Italy's Salvini meets rescued migrants, promises 'welcome'

Italian far-right Interior Minister Matteo Salvini on Wednesday met dozens of African migrants, recently evacuated from Libya by the UN, and sought to reassure them that Italy is "a welcoming, generous and supportive country". Salvini, who has been at the forefront of the country's hardline approach to immigration, met the group of 51 migrants, mostly families or women with children, on the tarmac at a military airport near Rome. "For women and children in difficulty, the only way to arrive is by plane, not by inflatable dinghy, because the dinghies are operated by criminals who in exchange for trafficking in human beings, buy weapons," he said. "This is a demonstration that Italy is a welcoming, generous and supportive country, where I have been entrusted with the duty of bringing back some rules and order." Almost all those in the group of 32 adults and 19 children came from Horn of Africa nations Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia, as well as Sudan. They were among more than 2,300 vulnerable people who have been evacuated from Libya via Niger by the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, since December. They will be placed with host families in Italy by a Catholic association. Salvini, the head of the far-right League, which is in a coalition government with the anti-establishment Five Star Movement (M5S), has vowed to stop migrant arrivals and Rome has moved to close its ports to rescue boats. He supports a deal between Italy and Libya, forged under the previous, centre-left government, under which the Libyan coast guard intercepts migrants and returns them to the conflict-torn country. In return, Italy is developing initiatives to legally accept vulnerable people stranded in Libya, where thousands of migrants face arbitrary detention, extortion and violence. The UNHCR has estimated there to be 679,000 migrants registered living in Libya as of June 2018, though the actual number could be closer to a million. The situation in Libya's detention centres "continues to deterioriate" because of food scarcity and the spread of diseases including tuberculosis, the UNHCR's special envoy for the Central Mediterranean, Vincent Cochetel, warned Wednesday. Last month the UN Refugee Agency and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) warned the "political discourse concerning refugees and migrants, particularly those arriving by boat, has become dangerously toxic", adding that while boat arrivals had fallen deaths at sea had risen. On Tuesday Italian police bulldozed a symbolic makeshift camp in Rome, where about a hundred migrants had been living after leaving -- voluntarily or otherwise -- Italy's reception system.