After a council of ministers relocated to southern Italy, where the sinking of a migrant boat killed at least 72 people at the end of February, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni reaffirmed Thursday the determination of his government to combat illegal immigration and smugglers.
This council of ministers was symbolically held in Cutro in Calabria, the poor region forming the tip of the Italian Boot where many boats carrying migrants from Africa or Turkey arrive each year.
A first outside Rome for the executive with a majority on the far right, which since taking office in October 2022 has multiplied the obstacles to the operations of humanitarian ships in the Mediterranean and started a standoff with its European partners to obtain from them more solidarity in welcoming migrants.
If Giorgia Meloni deplored a human tragedy and expressed her support for the families of the victims of this shipwreck, she especially lambasted "trafficking in human beings". “Our response to what happened is a policy of greater firmness,” she promised.
The Council of Ministers has approved a new decree increasing the penalties for smugglers and creating a new crime punishable by thirty years in prison for those traffickers whose operations have resulted in the death or injury of their victims.
The text also provides for preferential immigration quotas for countries of departure which would contribute to the fight against smugglers.
Ms. Meloni still enjoys a solid confidence rating in the polls but her government is under fire from cross criticism from the opposition and civil society after the sinking on February 26 near the Calabrian coast of a boat that left for a few days earlier from Turkey with - according to the survivors - 180 people on board.
The maritime authorities, and in particular the coastguards, are suspected of not having reacted quickly enough to reports of the presence of an overloaded ship in the area.
Questioned by AFP, the mayor of Crotone, the town closest to the scene of the tragedy which hosted the burning chapel for the coffins of the victims, described this council of ministers as a "communication operation" intended to compensate for the absence on government grounds in the days following the tragedy.
"I would have preferred to benefit in recent days from the presence of the government through actions to demonstrate human solidarity", lamented Thursday Vincenzo Voce.
In front of the Ardent Chapel, the inhabitants brought many stuffed toys, bouquets of flowers, candles, drawings by schoolchildren and placards. "No one saved them when we could have," read one of them.
A passer-by, Maria Panebianco, an 80-year-old retiree, told AFP: "They are in my heart all these little girls, all these women who came to seek peace and found their death, it pains me. , so much pain".
Italian justice has opened an investigation into the circumstances of the tragedy.
According to Frontex, one of its planes had spotted an overloaded boat on the evening of the 25th that had left Turkey for Italy the previous week and alerted the Italian authorities.
Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi, whose resignation has been demanded by the opposition, maintains that Frontex had not reported any problem with the boat.
He accused the four alleged smugglers of being at the origin of this tragedy because they remained for hours without landing near the coast, at night and in rough seas, to escape the police, before carrying out a perilous maneuver that caused the sinking.
Early Thursday afternoon, dozens of opponents surrounded by a large riot police force demonstrated against the government's migration policy in the center of Cutro.
"I want to denounce the hypocrisy of the government, which leaves a ship of people fleeing famine and misery to die at sea and which today comes here to make a political platform," Antonio Viterutti, a student, told AFP. 28 years old.
The head of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen assured, in a letter sent to Ms Meloni on Monday, that Italy would not be left alone to manage "a European challenge which requires a European response", while stressing "the duty moral to act to avoid similar tragedies".
03/09/2023 21:18:19 - Cutro (Italie) (AFP) - © 2023 AFP
