Monday, February 14, 2011

Unrest in Arabia: thousand of refuges in Italy

Lampedusa - There are already at least 3,000 people. In small boats they have ventured in recent days, the trip across the Mediterranean to Italy - most of them come from Tunisia. 150 km range from the State in North Africa and the island of Lampedusa.

Numerous other boats had been sighted on the horizon. The government in Rome on Saturday said the humanitarian emergency. Ships and aircraft of the Italian Coast Guard monitored the sea in search of other boats of people smugglers. The Italian government fears at all that the situation gets out of control - and invites the European Union for support.


Brussels should send "immediately" units of the EU border agency Frontex to Tunisia and have them patrol along the coast, it said in a statement the Foreign Ministry in Rome. Refugees reported against the Italian authorities that, in the Tunisian ports were to take place no controls at all anymore.

Meanwhile, it has at least one death among migrants given. The official Tunisian news agency TAP reported that died a refugee, as an occupied people with twelve boat sank off the Tunisian coast. Another refugee was regarded as missing. Those who make it to Italy to be supplied to Lampedusa and medically examined.

With ships and aircraft, they are then taken to holding centers in Sicily or on the Italian mainland. From concern that could be among the refugees, terrorists or common criminals, the government began to bring people with ferries and planes in a deportation camp in Sicily. The explanation of the humanitarian emergency it allows the civil defense authorities to help with the implementation of the "necessary measures to control the phenomenon, said the office of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

What measures are exactly meant by that was not explained. A month ago, had celebrated in Tunisia thousands of demonstrators to dispose of the authoritarian ruler Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali. Whose fall is the starting point for the protests in Egypt and many other countries in the Arab world.

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