Alfano calls for end to Italy's Mare Nostrum on anniversary

(See related) (ANSA) - Tunis, October 3 - 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".