Italy’s Leader Keeps The Focus On Migration On Her Fourth Visit To Tunisia In A Year

Tunisian President Kais Saied, left, shakes hands with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, in Tunis, Wednesday, April 17, 2024. (Slim Abid, Tunisian Presidential Palace via AP)

BY BOUAZZA BEN BOUAZZA AND SAM METZ

TUNIS, TUNISIA (AP) — The head of Italy’s right-wing government acknowledged Wednesday that Tunisia cannot serve as a dumping ground for migrants, days after Tunisia’s president reaffirmed his unwillingness to let Europe outsource migration problems by sending those not welcome there to his country.

Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni said during a visit to Tunisia — her fourth in the past year — that the North African nation “cannot become the arrival point for migrants coming from the rest of Europe.”

However, she sidestepped tensions over how to manage migration via the Mediterranean Sea and instead praised Tunisia and Italy’s shared priorities in fighting human traffickers and repatriating African migrants back to their home countries.

Meloni and Tunisian President Kais Saied signed new accords as part of Italy’s “Mattei Plan” for Africa, a continent-wide strategy aimed at growing economic opportunities and preventing migration to Europe.

They included education initiatives and 50 million euros ($53 million) in a budgetary aid package earmarked for renewable energy projects. Meloni also promised to expand efforts to repatriate migrants to their home countries and expand legal migration pathways for Tunisians to work in Italy.

“It is essential that we work together to continue to fight the slavers of the third millennium, the mafia organizations that exploit the legitimate aspirations of those who would like a better life,” Meloni said, referring to smugglers who facilitate migrants’ perilous sea journey.

European leaders often frame migration as a human trafficking issue, though migrants are known to make the trip in various ways and for a variety of reasons.

Nearly 16,000 migrants have made the treacherous journey from North Africa to Italy so far in 2024, travelling hundreds of kilometers (miles) from the shores of Algeria, Tunisia and Libya, mainly to islands off the Italian mainland. Arrivals tend to increase through spring and summer.

As weather warmed early this year, more migrants arrived with each passing month — a trend that’s on track to maintain its pace through April.

Less than half as many migrants had arrived in Italy as of April 15, compared to the same period in 2023, according to figures from the U.N. refugee agency. That’s in part because of Tunisia’s border patrol force, which this year intercepted about 21,000 migrants before they crossed into European waters.

Despite the interceptions, Saied has long insisted he is unwilling to let his country become Europe’s “border guard” or accept migrants that Europe wants to deport.

Earlier this week, he said he had no intention of opening detention centers for migrants in an agreement similar to Italy’s deal with Albania on asylum seekers. “We will not accept the presence of people outside the law, and Tunisia will not be a victim,” Saied said.

North African countries, from Morocco to Egypt, enjoy some leverage in their relations with Europe due to their role in helping control the flow of migrants. Italy and its European Union counterparts have pledged substantial financial support to countries on the other side of the Mediterranean to help prevent migration and trafficking.

But most of the more than 1 billion euros ($1.1 billion) promised to Tunisia as part of an EU agreement brokered in July is contingent on the country reaching an agreement with the International Monetary Fund on a stalled bailout package that could require painful spending cuts.

The broader EU package includes 105 million euros ($112 million) earmarked for migration. Romdhane Ben Amor, a spokesperson for the Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights, which closely follows the migration assistance, said much of it has yet to be disbursed.
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Metz reported from Rabat, Morocco. Associated Press writer Giada Zampano in Rome contributed to this report.

Italy’s Meloni Opens Africa Summit To Unveil Plan To Boost Development And Curb Migration

Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni, top center, poses with African leaders and dignitaries at the Senate for the start of an Italy-Africa summit, in Rome, Monday, Jan. 29, 2024. (Roberto Monaldo/LaPresse via AP)

BY NICOLE WINFIELD

ROME (AP) — Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni opened a summit of African leaders on Monday aimed at illustrating Italy’s big development plan for the continent that her government hopes will stem migration flows, diversify sources of energy and forge a new relationship between Europe and Africa.

But the plan got a lukewarm and cautious reception initially, with African Union Commission Chairman Moussa Faki Mahamat telling the summit that African countries would have liked to have been consulted before Italy rolled out its plan.

“We need to pass from words to deeds,” Faki, the former prime minister of Chad, told the summit. “We cannot be happy with promises that are never maintained.”

