IHS Fairplay – Italy to start East Africa migrant talks

IHS Fairplay: Italy to start East Africa migrant talks

Italy will launch next week an official dialogue with countries in East Africa to tackle irregular immigration via a dangerous sea route to Europe.

Italy has borne the brunt of migration from East Africa, which reached a crisis point last year with the Lampedusa tragedy, in which a vessel of migrants from Eritrea, Ghana, Libya, and Somalia sank near the Italian island, killing 366 passengers.

Dr Marco Del Panta, principal director for migration issues at the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told the Shipping and the Law conference in Naples today that Italy will leverage its strong relations with East Africa to launch the ‘Khartoum Process’.

The meeting will be held next week in the Sudanese capital, after which the initiative is named.

“We decided to launch a dialogue, using the EU and its financial instruments,” said Del Panta.

A ministerial meeting in Rome in November will follow up on the Khartoum talks, he said. But he warned that short term results are not the aim or expectation.

“We do not expect this [initiative] will lower the flows [of migrants], but we have to start working on the medium and long term. This is the only thing we can do. It will not help in the next months, but somebody has to start to do something, because nothing is being done,” he said.

Del Panta thanked the shipping community for its rescue activities at sea.

“Many shipping companies face this [crisis] on a daily basis and it is something costly and something we should look into – the governments of the EU. It is an important contribution that the private sector gives with this kind of operation,” he said.

But he was concerned that Italy’s EUR9.5M ($12M)-a-month Mare Nostrum operation – in which navy vessels patrol close to the Libyan coast to rescue migrant boats and take the migrants to a reception system in Sicily – is under threat from a new European initiative known as Frontex Plus.

Frontex Plus would not be a search-and-rescue operation but a coastguard operation taking place further north, “so the situation before Mare Nostrum might occur again”, he warned.

Del Panta said that through the new dialogue with East Africa, Italy needed to find ways to co-operate with those countries to tackle the drivers of irregular migration, to look at training, and to crack down on the traffickers.

While Europe has already opened a dialogue with West Africa, this is the first attempt to create such a relationship with East Africa, he said.

“Migrants are mainly from the Horn of Africa, and what happens in the Horn of Africa matters to all Italian – European – citizens,” he said.

Girija Shettar