Delrio: “These agreements with Tripoli are a pact with the devil”

Rome

For Graziano Delrio, the new agreement signed by the government with the Libyan authorities on the subject of immigration is “an agreement with the devil, with those who make migrants die, and now there is evidence that this is the case”. The former minister, now a senator of the Democratic Party, has never been a supporter of the memorandum between Italy and Libya, signed exactly 6 years ago (it was February 2, 2017) by the Gentiloni government, with Marco Minniti as Minister of the Interior. “But there is a fundamental difference compared to today – he specifies – at the time the criminal actions of the Libyan coast guard had not yet been documented by UN agencies and international organizations”. However, that period of government had a responsibility: «At the end of that experience, suspicions and accusations against NGOs began – Delrio recalls – a wrong analysis, which in the following years became criminalization by the Count I and of the right”.

Regardless of the color of the government and who the prime minister is, Tripoli always comes back with a strengthening of their coast guard, if we can call it that…

«It is the worst that can be done at the moment, a serious mistake of weakness, given that the coast guard of Tripoli is the protagonist of a systematic violation of human rights. And we know that some officers are in cahoots with human traffickers, in practice they are their own controllers, and often directly manage the inhumane detention centers for migrants.

Wasn’t that the case before? I mean when you ruled.

«This agreement is more guilty, because violence and abuse are now there for all to see and we prefer to pretend not to see. The meaning is: as long as you don’t let the migrants leave, do what you want. Furthermore, no formal commitment was requested on the verification of coast guard operations, nor on the possibility of having UN agencies carry out surveillance activities on Libyan territory”.

These are criticisms that, in large part, could also be addressed to you. Or not?

“I have to defend something I wasn’t thrilled about. But it must be said that the conditions, at the time of signing the first memorandum, were different. First, there was a real emergency on migratory flows, not the current propaganda on numbers. Then a government was being born in Libya, they had to form the coast guard, assisting them was legitimate and necessary. We could not have known that they would have handed her over to the traffickers, proving to be unreliable and not even respecting the then expected commitment to let the UN agencies enter the detention centres. And then we, even earlier, had established the humanitarian corridors ».

But, even after the complaints, the memorandum was confirmed. And you, apart from the yellow-green parenthesis, have always been in government. Therefore?

«Therefore, I and many others, within the Democratic Party, have asked several times to cancel or revise that memorandum. Then there were objective difficulties in renegotiating it, given that the crisis of the Libyan government had begun and it is complicated to deal with a delegitimized partner and in the midst of civil war. After all, it is a problem that also arises with the current government in Tripoli. It can only be resolved with a European initiative».

How?

«Transforming the EU Irini mission, created to stop arms trafficking, into a training mission for a new body of the coastguard in Libya, removing it from the control of the traffickers. But the point is that it is not with these media showcases, in Libya or in Egypt, that the problem is solved in a structural way. And it is ridiculous to think of an Italian sovereignty over immigration, it is Europe that gives us more sovereignty. Speech that also applies to the fake Mattei plan for Africa ».

How fake?

«I have many doubts that an Italian-only initiative, 60 years later, can stimulate such a strong process. There is already a European plan for Africa, which is worth 150 billion, Italy undertakes to become the leader of that project, only in this way can we really have an impact. Otherwise, they’re just slogans.”

So, has the Meloni government’s migration policy been rejected across the board so far?

«It is the demonstration that words, and electoral promises, if detached from reality, do not work. From the naval blockade to the closed ports, up to the security decrees. Now they tell us that what has been demonstrated about the work of the Libyan coastguard doesn’t count for anything, as long as they keep the migrants away from us. If our vocation for being protagonists in the Mediterranean, which I share, is reduced to turning away, that’s really little stuff».

And the Democratic Party in government, on the other hand, didn’t do anything wrong?

«It is a fact that, in the last phase of the Gentiloni government, suspicions and accusations against NGOs began, which I have never accepted. Up to the absurd theory of NGO ships as a “pull factor” for migrants, still in fashion, but denied by all the official data. Well, that was a mistake, certainly not like the bad mass distraction on right-wing NGOs, which still continues today”