Two dozen African leaders, top European Union and United Nations officials and representatives from international lending institutions were in Rome for the summit, the first major event of Italy’s Group of Seven presidency.

Italy, which for decades has been ground zero in Europe’s migration debate, has been promoting its development plan as a way to create security and economic conditions that will create jobs in Africa and discourage its young people from making dangerous migrations across the Mediterranean Sea.





In her opening, Meloni outlined a series of pilot projects in individual countries that she said would enable Africa to become a major exporter of energy to Europe, to help wean it off its dependence on Russian energy following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.

“We want to free up African energy to guarantee younger generations a right which to date has been denied,” Meloni told the summit in an opening address. “Because here in Europe we talk a lot about the right to emigrate, but we rarely talk about guaranteeing the right to not be forced to emigrate.”

Meloni, Italy’s first hard-right leader since the end of World War II, has made curbing migration a priority of her government. But her first year in power saw a big jump in the numbers of people who arrived on Italy’s shores, with some 160,000 last year.

The government’s plan, named after Enrico Mattei, founder of state-controlled oil and gas giant Eni, seeks to expand cooperation with Africa beyond energy but in a non-predatory way. The plan involves pilot projects in areas such as education, health care, water, sanitation, agriculture and infrastructure.

“It’s a cooperation of equals, far from any predatory temptation but also far from the charitable posture with Africa that rarely is reconciled with its extraordinary potential for development,” Meloni told the leaders.

Italy, which under fascism was a colonial power in North Africa, has previously hosted ministerial-level African meetings. But Monday’s summit — held at the Italian Senate to demonstrate the commitment of all Italian public institutions to the project — marks the first time it’s under the head of state or government level.

The summit includes presentations by Italian ministers detailing various aspects of the plan. A gala dinner hosted by Italian President Sergio Mattarella was held on Sunday night.

As the summit got underway, Italian green and opposition lawmakers planned a counter-conference at Italy’s lower chamber of parliament to criticize the Mattei Plan as a neocolonial “empty box” that seeks to again exploit Africa’s natural resources.

Alongside the Mattei Plan, Meloni’s government has forged controversial deals with individual countries to try to mitigate the migration burden on Italy. An EU-backed deal with Tunisia aims to curb departures through economic development projects and legal migration opportunities, while a bilateral deal with Albania calls for the creation of centers in Albania to process asylum applications for Italy-bound migrants rescued at sea.
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Follow AP’s coverage of migration issues at https://apnews.com/hub/migration

Italian Ex-Premier Says French Missile Downed An Airliner In 1980 By Accident In Bid To Kill Gadhafi

An Italian Carabinieri police officer patrols a hangar in Pratica de Mare, near Rome, Monday, Dec, 3, 2003, the reconstructed wreckage of the Itavia DC-9 passenger jetliner which crashed near the tiny Mediterranean Island of Ustica in  June 27, 1980. (AP Photo/ Emiliano Grillotti, File) 

BY FRANCES D’EMILIO

ROME (AP) — A former Italian premier, in an interview published on Saturday, contended that a French air force missile accidentally brought down a passenger jet over the Mediterranean Sea in 1980 in a failed bid to assassinate Libya’s then leader Moammar Gadhafi.

Former two-time Premier Giuliano Amato appealed to French President Emmanuel Macron to either refute or confirm his assertion about the cause of the crash on June 27, 1980, which killed all 81 persons aboard the Italian domestic flight.

In an interview with Rome daily La Repubblica, Amato said he is convinced that France hit the plane while targeting a Libyan military jet.

While acknowledging he has no hard proof, Amato also contended that Italy tipped off Gadhafi, and so the Libyan, who was heading back to Tripoli from a meeting in Yugoslavia, didn’t board the Libyan military jet.

What caused the crash is one of modern Italy’s most enduring mysteries. Some say a bomb exploded aboard the Itavia jetliner on a flight from Bologna to Sicily, while others say examination of the wreckage, pulled up from the seafloor years later, indicate it was hit by a missile.

Radar traces indicated a flurry of aircraft activity in that part of the skies when the plane went down.

“The most credible version is that of responsibility of the French air force, in complicity with the Americans and who participated in a war in the skies that evening of June 27,” Amato was quoted as saying.

