Libyan Immigrants Becoming Italian Immigrants

Others never reached here. More than 600 died last week when their unstable boat broke apart off the Libyan coast, and three unidentified African men died off the coast of Lampedusa on Sunday during a night landing in rough waters.

Earlier this year, about 24,000 Tunisians traveled through Lampedusa, most seeking work in Europe. But now the situation has changed. More than 9,000 people have arrived from Libya since its unrest began, most of them sub-Saharan Africans and South Asians who had been working there, including more than 2,000 in the past week. Almost all are deemed refugees, and most are seeking asylum.

Italian officials and human rights workers say the sharp uptick since the end of March, when NATO took over military operations in Libya, and the fact that most of the boats, including unseaworthy ones, have left from ports in or near Tripoli, Libya’s capital, is a sign that the government of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi is turning a blind eye to — or possibly even aiding — their departure as a form of protest against the NATO bombing raids.

In an interview on Friday, Italy’s foreign minister, Franco Frattini, said that the Qaddafi government had long used immigration as a form of “retaliation toward Europe and Italy.”

“This is not an immigration to us just out of desperation, which is a constant for these people who are refugees and deserve refugee status in 95 percent of cases, but a criminal tool used by the Qaddafi regime,” Mr. Frattini told Corriere della Sera’s Web television, adding that the strategy could be used as evidence against Colonel Qaddafi in the International Criminal Court.

The surge comes at a time when Europe is increasingly divided over immigration, with right-wing parties gaining traction. On Thursday, Denmark provoked criticism and possible legal proceedings when it said it would reintroduce controls at its borders with Germany and Sweden, warning of crime spilling across.

Here in Italy, the concern is that the Libyan unrest has unraveled a 2008 bilateral treaty in which Italy pledged $5 billion over 20 years in exchange for Libya’s preventing immigrants from leaving — which it has done by means that have been criticized by human rights groups.

Some immigrants who arrived here on Sunday said that after they saw last week’s shipwreck off the Tripoli coast, they did not want to board a ship leaving Tripoli but had been forced to do so by armed men, according to Laura Boldrini, the spokeswoman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Italy.

The size of the ships arriving in Lampedusa from ports near Tripoli — some carrying as many as 800 passengers — is taken by Italian officials as another sign of Libyan complicity, or at least permission.

“It’s not that they’re put on boats, but you have to remember that ports are officially controlled by Libyan police,” Alfredo Mantica, an Italian under secretary of state responsible for relations with Europe, the Balkans and Turkey, said in a telephone interview.

“First they slept on the beach and tried to hide, and authorities pretended to check,” Mr. Mantica added. “Now there’s not even the theater of pretending there are checks.”

This week, Prime Minister Baghdadi Mahmudi of Libya said that NATO’s military intervention had prevented Libya from patrolling its coasts, as it had done under the 2008 treaty with Italy.

“We say to Europe that we can no longer do what we used to do,” The Guardian newspaper reported Mr. Mahmudi as saying. “And that’s because NATO has ruined our coastal defenses.”

But the situation appears more complicated. This week, a well-respected Italian immigration researcher wrote in the Italian newspaper L’Unità that a senior officer in the Libyan Navy, Zuhair Adam, was now helping to organize boatloads of immigrants to Italy from a military port near Tripoli. The newspaper said he had been trained by the Italian authorities in coastal patrols under the treaty.