ROME: The communal council of the southern Italian island of Lampedusa has declared an emergency over the arrival of more than 8,000 illegal migrants to the island in the past three days, Mayor Filippo Mannino said Wednesday, reported Sputnik.
“The communal council has declared an emergency. We have confirmed what we have been requesting for many months: a way must be found to bypass Lampedusa, using the ships at the roadstead, and thus providing help and support to the island, which is under great stress these months,” Mannino said.
Earlier in the day, the mayor held a sit-in protest outside the Lampedusa municipality with a group of locals and then raised the issue of declaring an emergency on the island during the meeting of the communal council.
Mannino has earlier said the island cannot cope with such an influx of migrants and called on the Italian government to take emergency measures.
Some 110 boats docked at the island’s shores on Tuesday alone, bringing 5,112 migrants to the territory of Italy — the all-time highest number, according to official information.
The previous record was set on Aug 29, when 2,172 illegal migrants arrived at the overcrowded island in 24 hours.
Illegal migrants, mostly from Africa and Asia, have been arriving on the island together with children throughout Wednesday.
The Il Sole 24 Ore newspaper reported that a total of 6,762 people are currently located at the local migrant detention centre, although it is designed to receive only 400 refugees.
“Chaos and disorder” reign in the centre, and several hundred more migrants still remain in the open at the Favaloro pier.
Tension broke out Wednesday at a local port over the distribution of drinking water and food to refugees, forcing law enforcement to intervene, the report said.
Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini said Wednesday that the migration crisis in Lampedusa represents the “death of Europe” in political and values sense, as Italy, an EU member, has been “left alone” in this situation.
“What is happening in Lampedusa is the death of Europe. It represents the death of political, cultural, social, values because Italy is left alone,” Salvini told a news conference for foreign press in Rome.
He added that the peak of arrivals on Lampedusa coincided with decisions by Berlin and Paris to suspend an agreement with Italy on voluntary refugee admissions, noting that “he does not know where solidarity, complicity and inclusiveness have ended up”.
Italy is seeking a solidarity approach from the European Union to resolve the migration crisis, offering to organise a naval mission in the Mediterranean and actively contribute to stabilising the situation in North Africa.
The Italian prime minister said in March that “Italy has been left alone” to rescue migrants in the Mediterranean.
According to the latest data from the Italian Interior Ministry, over 116,000 migrants have arrived in the country by sea since the beginning of the year, compared to 63,500 migrants in the same period last year. More than 2,000 migrants have died trying to reach Italy this year.
In April, the Italian government declared a six-month state of emergency throughout the country due to “an exceptional increase in the influx of migrants arriving in the country along the Mediterranean routes”. – BERNAMA-SPUTNIK