NATO planned to “simulate an exercise, with many planes in action, during which a missile was supposed to be fired” with Gadhafi as the target, Amato said.

In the aftermath of the crash, French, U.S. and NATO officials denied any military activity in the skies that night.

According to Amato, a missile was allegedly fired by a French fighter jet that had taken off from an aircraft carrier, possibly off Corsica’s southern coast.

Macron, 45, was a toddler when the Italian passenger jet went down in the sea near the tiny Italian island of Ustica.

“I ask myself why a young president like Macron, while age-wise extraneous to the Ustica tragedy, wouldn’t want to remove the shame that weighs on France,” Amato told La Repubblica. ”And he can remove it in only two ways — either demonstrating that the this thesis is unfounded or, once the (thesis’) foundation is verified, by offering the deepest apologies to Italy and to the families of the victims in the name of his government.”

Amato, who is 85, said that in 2000, when he was premier, he wrote to the then presidents of the United States and France, Bill Clinton and Jacques Chirac, respectively, to press them to shed light on what happened. But ultimately, those entreaties yielded “total silence,” Amato said.

When queried by The Associated Press, Macron’s office said Saturday it wouldn’t immediately comment on Amato’s remarks.

Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni called on Amato to say if he has concrete elements to back his assertions so that her government could pursue any further investigation.

Amato’s words “merit attention,’' Meloni said in a statement issued by her office, while noting that the former premier had specified that his assertions are “fruit of personal deductions.”

Assertions of French involvement aren’t new. In a 2008 television interview, former Italian President Francesco Cossiga, who was serving as premier when the crash occurred, blamed it on a French missile whose target had been a Libyan military jet and said he learned that Italy’s secret services military branch had tipped off Gadhafi.

Gadhafi was killed in Libya’s civil war in 2011.

A few weeks after the crash, the wreckage of a Libyan MiG, with the badly decomposed body of its pilot, was discovered in the remote mountains of southern Calabria.

Sylvie Corbet contributed to this report from Paris.

Role Of Race Contested In killing Of Nigerian Man In Italy

Charity Oriakhi, widow of a street vendor Alika Ogochukwu, cries during an interview with Associated Press at her home in San Severino Marche, Italy, Friday, Aug. 5, 2022. The brutal killing of a Nigerian immigrant in broad daylight has sparked a debate in this well-to-do Adriatic beach community over whether the attack by an Italian man with a court-documented history of mental illness was racially motivated. It will go to the streets on Saturday, Aug. 6 when a Black Italian activists from all over Italy march through the town demanding justice for Alika Ogorchukwu. (AP Photo/Antonio Calanni)

BY COLLEEN BARRY

CIVITANOVA MARCHE, ITALY (AP) — Black Italians marched through a well-to-do Adriatic beach town Saturday demanding that authorities reverse themselves and recognize the role of race in the brutal daylight killing of a Nigerian immigrant.

A witness filmed the July 29 assault that preceded the death of Alika Ogorchukwu, a 39-year-old street vendor. A widely circulated video showed a man wrestling Ogorchukwu to the ground and strangling him. Onlookers shouted for the aggressor to stop but didn’t come to Ogorchukwu’s aid as he struggled to free himself, which added to public outrage over the killing.

Police arrested an Italian suspect, Filippo Ferlazzo, 32, but immediately ruled out a racial motivation for the attack in the town of Civitanova Marche. Ferlazzo’s lawyer, Roberta Bizzarri, said prosecutors confirmed that determination in his client’s charging document.

According to police, Ferlazzo first struck Ogorchukwu with a walking crutch the vendor used, having pursued him some 200 meters down a shopping street lined with high-end boutiques. Some accounts said Ogorchukwu had complimented Ferlazzo’s companion while trying to make a sale or ask for spare change, others that he had touched or caressed the companion’s arm.

Townspeople, taking the lead of law enforcement officials, have attributed the Nigerian man’s death to an insistent street-seller unfortunately clashing with a man with a court-documented history of mental illness.

“This is not a racist city,” newsstand owner Domenico Giordano said. “This is an open city. If you behave well, you are welcomed and even helped.”

People have left flowers and notes of condolence on the sidewalk where Ogorchukwu died, in front of a beachwear boutique that was closed for lunch at the time.

