From: lessgovt@gmail.com   
      
   On Italy’s Coast, Empathy Mixes With Frustration After Migrant Tragedy   
   By Gaia Pianigiani, March 16, 2023, NY Times   
   In the weeks since Vincenzo Luciano pulled a dozen bodies from the rough sea   
   in southern Italy, he has kept a careful eye on the beach, now strewn with   
   jackets and sneakers, for the missing son of a shipwreck survivor he promised   
   to help find.   
      
   On Wednesday, Mr. Luciano, a 50-year-old fisherman, watched from a dune as   
   rescue workers pulled yet another child’s corpse from the water’s edge. He   
   craned his neck to peer inside the coast guard’s pickup truck.   
      
   “Maybe it’s him,” he said.  It wasn’t. It was a little girl.   
      
   More than two weeks after a ship broke apart just off the Calabrian coast,   
   killing 86 onboard, including more than 30 children under the age of 12,   
   European officials said, Italy is still locked in a furious debate about who   
   is responsible for the    
   tragedy.   
      
   PM Giorgia Meloni, who came to power talking about a “naval blockade”   
   against migrant ships and who has warned against “replacement” by   
   migrants, has vehemently deflected blame, arguing that Europe needs to do more   
   to help Italy with the migrant    
   issue and that the best way to save lives is to crack down on human   
   traffickers.   
      
   The Italian Parliament and news media are filled with polemics about how to   
   stop, or welcome, the tens of thousands of migrants expected to arrive in   
   coming months and about what needs to be done to prevent another calamity at   
   sea. And the migrants keep    
   coming. On Sunday, 30 more died after a boat capsized about 100 miles off the   
   Libyan coast.   
      
   But in this region of Italy, at a critical nexus of the country’s migration   
   crisis — the coastal area around Steccato di Cutro, a poverty-stricken and   
   sparsely populated part of the Calabrian seaside — there is less frustration   
   than compassion.   
      
   Locals have taken to praying by the sports center in the close-by city of   
   Crotone, where coffins sit, waiting for burial. They bring flowers to the   
   beach. A committee of residents in Crotone started a campaign to offer   
   migrants jobs in the fields to    
   reinvigorate the area’s agriculture and repopulate a region from which many   
   young flee.   
      
   “We came to pay homage to these poor victims who lost their hope for a   
   better life in our sea, and their lives,” said Dionigi Gullo, a retiree from   
   Crotone who walked by the impromptu crosses fashioned from bamboo canes on the   
   beach near where the    
   migrant ship broke apart.   
      
   Crotone is a faded industrial city. Downtown squares are filled with young   
   people during working hours. Used shirts and trousers sell for 3 euros, or   
   about $3, at market stalls. The outskirts are lined with homes for sale.   
      
   Residents seem seared by the experience of having so many dead wash up on   
   their shore.   
      
   “These are human beings,” said Antonio Sghirrapi, 53, owner of a food   
   stand in the city’s market. “We have seen them coming for decades, and   
   they are people like us, they should be saved at sea.”   
      
   Advocates for migrant rights and members of Italy’s progressive opposition   
   parties agree. They argue that policy changes introduced in 2019 by the   
   populist government that was in power at the time limited coast guard vessels   
   to seeking and rescuing    
   migrants only in cases of “immediate” danger.   
      
   In the Cutro case, an aircraft with the European border agency, Frontex,   
   sighted the rickety migrant boat, called Summer Love, 40 miles from the   
   Italian coast, sailing without any “signs of distress.” There was one   
   person visible on the deck but “   
   significant” indications that many more people were under the deck, the   
   agency said.   
      
   The Italian authorities decided not to deploy coast guard vessels, which over   
   the years have saved hundreds of thousands of lives in the Mediterranean.   
   Instead, they sent poorer-equipped law enforcement boats, which had to return   
   to port because of rough    
   seas.   
      
   The migrant boat, it turned out, was carrying in the hull at least 180 people   
   who had departed from Cesme, a small port west of Izmir, Turkey, four days   
   earlier. It arrived at Cutro beach in the dark one February morning amid   
   six-foot waves. Hitting the    
   low, sandy bottom, the decrepit boat broke apart about 100 yards from the   
   shore. Despite being so close to land, many were unable to reach safety   
   through the treacherous, cold waters.   
      
   The deaths have brought the full weight of the migrant crisis onto Ms. Meloni,   
   who at a cabinet meeting symbolically held in the nearby town of Cutro last   
   week, announced tougher measures against human smugglers. She did not go to   
   see the survivors, the    
   victims’ families or the coffins.   
      
   On Monday, Ms. Meloni sat at an event in Rome next to Cardinal Pietro Parolin,   
   the Vatican secretary of state and effectively second-in-command of Pope   
   Francis, who has repeatedly urged compassion for migrants. She gave a lengthy   
   speech arguing why    
   hardening her position against human traffickers was the more humane one.   
      
   She then met privately with Cardinal Parolin, who later told reporters,   
   “Immigration is really, really a complicated topic.” On Wednesday, Ms.   
   Meloni told Parliament, “My conscience is clean” regarding the shipwreck   
   in Cutro.   
      
   On Thursday, survivors and victims’ families, neatly dressed in clothes   
   donated by local charities, flew to Rome to meet with Ms. Meloni.   
      
   Earlier in the week, they had waited at a sports center in Crotone, where the   
   coffins await clearance, filling in paperwork and fleshing out memories of   
   those who were lost.   
      
   Mohammad Saber Soltani, 50, from Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan, lost his wife   
   and two children in the shipwreck. He said that migrants had been sitting in   
   different parts of the boat and that it had been more difficult for women to   
   get up because of their    
   long dresses. When the vessel crashed, he recalled, people ended up in the   
   sea, trying to grab floating pieces of wood.   
      
   From his family, only he and his 16-year old son survived. His eldest   
   daughter, 22, is still missing.   
      
   “We are not leaving without her,” he said.   
      
   Mr. Saber Soltani was leading a relatively prosperous life in Afghanistan   
   until the Taliban returned, but living under the Sunni militant group’s rule   
   was not an option for his Shiite family, he said.   
      
      
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