ROME—More than 1,100 people were rescued from two fishing boats by the Italian Coast Guard on Wednesday morning as the new hard line far-right government vows to stop irregular migration—leading to a delay that could have cost lives.
The S.O.S. call came in on Tuesday as Italy’s new far-right prime minister Giorgia Meloni was addressing parliament. Two wooden fishing boats with a combined load of more than 1,100 migrants and refugees needed to be rescued between Italy and Malta. Twelve people were already dead due to dehydration. Several had jumped overboard. The engines had long ceased to work and supplies of drinking water and food were nearly depleted.
As various humanitarian organizations reached out to Italian and Maltese coast guards with details about how to find the listing vessels, Meloni’s new Interior minister Matteo Piantedosi announced that borders were closed to NGO rescue ships. That meant the Norwegian-flagged Ocean Viking and German-flagged Humanity I—already laden with a combined 329 rescued people on board from other sinking ships—would not be allowed to enter Italian waters because they were breaking the law and not “in line with the spirit of European and Italian rules on border security and control and on combating illegal immigration.”
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And since the rescue vessels could not disembark the migrants and refugees they already rescued, they certainly had no space to rescue 1,100 more people, even if they could have reached them before it was too late.
Nearly 24 hours after Meloni’s address, the people were finally rescued by the Italian Coast Guard with support from a Spanish vessel. In all, 1,157 were saved—494 on one boat and 663 on the other. The rescuers also recovered two bodies, though have not confirmed if the other reported dead were left on the boats or had been thrown overboard as they decomposed.
The humanitarian group Alarm Phone, which acts as an informal switchboard between migrants onboard ships and rescue vessels and coast guards, said no one had even acknowledged their requests from either Malta or Italy. They have tried to stay in touch with those onboard, but cellphone battery life will soon make that impossible. “We spoke to persons on the boats who are scared of drowning,” they tweeted early Wednesday. “We alerted authorities over 15 hours ago, why have rescue operations not yet taken place?!”
The reason that no passing merchant ship or NGO vessel rescued the increasingly desperate people is simple. Once onboard, they could be there for weeks since Italy has vowed “no more” to incoming migrants. The Ocean Viking and Humanity I have formally requested a port of safety and both have been denied. The only other reasonable option for them is to go to Malta.
In the end, only the Italian coast guard vessel will have permission to dock in an Italian port—but the wait for the vessel to arrive could have cost many more lives.
In 2018, when far-right Matteo Salvini became the interior minister, he did the same thing, and one rescue vessel had to travel three days to Spain to find a safe place to leave those onboard, most of whom are fleeing unthinkable poverty, war, and political persecution. No rescue ships were allowed to reach Italy until his government fell a few months later.
A spokesperson for a humanitarian group told The Daily Beast that the most likely reason for why so many people are onboard boats that generally carry only a few hundred is that the boats left Libya to try to reach Italy before the government was sworn in—which was thought to have been early this week.
But thanks to a strong election result, Meloni’s government was essentially fast-tracked and sworn in on Sunday, with her first address to parliament on Tuesday—and her strong borders, anti-immigration campaign promise suddenly becoming a reality. She said Italy would close its borders to irregular immigration. “As in any other serious state, you do not enter illegally, you only enter according to the law,” she said.
But for the 1,157 people onboard the perilous vessels, there was no legal route to come to Europe. That they left Libya means they are in the hands of human traffickers who likely took thousands from each one in exchange for a promise of making landfall. Now their fate is in the hands of a new government that doesn’t want them and could easily return them from where they escaped.
Nearly 78,000 people have arrived by sea in Italy so far in 2022—up 51 percent from a year ago. A further 27,000 have arrived in Spain and more than 12,000 in Greece, according to the United Nations Human Rights group UNHCR. More than 1,500 people died trying to make it so far this year.