Store owner Laura Latino said she has received negative reviews from as far away as Houston accusing her of standing by and doing nothing when she wasn’t there.

’’Be careful about judging a city of 45,000 people,” Latino said, adding that she thinks propaganda around the death was “ruining the reputation of the city.”

City officials have expressed concern that the killing would become politicized as Italy prepares for parliamentary elections next month.

The role of race in the case is so charged that a local newspaper, il Resto del Carlino, carried with a story about plans for Saturday’s march a headline stating that “the word racism” would not be used during the demonstration.

But a manifesto for the event, billed as the the country’s first to be organized by Black Italians, lists the recognition of the role of race in what happened to Ogorchukwu as the first of 11 demands. Some 30 organizations said they would seek to join the prosecution as a civil complainant on behalf of “racialized people.”

Ogorchukwu’s widow, Charity Oriakhi, is reluctant to say the killing was racially motivated.

“It is just someone who is wicked,” Oriakhi told The Associated Press. “He wants to kill someone, that is what I feel.”

She said both she and her husband had always felt welcome in Italy and that he never recounted having negative interactions when he was out selling. In fact, she said, he often came home with gifts from Italians for the couple’s 8-year-old son.

The pair hailed from different parts of Nigeria and met in the Tuscan town of Prato about a decade ago, shortly after Ogorchukwu’s arrival in Italy, and later resettled in the Marche region in an apartment above a marble workshop in the small hillside town of San Severino.

The Nigerian government has condemned Ogorchukwu’s death, and the West African nation’s Foreign Affairs Ministry urged Italian authorities to “bring the perpetrator of the heinous act to book without delay.”

Nigerians who have lived in Italy for decades and organizers of Saturday’s march say race cannot be excluded as a motive.

“The word racism cannot be minimized because it exists,” said Daniel Amanze, an activist based in Macerata who arrived in Italy from Nigeria as a student 40 years ago. He said he perceived racism becoming more “obvious” in recent years as some politicians scapegoat immigrants as cover “for their poor administration and the malaise you see every day.”

Amanze said Ogorchukwu’s killing renewed a sense of fear among Africans living in the Marche region that had started to dissipate following two other racially motivated attacks: a 2018 shooting spree by a one-time far-right political activist targeting Africans in Macerata that wounded six, and the death of a Nigerian man who was attacked after defending his wife from racial abuse in the town of Fermo in 2016.

Ogorchukwu used a crutch because a car struck him while he was on a bicycle a year ago, leaving him with a limp, according to people who knew him. The family’s lawyer, Franceso Mantella, said the street vendor continued to hawk wares, from tissues to straw hats, even after an insurance settlement provided a bit more financial security along with Oriakhi’s job cleaning a train station.

The widow said she last saw her husband when he gave her a sandwich at the station before he he set out for Civitanova the Friday he died. She is haunted by the images on the video, and keeps the TV at home off so her son doesn’t see them.

“I saw the video, just when the boy was strangling hard, very, very hard, and my husband was struggling like this,” she said, mimicking the stranglehold. “What hurts me most, is there are people circled. They do a video. No one to help. I wish someone rescued him. Maybe he would not be dead.”

Chinedu Asadu in Lagos, Nigeria and Gianfranco Stara in Civitanova Marche contributed.

Italian Police Arrest Suspected Members Of Nigerian Mafia

BY EMMA WALLIS

PALERMO, SICILY (INFO MIGRANTS) -- On Tuesday, Italian police rounded up four suspected members of a Nigerian mafia-like gang known as Black Ax. The suspects are charged with slavery, human trafficking, kidnapping and recruiting prostitutes. Behind this case lies a vast system of exploitation that stretches across Africa and Europe

In the early hours of Tuesday morning (January 18), Italian police (Polizia di Stato) launched operations in the Sicilian regional capital Palermo and on mainland Italy in the Puglian regional capital Taranto. The police were acting on information from a Nigerian migrant who said she had been forced into prostitution by the group.

According to the Italian news agency AGI, the four suspects are charged with slavery, human trafficking, kidnapping, profiting from prostitution and employing "mafia methods."

