The Italian coast guard said 43 bodies had been recovered, and 80 people had survived. The Italian news agency ANSA said among the dead were “many children.”
The sinking occurred at a time when migration to Europe, and to Italy in particular, is spiking, despite years-long efforts by leaders to cut off flows by building walls, using surveillance and sometimes employing brute force. In 2022, Europe saw its highest migration numbers in six years.
While much of Europe has become inured to the problems of migration — with the issue’s political potency having faded — the disaster Sunday dominated Italian news and could refocus attention on the subject. And though Sunday’s incident appeared to be particularly deadly, there are smaller-scale drownings almost daily, with several thousand dying in the Central Mediterranean every year.
The Calabrian coast is an area that until recently saw little migration activity. But as Greece has tightened its doors, traffickers operating in Turkey have charted a new — and much longer — course, bypassing Greek islands and heading instead to Italy’s Calabrian coastline. Of the 12,000 migrants who have made it to Italy so far this year, 678 have landed in Calabria.
“You can slow them down, but you can’t stop them. It’s too vast,” Nicola Gratteri, a prominent prosecutor in Calabria, said of traffickers in an interview two months ago.
The people taking that route tend to come primarily from Afghanistan and Syria.
In a statement, Meloni, who leads the far-right Brothers of Italy party, expressed her “deep sorrow” for lives that she said had been “cut short by human traffickers.” She called it “criminal” to launch a small boat packed with so many people in bad weather.
“The government is committed to preventing such departures, and with them the unfolding of these tragedies,” she said.
But as has become obvious during its first several months in power, Italy’s right-wing government has few tools to limit the number of landings. It has focused primarily on rescue vessels operated by humanitarian groups, imposing obstacles that raise their operating costs — such as assigning them Italian ports that are far from where the rescues occur.
But the NGO vessels account for only 15 percent of migration arrivals. And Italy hasn’t yet tried — or been able — to close itself off more fully like Greece, where border authorities are accused of intercepting boats carrying asylum seekers and pushing them back to international waters.
Chico Harlan
Source link