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Italy's Mare Nostrum sea search
and rescue operation must be shut down and replaced by November
with the European Frontex Plus, Italian Interior Minister
Angelino Alfano said Friday.
During a visit to Tunis on the first anniversary of one of
two Lampedusa boat disasters that took the lives of some 400
migrants, triggering the Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) program, Alfano
said the responsibility for saving migrants heading for Europe
must be assumed by European authorities.
"(We need to see) European action to show that Europe takes
charge of its own borders," Alfano said.
"We will reach the objective of bringing Europe to patrol
the Mediterranean border," he added.
"We will do it by November and my idea is that Frontex Plus
should start as soon as possible, already at the beginning of
November (and) right afterwards, Mare Nostrum should be closed,"
said Alfano.
Mare Nostrum has been effective, saving more than 90,000
lives, but it was not designed as a permanent program, he said.
Nor should Italy continue to shoulder the burden of sea
rescues of migrants heading for all parts of Europe and only
passing through the Italian peninsula, he said.
"The (Mediterranean) is a European border," the minister
said, adding that Mare Nostrum could not prevent some 500 people
from dying and, according to survivors, 1,400 others from
disappearing.
But it has succeeded in capturing more than 500 human
smugglers during the past months.
"I have to say that these police operations have been the
most concrete response to human traffickers," said Alfano.
Outside of Mare Nostrum, Italy will continue to fight human
trafficking, he said, and support migrants who have risked their
lives to flee war and poverty.
"Today Italy remembers a dramatic day, a day in which on
Italian coasts, on the coast of a splendid Mediterranean island
like Lampedusa, migrants died," Alfano concluded.
"We commemorate this with the emotion and pain we owe to
the women, children and men who lost their lives on such a
tragic day".
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