Humanitarian ship with refugees disobeys government order, lands in Sicily rather than Tuscany

 TRAPANI, Sicily - The Ocean Viking, the humanitarian ship of the NGO SOS Méditerranée, rescued a rubber boat in international waters north of Libya, Saturday night, writes Il Fatto Quotidiano.

 “We saved 47 people including 9 unaccompanied minors,” Sos Méditerranée posted on X. Many of them are fleeing the war in Sudan. The Italian authorities have assigned Marina di Carrara as the port of disembarkation. 1,300 km away from the rescue area and three and a half extra days of navigation.

 The episode relaunches the issue of “troublesome routes” imposed by the government on civilian ships operating in the central Mediterranean, where at least 400 people have died and 318 are missing since the beginning of the year, as of August 16 the International Organization for Migration (IOM) announced. In the same period, the UN agency said, there were 14,554 migrants intercepted at sea and returned to Libya, including 12,617 men, 1,324 women, 468 minors and 145 whose gender data are unknown.

 On Saturday, the new Mediterranea Saving Humans ship disobeyed the orders of the Interior Ministry which had assigned the port of Genoa for docking. “With waves of almost three meters,” the crew explained, “we chose the nearest port”. The ship landed in Trapani on Saturday evening and the ten migrants on board have already disembarked: Kurds from Iran and Iraq, Egyptians and Syrians, including three unaccompanied minors aged 14, 15 and 16. All of them had been thrown into the sea by Libyan militiamen, the NGO announced after the rescue last night between Wednesday and Thursday.

 At the pier in Trapani, in addition to the police, there were volunteers from Save the Children and a minibus from the Italian Red Cross. “The USMAF doctor came on board,” explained Beppe Caccia, head of mission of Mediterranea, “and the people were all disembarked. Shortly before we arrived at our destination we were told by radio if we were aware that our assigned port was Genoa and that therefore, we were taking an action that was not permitted. We have shown that we were aware of this.”

 The possible consequences range from fines to administrative detention of the ship, as foreseen starting from the Piantedosi decrees of 2023. But a complaint to the commander cannot be ruled out. “Mediterranea's act is an act of civil disobedience and full legality: it respected the law of the sea and the Constitution, not the bureaucratic cruelty of a government that uses suffering as a political deterrent,” declares Filippo Blengino, Secretary of Radicali Italiani. “For this reason, Radicali Italiani stands with Mediterranea and makes its lawyers available, ready to support new actions of civil and human disobedience by NGOs that save lives, until rescue at sea is finally recognized as a duty and not as a crime.”

 After the shipwreck of August 13th south of Lampedusa, with at least 27 bodies recovered and many more missing, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni spoke of “inhuman cynicism of human traffickers.” The government has instead denounced the organizations such as Mediterranea, Sea-Watch, SOS Humanity and SOS Méditerranée: their ships remain outside the rescue areas for days or even weeks due to the laws that assign them landing ports in northern Italy, even 1,600 km away. It means “hundreds of days lost in unnecessary navigations and delays that put lives in danger at risk.”

 Sea-Watch spokeswoman Giorgia Linardi declared that one of their ships would have been able to intervene promptly to save people on board boats in difficulty on August 13th, if only it had not been far away due to these laws.

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