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Ajouter un commentaireHumanitarian crisis in Lampedusa
Since January, over 20,000 migrants have arrived at the Pelagie archipelago, three small Italian islands located off the coast of Tunisia, the largest of which, Lampedusa, is home to around 6,000 inhabitants.
- Refugees waiting to be transferred in Lampedusa
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Avisnet©
Who are these ‘Tunisini’, as the Italians call them ? Although most sources claim an overwhelming majority of Tunisians, there have also been reports of sub-Saharan Africans, Eritreans, Somalis, Libyans and an increasing number of women and children. There is still no precise data on these 22,000 new arrivals, whom Tunisia refused to take back en masse. This dedicated site was created by the International Organization for Migration for tracking population movement in the region, but no official figures exist for countries such as Libya, Italy or Greece, or indeed Sudan, Chad or Algeria.
There can be no doubt that what has occurred in Lampedusa is a humanitarian crisis, the pressure increasing gradually to the regular rhythm of boats arriving from Tunisia and Libya. Despite transfers being organised to centres in Sicily and the Italian mainland, the critical threshold was reached when food ran out on 30 March.
A question of scale
For the island, the chaos was very real and was widely broadcast throughout the media. Italian television channels transmitted wall-to-wall coverage of the migrants’ terrible living conditions and the anger of the island’s inhabitants. Several days later there was further tragedy when of one of the overcrowded vessels sank off the Italian coast – almost 250 people died. However, this is just the tip of the iceberg.
The IOM’s dedicated site reports that the total number of displaced persons due to the crisis in Libya has reached almost 490,000, with the majority heading to Tunisia and Egypt – two countries which were heavily affected themselves by the Arab spring. The European Union and its Member States, who are among the greatest donors of funds to humanitarian causes, naturally praised the solidarity shown among north African countries, but have shown a complete unwillingness to tackle this humanitarian crisis on their own soil.
If the statements made by European leaders are to be anything to go by, it would seem that the arrival of 20,000 people in the space of three months is a migratory crisis which they are completely incapable of resolving. Silvio Berlusconi described it as a ‘human tsunami’, while the French Minister of the Interior, Claude Guéant, made reference to a ‘tidal wave’ ; the governments of these European countries may not be able to agree on actions, but at least they can manage it for words. The European Parliament itself declared here that no one country alone can cope with the influx of thousands of migrants.
A humanitarian solution to a humanitarian crisis ? Far from it.
Italy was the first country to have to come up with a political solution to this humanitarian crisis. However, in a country where the theme of clandestine invasion is omnipresent, the immediate reaction was not one of a humanitarian handling of the crisis but rather, in the words of the Northern League, one of the first political groups to comment on the issue, ‘Föra di ball’ (‘Get them out’). It was only later, after Silvio Berlusconi had contributed some grotesque sound bites of his own, that the Italian government took action in the form of a two-point plan. Firstly, ‘closing the floodgates’ through a repatriation agreement with the new Tunisian government. Secondly, easing the ‘migratory pressure’ weighing down heavily on Italy by granting those already on the island a temporary residence visa valid in the Schengen area.
In other words, through bitter negotiation, Italy obtained the repatriation of any future migrants arriving from Tunisia in exchange for considerable financial and technical aid. Moreover, faced with Tunisia’s outright refusal to take back the 22,000 migrants already on European soil, the Italian government imposed a European solution on their entry.
Is Europe fit to burst with 22,000 migrants too many ?
It became clear very quickly that this game of table tennis which Italy had started against Tunisia would continue against France, whose greatest concern was the mass delivery of these visas. The very next day following the announcement of the steps taken by Italy, a circular appeared in France to ‘remind’ police chiefs of the five conditions of validity of these residence visas, one of which is financial. If they are unable to meet any one of these conditions, the visa holders will be escorted back to the Italian border. Since then, Claude Guéant has announced that checks at the border between Italy and France will be intensified. So we’re back to square one. It should be pointed out that these statements from the French government have only served to make official the practices of border surveillance and escorting people back to Italy, both of which were already prevalent. We are witnessing the renaissance of an ad hoc internal border within the European area of free movement, fuelled by a diplomatic retreat hinting at the potential collapse of Schengen. The Italian Minister of the Interior Roberto Maroni went one step further, calling his own country’s ties to the European Union into question when he asked : “Does it make sense for us to remain in Europe ?”.
Humanitarian crisis leads to security solution
Ever since this question was raised, members of the Italian government have produced an endless stream of contradictory statements. However, the controversy paid dividends, even gaining a reaction from the highest-ranking EU leaders. The European Commission’s position was originally articulated in the statement made by EU Home Affairs Commissioner Cecilia Malmström, who reiterated that Italy was responsible for managing migrants and called for the traditional mechanisms of European solidarity to be employed, in particular the European border monitory agency Frontex, which, it was promised, would see its activity increased as far as the Tunisian coastline.
Since then, José Manuel Barroso, the President of the European Commission, made a personal visit to Tunisia to plead the cause of an agreement between Tunisia and Italy on the repatriation of the 22,000 migrants. The solution envisaged by the Commission remains, as ever, the classic trio of externalisation, exclusion and confinement. No emergency measure was suggested or encouraged to cater for the migrants, nor were any steps taken to provide them with the legal treatment they are entitled to.
Security solution leads to security crisis
Faced with an emergency which is, above all, humanitarian in nature, the EU bodies and member states responded with exclusion, rejection and inaction. Europe’s solidarity with the Arab people, reinforced by words and actions overseas, barely holds up when the time comes for it to be applied on European soil.
- Sign on the coast of Tunisia [city centre ; Ennadhour ; Italy]
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Noborders©
The humanitarian emergency has moved on from the island of Lampedusa to small Italian towns on the French border, such as Ventimiglia (population 25,000) and Bardonecchia (population 3,000). The crisis now has to be managed in a new location, causing all-too-familiar scenes of chaos. The EU member states are certainly not responsible for the crisis, but they are responsible for how they manage it. Their attitude has turned what was initially a low-level migratory crisis into a serious, long-lasting, humanitarian emergency, exacerbated by an internal solidarity crisis, and perhaps now even a security crisis.
The fact is that these 22,000 migrants who have been granted temporary residence are currently being left to fend for themselves, with no means of doing so and none of their belongings. When Austrian minister Maria Fekter says that “letting people in who have nothing to feed themselves with and who cannot prove that they have their own resources will only open the door for crime and, as I am responsible for security, I cannot allow it”, the temptation is surely to ask in reply, “well, who is to blame ?”.
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De Lampedusa à Vintimille : la solidarité européenne à l’épreuve
Von Lampedusa bis Ventimiglia : Prüfstein für die europäische Solidarität 
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