Europeans are shutting their eyes to the mass-migration now occurring in the Mediterranean. Able-bodied men and some women from all over Africa and now even Asia reach Tunisia or Libya, pay people traffickers a thousand or more dollars and then sail in boats and dinghies that may or may not be sea-worthy. Last year Italy alone received 181,000 by these routes, and 4,600 are estimated to have drowned on the way. The country could not survive another year with numbers in that order, said the then-prime minister, Matteo Renzi. This year 37,000 have already landed in Italy and about 1,000 have drowned.
An Italian prosecutor by the name of Carmelo Zuccaro has been investigating this process of shipping human cargo regardless of the fact that manslaughter if not murder is a by-product. In his opinion, charities and NGOs are hand in glove with the traffickers. The more migrants the traffickers cram into a boat, the more money they take. It appears that they contact the NGO rescuers, arrange a rendezvous outside Libyan waters and so become accomplices in a business that is not only shameful but dangerously destabilizing. NGOs such as Save the Children, Amnesty International, the Spanish Proactiva, and the Maltese-based Moas reject Zuccaro’s findings and claim that they are only saving lives — but they would say that, wouldn’t they?