Napolitano says EU must help on migrants

(ANSA) - Geneva, May 19 - 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".