Italy pleads for EU help after latest migrant boat disaster

As many as 41 African migrants drowned Thursday after a small boat carrying refugees sank in the Mediterranean near Sicily, underlining the urgency behind an Italian plea for more European Union help in rescuing those risking lives by attempting the crossing.

Four survivors — of the latest in a string of mass-casualty sinkings — said they were originally from Sub-Saharan Africa and had left Tripoli in Libya on Saturday. They strayed off course for four days before their boat was wrecked, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

The drownings come as Italian authorities struggle to cope with the number of attempted crossings. In the last week alone, the Italian coastguard reported rescuing nearly 10,000 migrants. On Wednesday, survivors of a capsized ship off Libya told aid agencies that as many as 400 people had died in that incident.

The EU's top migration official, Dimitris Avramopoulos, said such events are “unfortunately the new norm and we will need to adjust our responses accordingly.”

But the EU has acknowledged that it doesn't have a plan for the ongoing humanitarian catastrophe, with EU migration spokeswoman Natasha Bertaud saying Thursday, "we do not have a silver bullet."

“The European Commission alone cannot do it all,” Bertaud said.

But Italian Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni said it was his country that was shouldering nearly all of the burden for patrol and rescue, and he demanded a “clear answer” from the EU about where refugees should be sent. 

“Ninety percent of the cost of the patrol and sea rescue operations are falling on our shoulders, and we have not had an adequate response from the EU,” he told the Italian daily Corriere della Sera, adding that the EU was only spending about $3.2 million a month on sea patrols.

“And then there is the difficult issue of knowing where to send those rescued at sea — to the nearest port? To the country where their boat came from? The EU has to respond clearly to these questions,” Gentiloni added.

According to the United Nation's refugee agency, UNHCR, 219,000 refugees and migrants crossed the Mediterranean last year. Over 3,500 people died trying.

The numbers of people crossing in the first two months of 2015 were already up by a third over the same time frame in the previous year, according to the EU's Frontex border agency.

Many migrants pay thousands of dollars to be crammed by smugglers onto old boats and rafts on the coast of conflict-torn Libya heading toward Europe. If they are rescued, the EU allows them to stay while their cases are assessed.

The 28 EU nations have long argued about how to share the burden that migration places on the continent. Italy, Spain, Greece and tiny Malta are bearing the brunt of the influx from Africa. Germany and Sweden are also accepting large numbers of asylum seekers.

Gentiloni said that in order to confront the problem, the EU also had to tackle why the migrants were trying to make the perilous journey to Europe in the first place. He said it needed to “work on the regions of origin” of the wave of refugees, including “Syria, the Horn of Africa and central Africa.”

Italy believes the only way the flow of migrants can be slowed is to tackle the chaos caused by the civil war in Libya, where unpoliced ports see a majority of migrant boats set sail.

Human rights groups have also been vocal about calling for a solution to the problem, saying that the EU needs to implement a “vast search and rescue operation.”

“The unbearable number of lives lost at sea will only grow if the EU doesn’t act now to ensure search-and-rescue operations across the Mediterranean,” said Judith Sunderland of Human Rights Watch.

Al Jazeera and wire services