By IPS Correspondents
PADUA, Italy, Aug 26 2007 (IPS)

Mid-August, a normal week in Lampedusa, a small Italian island in the Mediterranean Sea. In all, 439 illegal migrants, including a 15-day old baby, arrived from North Africa in old motorboats. The same week, 20 bodies were found off the coast, victims of earlier shipwrecks.

Summer is a ‘hot’ time for such arrivals. About 2,300 migrants arrived in July and August, according to the Italian branch of medical aid agency Medecins sans Frontiers (MSF), which provides first aid to migrants at the Lampedusa harbour.

Only 113 km separates the Tunisian coast from Lampedusa, which has become the gateway to Italy and then Europe for thousands fleeing war and poverty.

“People arrive really shocked,” Antonio Virgilio from MSF told IPS. “Often they have been travelling for days without any food or water. It is a tragic crossing, in particular for women and children.” Migrants come from sub-Saharan Africa, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Sudan, Nigeria, or West Africa. In most cases the trip starts in Libya or Morocco.

Lampedusa counts 12 beaches, 5,500 residents and more than 50,000 tourists in summer. The illegal migrants are put away at a detention centre near the airport on the 20 sq km island, away from both residents and tourists.

The centre has a capacity for 190 people. In July it ended up hosting about a thousand migrants at a time. An epidemic of diarrhoea and high fever broke out.

The centre was then converted to a “first aid and reception” facility. Migrants are now detained for 48 to 72 hours before being transferred to the mainland, and not 30 to 60 days as before. But conditions for arriving asylum seekers are still difficult.

As a result of lobbying by MSF and migrants rights activists, this centre will soon be closed. Another centre is due to open on the island with a capacity for 700 people. The new centre will have a proper reception, and also offer medical care.

“We ask Italy to implement reception measures that are worthy of a democratic country,” Virgilio said. “MSF will leave Lampedusa only when the public health system will start providing medical assistance to these people.” MSF signed a cooperation agreement with the public health system last week to operate at the centre.

Many who set out will never see these improvements. “Compared to last year, there are less landings and more deaths,” Virgilio told IPS. “There has been a change in the means of transportation: smaller rubber boats that can easily escape the controls. But they are also more dangerous.”

In July, 79 migrants drowned in the Strait of Sicily trying to reach Lampedusa or the Sicilian coast, according to Fortress Europe, a blog dedicated to the victims of clandestine migration which publishes a press review every month of the death toll at European borders.

Ironically, the slogan on one of the many tourism websites for Lampedusa invites visitors to “first of all enjoy the sea.”

“The Mediterranean is more and more a sea of corpses, only criminals can organise such trips,” Italian minister for the interior Giuliano Amato said following the last deaths. “But also we, the governments, will end up taking heavy responsibility for it if we will not adopt all the initiatives and agreements towards more effective forms of control and patrolling of the departure spots.”

“Italy and European Union countries make it a priority to fend off (these people) using military means and not welcome them,” Virgilio said. Last year the European Union spent 11 million euro under a programme called Frontex to send back illegal migrants.

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