Under Italian law, "employing mafia methods" generally indicates that those charged have used intimidation and threats to exploit their victims. Sentences can vary, but being accused of being part of a mafia-like structure in Italy carries with it sentences of between three and six years. If you are found to have used weapons, the sentence increases to between four and ten years, if found guilty.
Arrests in two cities

Palermo's flying squad led the investigation via their department for foreign organized crime and prostitution. One of the suspects was taken into custody in Palermo. The other three were found to be living in Taranto, where they were also taken into pre-trial custody. The Nigerian woman who accused the suspects was supported by a Pentecostal preacher, also from Nigeria. According to AGI, the woman turned to the preacher for help after being forced to work as a prostitute in Italy.

According to the woman’s statement, she underwent a "Juju" or traditional magic ceremony in Nigeria before being trafficked to Italy. The ceremony is commonly used to make sure that women who hope to migrate will not tell anyone, most of all the police or authorities, about what they are forced to undergo, so that they can work, often as prostitutes to pay back the "debts" they are told they incurred for their journey.

Those who undergo such a ceremony often swear oaths with their own blood or hair. If they break their oath of silence, they are told either they or their family members will die or be seriously injured.
Threats of death and violence

The woman said she was first kidnapped by a group of Black Ax members in Nigeria. She escaped with the help of a fellow Nigerian but to pay him back, she was asked to travel to Italy as a "slave." During the ceremony, she promised to pay €15,000 for her journey.

Once the woman arrived in Palermo, under "the threat of death and violence" reports AGI, the woman was forced to work as a prostitute. The money she earned was then taken to "repay" the debt.

Finally, the woman turned to the priest, who is also now a target of the group and has also received death threats.

The Black Ax group is just one of many Nigerian mafia-like gangs or structures which are thought to have grown out of various universities there in the seventies. Black Ax, began life as a kind of student fraternity at the University of Benin City. Many of the Nigerians trafficked into Italy and Europe begin their journey from Benin City even today.
System of exploitation

Recently, the Association for Juridical Studies on Immigration (ASGI) in Italy brought a case before a UN Committee. The case related to two Nigerian women who didn't even make it to Italy, but had suffered a similar fate, having been trafficked from Nigeria to Libya, with the intention of making it on to Europe.

The two women in question, Doris* and Princess* said they were sold several times to various gangs during the course of their journey. They had been imprisoned multiple times in Libya and forced to work as prostitutes in so called "correction houses (Brothels)" in Libya. The money they earned there was taken from them to pay back their debts. They were also subject to Juju ceremonies before leaving Nigeria.

Also read: Concern at EU's growing push to return rejected asylum seekers

The case brought by ASGI aims to demonstrate that both Italy and Libya are partly responsible for the exploitation women like these suffer. The ASGI case seeks to make clear that the exploitative structures in Libya, often run solely or partly by the Libyan authorities themselves, and supported by money from both Italy and the EU, infringe migrants’ human rights and lay them open to abuse, torture, violence and sexual and economic exploitation.
Intercepted by Libyan coast guard

One of the main components of this "systematic abuse" as ASGI calls it, is the role of the Libyan coast guard. Financed and trained in large part by EU and Italian bodies, it intercepts migrants at sea and brings them back to Libya, where most find themselves back in various forms of detention, and thus in a new cycle of exploitation if they want to be free.

In 2021, the UN found that the numbers intercepted by the coast guard almost tripled compared to figures in 2020. 12,000 migrants were intercepted at sea and brought back to Libya according to the UN.

According to the UN Refugee Agency UNHCR, more than 67,000 migrants reached the Italian coast in 2021, most from North Africa, including Libya. According to Italian national statistics ISTAT, in 2020, 113,049 Nigerians were registered as living in Italy.
Nigerians in Italy

However, many of those who work as prostitutes may not be fully registered in Italian statistics. Often, after arriving in Italy, they are told to leave the migrant and asylum seeking accommodation and sent out to work. Some may have initially been issued with a temporary stay permit which may later elapse as the women are moved around Italy and Europe by the gangs.

The Italian government also wrote a report about the Nigerian community in Italy in 2020. This report found that 44% of the community registered in Italy was women and 56% men. 53.1% of them were under the age of 30 and there were 24,083 children living in Italy.

About 45.8% of them were officially employed, the majority working in the service industry, as sales people (27.7%), in industry (24.5%), and in agriculture (8.9%).

In October 2021, Fanpage, an Italian newspaper based in Naples, published a video with testimonies from one Nigerian woman who had been forced to work as a prostitute in Italy.