Italy: UN presence in Niger, Sudan can help migrant crisis

Italy pressed the EU today to devise robust steps to stop the deadly tide of migrants crossing the Mediterranean, including considering military intervention against smugglers and boosting UN refugee offices in countries bordering Libya.
"We know where the smugglers keep their boats, where they gather," said Defense Minister Roberta Pinotti. "The plans for military intervention are there."
Some 90 per cent of smugglers' boats leave from Libya, where the lack of a central authority coupled with extremists affiliated with the Islamic State group have contributed to chaos and lawlessness that have allowed criminal trafficking networks to proliferate.
Pinotti said Italy was willing to take the helm of any military intervention if asked and as long as it is carried out as an international mission, backed by the United Nations.

"We're ready to do our share," she told Sky TG24. "We're the closest country to Libya."
Pinotti spoke a day before EU leaders hold an emergency summit in Brussels called in the wake of a shipwreck off Libya last weekend that may have killed more than 800 migrants. It would be the highest known loss of migrants' lives in a single incident in the Mediterranean.

Ahead of the summit, Premier Mario Renzi called for EU leaders to approve three key proposals: doubling the resources and assets of the current EU border patrol mission; destroying smugglers' boats and improving coordination across the EU for transferring asylum seekers.

"European Union naval operations in the Horn of Africa have successfully fought piracy - and a similar initiative must be developed to effectively fight against human trafficking in the Mediterranean," Renzi wrote in a New York Times opinion piece. "Trafficking vessels should be put out of operation."
In the latest arrivals of migrants, an Italian naval vessel docked in the Sicilian port of Augusta with 446 people who had been rescued off the southern coast of the Italian mainland. The navy said 59 were children.
"We prefer to die trying (to migrate) than stay back there and die," said Emmanual, a Nigerian migrant who recently arrived in Sicily. "Stay at home and get shot dead or maybe burnt to death, I just prefer to die while trying or survive.