TUNISIA HAS offered to work with foreign governments to stem the flow of immigrants heading across the Mediterranean after Italy said it was struggling to cope with the traffic.
Some 5,000 Tunisians have landed on the remote Italian island of Lampedusa in the past week, prompting Rome to reopen the island’s detention centre and declare a humanitarian emergency. Prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s interior minister set off a diplomatic row at the weekend by calling for Italian police to be sent to north Africa to help prevent people leaving by boat. Roberto Maroni said the turmoil in Tunisia had triggered a “biblical exodus”.
“I will ask the Tunisian foreign minister for authorisation so an Italian contingent can intervene to block the influx. The Tunisian system is collapsing,” he said.
The government in Tunis called his comments “unacceptable” and warned against infringement of its sovereignty, but yesterday the foreign ministry said it was willing to “co-operate with fraternal countries in order to identify solutions to this phenomenon”.
Security has mostly been restored in Tunisia since the revolution that overthrew president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali last month, but the police have been weakened by lack of discipline and absenteeism and the military has been overstretched by having to restore order in the cities.
Visiting Tunis yesterday, EU foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton said Brussels was aiming to conclude negotiations on a new trade deal with Tunisia before a presidential election likely to take place by the end of July.
Asked about the “advanced status” talks that were under way with Ben Ali’s regime and are now expected to be accelerated, Ms Ashton said: “We do indeed have the intention of starting straight away so we can reach the objective with the transitional government.”
In a report on the Lampedusa landings, the International Organisation for Migration said yesterday that Tunisians were paying people-smugglers $1,800 (€1,340) to make the crossing from near Zarsis, a thinly populated area where there is little security.
Italian officials said the flow of migrant arrivals was overwhelming the island which usually has a population of just 6,000 and which, at just 110km (68 miles)from the Tunisian coast, is closer to North Africa than to mainland Italy. Most of the Tunisians have arrived in rickety and overcrowded boats and about 1,400 landed on Sunday alone.
Italy has begun airlifting and shipping many of the immigrants from Lampedusa to detention centres in Sicily and on the mainland, but police estimate that more than 2,000 remain on the island. Some have been put up in local hotels and officials on Sunday reopened an immigrant detention centre that had closed due to a dramatic decline in arrivals from Libya over the past two years.
Meanwhile, the vital tourist industries in Tunisia and Egypt received a fillip yesterday when two of Europe’s biggest travel companies, Thomas Cook and TUI Travel, said they would restart selling holiday packages from Germany to both countries next month.