If you follow the news, in the past day....there's a right-wing or alt-right, or just a group with an agenda....that rented a boat in the Med. Focus wrote the basic article to cover this.
So, the game-plan is to take this small ship (probably 120 ft in length)....registered and flagged under Mongolia (yeah, the land without a coast)....and go 'rescue' migrants adrift in the Med. Unlike the other five or six ships in the Med on missions like this....they will not take the migrants to an Italian port. They will instead take them back to Libya where they started.
The group running this operation? "Identity Movement".
What is said is that they expect trouble ('armed tugs' was the phrase used). So, they've got some kind of private security (one might assumed weapons) onboard.
One of the Italian mayors from the island typically used to receive migrants rescued.....has employed methods to ensure the ship can't enter their port, and I suspect all of Italy's seaports will be blocking this one ship from entry.
One can sense two scenarios coming out of this mess:
1. On the first 'rescue' and attempt to land the loaded craft in Libya....the Libya navy blocks them. My guess is that they have rafts on board and will force the migrants to board small rafts and just leave them in the middle of nowhere.
2. Some of the pro-migrant rescue vessels might try to block or ram the vessel.....thus getting fairly negative coverage of their aggressive behavior.
Who is paying for this? That's the funny thing.....no one knows much. Most say that some US blogger is paying out $140k from crowd-sourcing. If you had free labor....that would probably cover six months of fuel and food for the craft and its team. The thing is that they could patrol for weeks and never see a single raft. This particular area of the Med is fairly large if you gaze at a map.
Identity Movement? If you go read material from the left-wing....they refer to the movement as a cult. It started originally in France....about fifteen years ago. The idea was to become some reverse jihad group (as crazy as it sounds). It started to drift in and appear in Germany in the last five years, and has some minor support. One might imagine that if you were a neo-Nazi or alt-right....this movement might fit into your agenda.
As for the ship in this whole game of affecting migrant movement? It's been suggested by the Italian cops that some smugglers have a direct connection to the Italian mafia and the pro-rescue charity-ship operations. On more then one occasion, it's been suggested that coordinates are given to the rescue ships to come and pick up a floating raft at such-and-such point.
The one odd factor in this whole episode.....if there is a ramming attempt....then the Med will become a heated affair and some naval ships (probably Spain, Italy, France, and Germany) will have to patrol on a active basis, and enforce some stability.
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