President Giorgio Napolitano said
Monday that the European Union must provide Italy with greater
help in coping with a massive wave of migrants arriving from
North Africa.
"Today we are faced with the absolute need to achieve a
concrete, operative model of cooperation with the European
Union," Napolitano told Italian officials at the United Nations
in Geneva, ANSA sources said.
The Head of State added that while migrant arrivals had
caused an emergency for all of southern Europe, Italy is "the
main entrance".
There has been friction between Rome and Brussels after two
migrant boat disasters south of Italy last week in which around
60 people are confirmed dead and many more may have lost their
lives.
Rome says the EU is not doing enough to support it after it
launched the humanitarian Mare Nostrum (Our Sea)
search-and-rescue border operation in October, after roughly 400
migrants drowned in two wrecks off the coast of Sicily.
On Wednesday Premier Matteo Renzi accused the European
Union of looking the other way as Italy struggles to cope with
the crisis.
The EU's border agency Frontex said arrivals in Italy in
the first four months of 2014 rose by a dizzying 823% over the
same period in 2013.
From January to April 2014, 25,650 migrants arrived in
Sicily and 660 in the Puglia and Calabria regions, it said.
"There's a dramatic need not to close our eyes to this
tragedy," Napolitano told the Italian officials in Geneva.
"But we find a certain deafness in the EU.
"We shouldn't consider ourselves the only country with this
problem, but we should have greater support from the European
Union".
The president also spoke about the crisis in Ukraine and
Italy's role in it.
"Ukraine is a country that's close to us and it's going
through profound distress," he said.
"Italy is making its contribution. It's necessary to stop
the positions between the EU and Russia becoming rigid".
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