The balance sheet increases after a new human tragedy. On Sunday February 26, a migrant boat broke on rocks a few meters from the Italian coast, near the town of Crotone, in Calabria. Monday morning, the coast guards count 62 dead. Footage from Italian police and Agence France-Presse (AFP) showed wood debris scattered over a hundred meters of the beach. The previous count was 59 dead.
This tragedy made the front page of the Italian press on Monday. “The massacre of the innocents”, headlined the Turin daily La Stampa with a photo of the wreckage of the boat. “The boat breaks 100 meters from the shore: the massacre of migrants”, wrote the front page of the newspaper Il Corriere della Sera.
Expressing her “deep pain”, the head of the far-right government, Giorgia Meloni, judged on Sunday “criminal to put a boat barely 20 meters into the sea with 200 people on board and a bad weather forecast”.
The head of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, called on Sunday for progress on the reform of the right of asylum in the European Union, after this “tragedy”. She said that there was a need to “redouble efforts on the Pact on Migration and the Right to Asylum, and on the Central Mediterranean Action Plan”.
Italy, a country of first entry where hundreds of thousands of migrants have arrived in recent years, criticizes its EU partners for a lack of solidarity in the distribution of the latter, even if a large number of them leave subsequently the peninsula for other countries.
Italy’s geographical location makes it a destination of choice for asylum seekers crossing from North Africa to Europe. According to the Interior Ministry, nearly 14,000 migrants have landed in Italy since the start of the year, compared to around 5,200 during the same period last year and 4,200 in 2021.
NGOs pick up only a small percentage of migrants wishing to reach Europe at sea, with most being rescued by Coast Guard or Navy vessels. However, the government accuses these NGOs of stimulating the arrival of migrants through their action and encouraging traffickers.
