An Italian envoy will fly to Libya on Friday to discuss radical plans to set up ”reception centres” for would-be immigrants, with officials from both countries estimating that up to two million people have already massed on the north African coast in readiness for an opportunity to travel by boat to Europe.
The scale of the problem has been recognised by President Moammar Gadaffi’s regime, which has indicated that it needs help to deal with the number of people who have travelled to Libya’s poorly patrolled coast and the vast open deserts to the south.
The reception centre proposal, which has drawn criticism from some quarters, is part of a series of cooperation initiatives Italy is spearheading in an effort to control the flow of desperate illegal immigrants across the Mediterranean from northern Africa.
Libya is the only north African country which does not have a formal agreement with the European Union on tackling illegal immigration, and has become the focal point of refugees, most of whom have travelled from across Africa and the Middle East.
The debate over illegal immigration has become a major political issue in Italy. It flared again this week when African boat people said they had thrown the bodies of 23 fellow travellers overboard after they died of dehydration and exhaustion on the 15-day Mediterranean crossing.
One member of Silvio Berlusconi’s cabinet said all would-be immigrants should be sent home rather than be allowed to land.
As Italy urged help from the EU, Libya’s foreign minister, Muhammad Abdel-Rahman Shalgham, said his country needed cooperation to tackle the problem. ”If for you Italians illegal immigration is a problem, for us it’s much more — its an invasion,” he told the Italian daily newspaper La Stampa.
Since Tripoli decided to come out of the international wilderness and revive ties with the west, cooperation on immigration has begun. Libya has begun to police its southern borders with Chad, Niger and Sudan, with the aim of ultimately pushing the immigration frontline further south into Africa.
But Tripoli has often complained that sanctions meant it could not acquire the necessary night vision equipment, bullet-proof border patrol vehicles, surveillance motorboats and aircraft for repatriating would-be illegal immigrants.
Under proposals which the head of Italy’s immigration police, Alessandro Pansa, will present to Libyan officials tomorrow, Italy’s immigration police and other authorities would advise Libyan officials on setting up the reception centres.
Italian officials in the past have suggested that Tripoli had deliberately ”opened the valve” of immigrants heading for Italy to increase the pressure on Europe to lift its economic embargo.
Now, after Colonel Gadaffi’s government has taken another step towards normalising its relations with the west by agreeing to pay compensation for the victims of a bombing of a Berlin nightclub in 1986, Germany is showing signs of a readiness to reciprocate. The Netherlands, which currently holds the EU’s presidency, has reportedly agreed to raise the question of ending Europe’s embargo on Libya at the next meeting of EU foreign ministers in September.
Germany’s interior minister, Otto Schily, who is visiting Italy on Thursday, is expected to propose that Rome and Berlin formalise bilateral agreements on cooperation with Libya.
The two countries then hope to win the backing of their fellow European heavyweights, Britain, France and Spain.
But Schily has already met criticism in Germany for his plans.
Members of the Green party and the former leader of the Christian Democrats, Wolfgang Schaüble, are reported to have accused the interior minister of trying to create ”concentration camps on the edge of the Sahara”.
Schily has insisted that the new camps will operate in the same way as those along the EU’s southern shores and would not deny would-be immigrants the right to request asylum in Italy or Germany.
He has emphasised that the proposal is designed to help deal with an emergency.
”It’s hard to understand why a reception centre is a reception centre when it’s in Lampedusa [a tiny Italian island between Sicily and Tunisia, often the chosen destination for illegal immigrants], but when it’s in Africa it becomes a concentration camp,” the German media reported him as saying. – Guardian Unlimited Â