Germany’s interior minister Horst Seehofer has called on his counterpart in Italy, Matteo Salvini, to reopen the country’s ports to migrant transport vessels as NGOs increase their people-trafficking operations off the Libyan coast.
Seehofer, an open borders politician, has asked Italy’s national populist interior minister why he has closed his country’s ports when most of the migrants eventually end up docking and disembarking regardless, Il Giornale reports.
“I want to avoid the same pattern being repeated every time, with a ship with migrants waiting for eight or 14 days in front of Italy’s coasts and Salvini who does not want them to go ashore. But it always ends up docking anyway, either because migrants collapse, get sick, or there are pregnant women,” the German interior minister said.
Seehofer’s comments come on the heels of an agreement that was reached between the EU and Italy on Wednesday which allowed migrants on board of an Italian coastguard vessel to disembark at an Italian port so long as they would be relocated to other EU member states.
In response to his German counterpart’s words, Matteo Salvini said, “We are not opening anything, the ports remain closed,” adding “We are not the refugee camp in Europe.”
Salvini’s defiant words echo statements he made while responding to French President Emmanuel Macron after Macron condemned him for not showing up to a conference on migration Paris.
“Italy will not be your refugee camp… There is the port of Marseille, don’t come and put pressure on us. If you expect us to sign a document where ships arrive in Italy, you are wrong. Italians are no longer going to be anyone’s slaves,” Salvini retorted.
Recently, NGOs operating migrant transport vessels in the Mediterranean have ramped up their efforts.
French NGO SOS Mediterranee’s new ship announced that it had resumed its collection and transportation of migrants into Europe.
The German NGO Sea-Eye’s “Alan Kurdi” ship announced that it too had resumed its migrant collection and transportation service as well.
Earlier in the week, a spokesperson for Sea-Eye Gordon Isler announced that it had picked up 40 migrants while mentioning that the closest safe port was the Italian port of Lampedusa.
In a statement directed at NGOs who claim have migrant’s best interests at heart, Salvini said: “If the NGO really cares about the health of immigrants, it can set a course for Tunisia: if instead, they think of coming to Italy as if nothing had happened, they have the wrong minister.”
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