Eighty on the Doctors Without Borders ship, another 28 on the Open Arms ship. Migrants leaving from Libya and Tunisia had almost been forgotten: the war in Ukraine but also a rough sea that for days prevented any departure and the crossing of the central Mediterranean, had overshadowed the phenomenon. Two NGO ships, MSF’s Geo Barents and the old Open Arms of the Catalan NGO of the same name, thought of it today, to remind everyone that other serious emergencies do not cancel what is happening on the coasts of the southern shore of the Mediterranean.
Geo Barents intervened in the night to recover 80 people, including women and children, some very young, who were on a rubber dinghy adrift off western Libya. “They are all safe on our ship now,” Msf tweeted. Shortly thereafter, Open Arms also reported a rescue at sea, which took place at the same time and in the same area of international waters off western Libya; in this case we are talking about 28 people who were on a wooden boat “overloaded that took on water and risked sinking”, as the NGO said. Among the 28 there are also two children. In Italy there have been no arrivals of migrants since last February 26. The number of migrants who have arrived since the beginning of the year, 5474 as of yesterday according to data from the Interior Ministry, is in fact the same as a year ago when in the same period the migrants arrived were 5305.
Today’s are the first two rescue operations that took place in the central Mediterranean after more than two weeks, although attempts by migrants to reach Europe have not stopped. In recent days, there have been several attempts to cross the land border between Morocco and the Spanish enclave of Melilla: about two thousand tried on March 2, less than 500 managed to cross the high barriers of the border, many were rejected by the Spanish security forces and “returned” to the Moroccan ones. The next day another 1200 migrants tried to enter Melilla, about 380 succeeded but with clashes in which both some of them and the agents of the Civil Guard and the National Police were injured. Yesterday, the third attempt, another thousand people tried to climb over the fences but were rejected. According to the Spanish Interior Ministry, around a thousand migrants have managed to enter the enclave since the beginning of the year. Almost the same number of those who had succeeded in all last year.