Italy ships migrants to mainland, asks EU for help.

By Frances D'emilio, Associated Press

Published: Thursday, March 31, 2011 7:50 a.m. MDT

ROME — Italy shipped more than 2,000 migrants to detention camps on its mainland Thursday, relieving pressure on a tiny island off Sicily which has been overwhelmed by a relentless stream of boats full of illegal arrivals from North African shores.

Lampedusa — a clear-watered fishing and tourist island with a population of 5,000 — ran out of shelters days ago when migrant numbers peaked at over 6,000, forcing many of the Tunisians and others to sleep in the open air on docksides and in fields.

Human rights advocacy group Amnesty International has added its voice to local concern, saying that migrants had been left to fend for themselves in "appalling" conditions.

Premier Silvio Berlusconi, pressured by anti-immigrant coalition allies, promised while touring the island Wednesday that all of the migrants would be either deported to Tunisia or transferred to mainland detention centers within two to three days. Most of the arrivals are Tunisians who fled unrest in their homeland in the hope of finding family members or jobs in France.

Foreign Minister Franco Frattini has voiced frustration that other European Union countries have done little or nothing to help relieve Rome of the migrant burden.

The illegal arrivals "must be deported either to Tunisia or be spread around to other European countries," Frattini told an Italian TV news show Thursday. "It's stunning that there is no solidarity from any of the European countries, including those which many Tunisians would want to reach... France."

Italian TV has added fuel to his argument by running video footage of Tunisians being sent back from Italy's border with France, near the Italian seaside town of Ventimiglia.

Lampedusa Mayor Bernardino De Rubeis said that before dawn 690 migrants were shipped on a chartered ferry to the region of Puglia, with another 600 transported hours later. A tent camp for some 4,000 migrants was being hastily set up in the town of Manduria in the southeastern Italian region. Other ships, including a naval vessel, were anchored off Lampedusa's ports, waiting to transfer more migrants to the mainland.

While the Italian government has called on towns throughout the country to accept some of the migrants while they are processed for deportation or asylum, some southern politicians have protested that they are bearing the brunt of the arrivals, while they charge towns in the north — where anti-immigrant Berlusconi ally the Northern League is based — have done little to help.

Italian news reports said both the mayor of Manduria and an undersecretary in Berlusconi's Cabinet had handed in their resignation to protest what they said was an unfair number of migrants being sent to the south.

Migrants have also protested their treatment. Italian news agency ANSA reported that a group of Eritreans, who were rescued at sea a few days earlier and escorted to another tiny island, Linosa, had barricaded themselves in their detention center on Sicily following their transfer. More than 250 people from Eritrea, Somalia and Ethiopia had originally set sail from Libya on that boat.

Prior to the outbreak of a revolt against Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, an Italian-Libyan treaty saw Tripoli cracking down on smugglers' boats transporting migrants from its shores to Italy in exchange for Italian aid. But chaos has effectively ended any enforcement of the deal, and Berlusconi's government has warned that tens of thousands of migrants, many of them from the Horn of Africa or elsewhere on the continent, may soon be on their way.

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/7001 ... _cid=rss-5