migrants alone. It was necessary for everyone to share the responsibility and the burden.
“It’s difficult to guess what will happen. You may remember that during the peak of the turmoil in Tunisia people expected migrants to cross to southern Italy but that only happened two or three months later when the situation was stable... No one knows what the future will bring.”
Citing economic reasons as being the main motivation for people moving from one country to another, Mr Oropeza pointed to Egypt and Tunisia as two countries that could experience an outflow because they depended so much on tourism.
“At the moment, there is no tourism to these countries and for the time being people who depended on tourism have no jobs; those are the economic migrants that are going to Lampedusa.”
In today’s globalised society, it made sense for more developed countries to help the economies of countries where opportunities were scarce. “This way the people of these countries would be given two options: to migrate or to stay. Right now they only have one option.”
The Maltese government was well-prepared for an eventual influx of migrants and its relationship with the IOM was “outstanding”, he said.
The IOM runs projects on the island that include the repatriation or resettlement of migrants, educating them on their rights and obligations as residents in Malta and teaching them job-seeking skills.