“Too many people”: Migrant storm brings Lampedusa to the brink of collapse Italian government leader invites Von der Leyen to Lampedusa

It is dark on the Italian island of Lampedusa in the Mediterranean Sea. But Via Roma, the island’s main street, is illuminated by purple-white arcs of light. On the sidewalk, Michele, who does not want to read his last name in the newspaper, sits on a red plastic chair and shakes his head: “There are just too many people for the island,” he says, as he surveys a small group of migrants in dusty slippers observed as they mingled with the tourists in evening wear.

Like all residents of the island, Michele is used to migrants. After all, they have been coming here for decades because Lampedusa is Italy’s outpost in the Mediterranean: it is less than 200 kilometers from the Tunisian coast and is therefore the first destination for many migrants who want to go to Europe. But what is happening today is extraordinary even for Lampedusa: in less than 48 hours, more than 7,000 migrants have reached the island, more than ever before in such a short time.

In total, more than 9,000 people have arrived since the start of the week. This means that there were now more migrants on the island than its 6,300 inhabitants. Italian authorities are unable to get people from the island to the major migration centers on the mainland as quickly as they arrive. The municipal council therefore declared a state of emergency on Wednesday to draw attention to the exceptional situation.

The initial reception center is also completely overwhelmed: the so-called hotspot is only designed for 400 people, meaning that the large number of people cannot even fit in the building. Arguments repeatedly arise between the migrants crammed together under the hot sun. It often comes down to who gets to get on the next bus that takes those taken off the island. Red Cross employees are trying to resolve the dispute. But the situation is confusing.

“The government has left us alone”

The migrants who have just arrived and are still waiting for their transfer are now spread across the entire island. They are looking for some shade, a piece of bread or a piece of pizza. Many of them also come to Via Roma, where Michele runs a small grocery store.

He says he fed some of them the night before, but after that more and more came. Ultimately he had to close his shop. ‘We give them what we can. But the situation is simply too big to handle alone,” he says. “The government has left us alone.”

It is rarely clear in such a short time how much the EU migration policy has failed: only a month and a half ago, the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, was in Tunis together with the Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte and the Italian Prime Minister. Minister Giorgia Meloni celebrated the signing of an agreement with Tunisian President Kais Saied. The EU promised Tunisia millions to save the country from impending economic collapse. In return, the country should ensure that fewer migrants leave the coast and go to Europe.

But the exact opposite happened: not fewer migrants left the shores of Tunisia, but more. In total, more than 127,000 migrants and refugees have reached Italy via the Mediterranean Sea this year, with the vast majority of them heading to Tunisia. Most of the people who came to Lampedusa these days also left the Tunisian port city of Sfax.

Disconnected from reality

If you ask the Lampedusani what they think about politics, many just shrug their shoulders. Politics here is an abstract concept that has nothing to do with its reality. People are used to hearing announcements that have no consequences. “Here on the island we don’t even have a hospital. Anyone who gets sick has to fly to Palermo to be treated,” says Giovanna Bolino, describing how little the government in Lampedusa is interested. In her shop “Un mare d’Arte” she sells small works of art that her husband makes from the wood of migrant ships.

“If you don’t have money saved, you have no chance of getting treatment,” she says. And that’s not all: inflation has also caused prices in Lampedusa to rise, but there is still little work. This is also why the residents suffer so much from the many migrants, because they damage their main source of income: tourism.

At the same time, they show understanding for the suffering of migrants: “There is a humanitarian crisis going on here,” says Bolino. “This is sad for all of us.” They show their concern by giving them what they have: in a restaurant there is water and bread at the entrance to give to the migrants.

In the bakery, the saleswoman puts a thick piece of focaccia on the sandwich when she sees a passer-by buying something for a migrant. Other residents invite strangers to their homes for a portion of pasta, and a group of volunteers organized a food distribution at the church. But even their combined efforts cannot combat ubiquitous hunger.

“There is not enough food,” says Modou Congira, 20 years old from Gambia, one of the migrants sitting on the sidewalk behind the church, pointing in the direction of the hotspot. He reports that he left his homeland a year and a half ago to seek a better future in Europe. «In Gambia there is only enough money to eat. You can’t earn more than that.” So he left and got on one of the metal boats in Sfax, Tunisia. The crossing took two nights and one day. Congira doesn’t know where he wants to go. “The most important thing is work.”

The majority of migrants in Lampedusa are young men, some considerably younger than Congira. They come from Guinea, Ivory Coast, Mali, Ghana and Sudan. Those who speak French want to go to France, some to Switzerland. But most of them only want one thing: to get away from where they came from. For example, Esam Boush from Sudan answers the question of why he left his home country with one word: “War.”

For the people of Lampedusa, all this is still far away; here they only think from hour to hour, from day to day. On Thursday evening, they organized a funeral procession through the center to commemorate the migrants who did not survive the dangerous crossing – especially the five-month-old baby who drowned off the coast of Lampedusa on Tuesday.

The situation in the hotspot remains tense: Italian authorities managed to bring around 5,000 migrants to the mainland by ships and flights on Friday afternoon. But with around 4,000 migrants, the hotspot and the island are still overloaded. And the next boats are already mooring. (aargauerzeitung.ch)