This capture of the German pilot/captain of the rescue vessel Sea Watch-3, the Italian position, and media blitz....has flipped this page two-type story into a front page item, and probably will be public forum 'filler' for at least a week or two.
Donations have started to pour in for the legal costs coming upon the German female pilot/captain of the vessel, and this is being hyped up via social media.
The Italians? The current government leans to the right, and has chosen to impress upon the rescue crowd that Lampedusa is not some front-door for migrants to enter Italy. The political folks there have also turned to social media, and blasted out the tough stance taken.
So lets stand back and look at basic facts here.
1. Lampedusa? It's an island about 8 square miles in size....laying about 100 kilometers off the Sicily coast. If you look at the map....it's halfway between Tunisia and Sicily. From the Libyan coast, it's about 220 kilometers. Six-thousand Italians live on the isle, and it mostly survives off fishing and tourists. Strangely enough....the beaches there are considered among the best in the world. Yes, it is awful dry (maybe 12 inches of rain on average each year), and fairly warm (it never goes beyond 70 degrees F). In fact, in mid summer, you are talking about 95 degrees F being the norm almost every day.
For several decades, it was an important military site, and NATO ran a base there up until the late 1990s....turning it over to the Italians for use.
2. The use of Lampedusa as a entry-door? This gets into an interesting conversation. The chief strategy of the smuggling crowd is that they get a bunch of folks hyped up and willing to pay a fantastic amount of money (minimum of $1,000). For this....you basically get a seat in a raft made for a large crowd (usually 50 to 100). They 'drag' the raft out to a point, and simply release it.
No journalists can explain this, without the public grasping the connection between the smugglers and the 'blessed-rescue' crowd. The smugglers in some fashion tip the rescue folks to the general coordinates of the point where the raft was dropped off, and then the rescue craft shows up in some dramatic fashion to haul the folks out of the raft.
3. Law of the Seas. The law of the rescuing folks....says that you MUST rescue someone in distress on the open seas. The law also dictates that you will provide basic aid. Then the law says that you will drop them off at the nearest port. There is some open discussion going on....especially with the Italians....that Lampedusa is NOT the nearest port upon most all of these rescues, and that either ports in Tunisia or Libya would be the legal drop-off port. The law in this case....was never written to handle migration, or these type of immigration practices.
4. Who funds these rescue vessels? Well, that gets into a tricky area. All of them have a basic foundation that labels itself as a rescue foundation....charitable of course. If you try to view the next layer....who is chiefly donating to the foundations, that's not very obvious.
5. How many people die yearly because the raft sinks before the rescue craft gets there? Well....that's a worthy item to bring up. But you can't be sure about the statistics that the rescue crowd brings up. They have had rescue vessels pull up to some point, and there are people in the water....because the raft sunk. They can only estimate the number each year. Generally, it's a minimum of a thousand a year.
6. Why exiting via Libya? This is never clearly explained but one gets the impression that they don't really monitor ports along the coast, and the smugglers have a 'good' relationship to ensure no one interrupts their business side.
7. Wouldn't it make more sense to use the tip of Tunisia, and just run a motorboat across to Sicily? It's about 120 to 140 km across. Maybe, but there's a fair amount of surveillance by the Italians with their coastal operations, and you'd probably get stopped and end up in some Italian prison.
8. The use of this confrontation between the rescue folks and the Italians as some media blitz? There is some sentiment in Italy that they've done their part in the past, and they don't care to continue this open-door policy. Yes, they kinda got stuck with a bunch of rescued migrants, and there is a cost factor. Add to it....unemployment is around 9.9-percent, and among the younger crowd....it's at the highest level in a decade. They really don't need people showing up with marginal skills, no language capability, and likely attached to the country's social program for a minimum of two years.
9. The EU sorting this out? Well, the EU has been sorting for several years, and this really hasn't advanced too far. What they want is a forced-to-accept policy put upon the 28 member states. The policy would mean that if Italy has 1,000 migrants in camps....that x-number would be distributed to each member state. If the migrant doesn't want to immigrate to Poland or Portugal? That's a funny part of the story as well because if they don't like their 'dumping-ground'.....they'd just pack up and go onto the perfect land....Germany. The EU has this other problem....in that several member states have said 'no'....they won't accept this type of migration plan because it'll just increase, and you would start to see 10,000 migrants a month on rubber rafts and being dumped off into Europe.
10. A media blitz? There's no doubt that public TV news in Germany has a hyped-up topic, and use the video to drag the viewer along to a certain opinion. Some Germans have not accepted the hype, and simply hit the mute-button when this type of story comes up. I would take a guess that roughly one-third of German society is not pro-asylum or pro-rescue. As much as the journalists think they are doing a great positive for the lesser people....they are walking hand-in-hand with the smuggler-crowd.
11. How much are the smugglers taking in? This is a total mystery, and as far as I can tell....no one can say a magic number. If you figure a 100-person raft, with each person paying a $1000....with the cost of the raft around $3k....you ought to walk away with around $90,000 or more from each trip. Because its all illegal.....there's zero tax involved.
12. Resolving this German captain being held on charges mess? I will suggest that Chancellor Merkel, upon return to Germany this week from the G20 Conference, will be stuck having to call the Italians and work out some deal. I think the Italians will demand that the captain be suspended or have her license to pilot lifted for x-amount of time (maybe a year). The migrants on this vessel will be farmed out to five countries (they've already found five willing players). Whether the migrants like their new dictated land or not.....is a unknown in this game.
13. The use of this whole show to 'hurt' the right-leaning Italian government? Well....you can't help but notice the way that the story is told...that the Italians are the losers in this situation. 'Saving the world' enthusiasts are clearly getting their message out. The next official Italian election? 2023. But this government isn't exactly on firm ground, and some people may think that they can get a bunch of Italians suddenly to be pro-asylum, and flip the results of the next election.
And so the EU shuffles along, with no clear policy, and everyone mostly divided over migration.
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