At least 880 migrants and refugees died trying to cross the Mediterranean last week, the UN refugee agency said yesterday, amid speculation that people smugglers may be trying to maximise their income before Ramadan begins.
This year is proving to be particularly deadly, with 2,510 lives lost in shipwrecks and capsizes, compared with 1,855 in the same period in 2015, UNHCR spokesman William Spindler said.
Nearly 204,000 people have made the perilous crossing to reach Europe this year, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees said.
Citing reports from survivors interviewed in Italy, it said smugglers may be trying to maximise income before the start of the holy month of Ramadan, when Muslims fast from dawn to dusk. Ramadan will begin on June 6th or 7th.
“At the moment smugglers are packing people on boats that are barely seaworthy and that in many cases are not meant to make the crossing. So . . . as soon as they depart from the shore they call for rescue and then the rescue services come and rescue them,” Mr Spindler said. “In fact, it’s a race against time to get there before these boats sink, and on some occasions they get there too late.”
The Italian coastguard has rescued 14,000 people and is coordinating search and rescue operations with vessels of other countries, he said.
Turkey agreement
The flow has dropped between Turkey and
Greece
since an agreement in which Turkey has agreed to help stop illegal migrants reaching Europe in return for accelerated EU accession talks, visa liberalisation and financial aid.
Boats leaving from the shores west of Tripoli in Libya often carry more than 600 people and are sometimes towed by larger fishing boats, a dangerous practice, Mr Spindler said.
“The North Africa-Italy route is dramatically more dangerous: 2,119 of the deaths reported so far this year have been among people making this journey, making for odds of dying as high as one in 23,” Mr Spindler said.
Sub-Saharan Africans crossing from Libya are mostly Nigerians and Gambians, but also include Somalis and Eritreans fleeing war or persecution. “We need to crack down on smugglers but simply doing that is not going to work if we don’t offer people an alternative,” Mr Spindler said.
European countries agreed last year to re-locate 160,000 asylum seekers from Greece and Italy, but fewer than 2,000 have been relocated, figures show.
Paris camp
Meanwhile, municipal authorities in Paris plan to build a camp to house several hundred refugees in the French capital, the mayor said yesterday, criticising the dire living conditions for migrants who have fled to Europe.
Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo said city services were looking for a site in the north of the city and that the camp could be built within two months. Ms Hidalgo cited as a model a migrant camp made up of modular cabins housing about 2,500 people in Grand-Synthe on the northern French coast.
Opened in March, that camp is run by the charity Médecins Sans Frontières. “We cannot accept any longer the humanitarian situation, the sanitary situation that migrants have to put up with,” Ms Hidalgo said.
France has been much less affected by the migrant crisis than, for example, Germany, which has taken in more than a million migrants since last summer. However, thousands have crossed France to reach the Channel in the hope of crossing to Britain. Some 3,900 migrants currently live in squalid conditions in a camp outside the port of Calais. –( Reuters)