Italy seeks European help on migrants

The Italian Foreign Minister, Franco Frattini, on Thursday said Europe is not doing enough to help Italy with the influx of migrants from North Africa. Italy has been struggling to cope with an influx of over 25 thousand migrants after a series of revolutions rocked the region. Many of these people originally came from the Horn of Africa, and came to North Africa for work.

“We had appealed to the member-states and to the European Commission on the 28^th of February to immediately organize a humanitarian evacuation of Sub-Saharan African refugees stuck in Libya,” says Christopher Hein, director of the Italian Council for Refugees. He says only Italy responded with two flights, and this has led to people fleeing in boats, some of which have capsized.
Meanwhile, ther EU governments such as France, Belgium, and Germany, have discussed imposing border controls to keep these people from entering their countries.
“We are disappointed…about the reaction, in particular from France,” he told Vatican Radio. “We should [remember] that Tunisia was a French colony. That most of the young Tunisians speak French, that many of them have family members in France…so there should be, not certainly a distribution to other European countries, but a flexible approach rather than the sending back of hundreds and hundreds of people every day…and similar reactions from Germany and Belgium and other countries are disappointing, because the whole of Europe is confronted with this new situation, this positive situation, in North Africa, but it is also clear that this for a time puts a challenge in terms of migration flows from that area.”

Listen to the full interview by Charles Collins with Christopher Hein: