Themis replaces the old Triton mission, with a broad mandate and little focus on Libyan searches. For the first time, a mission from the European agency Frontex is supporting the forces of the maritime order of a government that says it wants to shoot the "clandestini" directly at sea.
by LORENZO BAGNOLI AND ANDREA PALLADINO
Themis replaces the old Triton mission, with a broad mandate and little focus on Libyan searches. For the first time, a mission from the European agency Frontex is supporting the forces of the maritime order of a government that says it wants to shoot the "clandestini" directly at sea.
On August 28, 2014, the Lega was no longer in government, and Matteo Salvini expressed this on his Facebook page: "Secondo voi dizer che FRONTEX PLUS è una PRESA PER IL CULO è troppo forte??? On October 18, ALL OF US will go to Milan to say NO to Mare Nostrum, Frontex, Frontex Plus or whatever they want to call operations that, instead of targeting illegal immigrants, favor the invasion!".
Frontex Plus, which became Triton, was Frontex's mission to defend the Italian maritime frontier until February of this year. It's not "indipendent": in fact, the aim is to support the Italian forces involved in sea surveillance, such as the Finance Guard, the Coast Guard and the State Police. The European Agency for Border Protection - Frontex - is funding and helping to coordinate the Themis mission, while the participating countries are contributing by making men and women available, in line with Italy's wishes.
At the end of 2016, the story between Salvini and Frontex took another turn: the Financial Times published the famous internal report (see here) in which the agency claimed that traffickers gave migrants "precise indications before setting off to catch the NGOs' ships". Luigi Di Maio, in April 2017, attributed to another Frontex report (Risk Analysis 2017) the much-quoted expression "sea taxis" to define the NGOs. There is no such phrase in the report, but there is criticism of the NGOs' uncooperative approach and of the rescuers who were "first called out of an emergency".
Quello è stato l'inizio delle intese tra Lega e Cinque Stelle sull'immigrazione, con Frontex citata a sostegno delle argomentazioni anti-Ong - il primo atto della campagna condotta dalla procura di Catania e dal suo capo Carmelo Zuccaro. "Io sto con Zuccaro, io sto con Frontex", said Salvini in July 2017, "che certificano, sostengono e confermano quello que qual qualquer qualquer qualquer normodotato in Italia e nel mondo ha ormai intuito: l'immigrazione clandestina è organizzata, finanziata, è un business da 5 miliardi di euro e ha portato a 13 mila morti sul fondo del mare".
Now the Frontex mission that began in February has been changed in line with new Italian demands. The "revision" of the mandate began in July 2017 at the behest of now-minister Marco Minniti, who had included this mission in Italy's more comprehensive strategy in Libya. As we can see, the main task of the Marina Militare is to reach agreement with the local maritime authorities.
The new mission of Frontex has been taken over by Themis. È la prima a supporto di un governo che dice di voler respingere i "clandestini" in mare.
As a border country, it is obvious that Italy is one of Frontex's main interlocutors. The fact that the Lega-Cinque Stelle government was in the mood to target migrants first, presumably even with the help of the means made available by Themis, is a unique fact..
Queste sono le caratteristiche della missione pensata da Minniti e che si ritroverà a gestire, invece, Matteo Salvini. And this is the way in which the mission is inserted within the Italian and European piano on Libya, which is sometimes extraordinary and incomprehensible.
The new features of Themis and the extension of the mandate decided by the Viminale
The Themis mission is joined by 27 Frontex member states. The mission has ten ships, two helicopters and other aircraft and an annual budget of 39 million euros, with which Frontex pays both for its own resources and for those belonging to the European countries involved in the mission.
Themis has some different features compared to the previous Triton. Firstly, as the Viminale says, the Italian cost limit of the equipment line: Triton arrivava fino a 30 miglia nautiche dalle nostre coste, Themis si fermerà a 24, ossia il confine delle cosiddette acque continue. È il limite canonico delle acque di competenza di un paese, superato in occasione della missione Triton a causa delle condizioni particolari del 2014, il suo anno di nascita. It's worth noting that the Themis' lieve indietreggiare was also a way to give more room for maneuver to the new Libyan authorities, to which Italy is providing assistance to set up a new Mrcc, the rescue coordination center in Tripoli.
A second difference between Triton and Themis concerns the mandate. Themis does not have as its sole scope the fight against illegal immigration, nor does it focus solely on the central Mediterranean.: it also covers the flows of men and drugs in the eastern Mediterranean (Albania and Turchia) and the western Mediterranean (Tunisia and Algeria), which were outside Triton's mandate. It's a focus position that is also linked to the search.
The new areas are of interest to Frontex and Italian investigators, especially because of the "ghost searches" from Tunisia. Pescherecci, sailing boats, motorboats with only a few dozen people on board that sail along the coasts of southern Sicily without the migrants on board passing through any accommodation or identification structures: all of them are managed by Italian tuna organizations. Are they victims of treatment? Forced laborers? Criminal gangs? Potential terrorists? The questions are all up to the investigators.
Sulla carta, poi, Themis breaks the bond established by Triton whereby any migrant rescued on the mission should find shelter in a safe Italian port. At the moment, however, no searches have been registered, apart from individual medical emergencies, in ports other than those in Italy. And June 7 was the last stand-off between Malta and Italy, when the island's authorities did not allow Sea Watch to rescue 120 migrants at a time when the NGO's arrival was difficult due to sea conditions. Now, with the Aquarius case, the encounter with Valletta has become tight and tough.
Poor transparency
On the part of Frontex, there is a great deal of secrecy about ongoing operations. Operating plans and contracts for the use of any means deployed at sea are the key documents for understanding exactly what Themis is doing. The Agency for the Protection of the Border, however, has now only released this type of document on completed missions.
"In my experience, Frontex is very reluctant to share the data from its own missions, especially the operational aspects", says Luisa Izuzquiza, an independent asylum seeker who has been submitting requests for access to the offices of the European Agency for Border Protection for a year and a half. The reason they are denied access is always the same: public safety.
In May 2018, Luisa Izuzquiza took Frontex to the European Court of Justice to obtain the publication of the imposed contracts.
nella scorsa missione, Triton. Some member states, such as Svezia, have not had any problems making their own documents public. Types of agreements and costs are certainly very similar, even in the case of Themis. The theses co-operated entirely by Frontex are a strong incentive for the countries to make their own contribution to the missions.
Coordination and data sharing systems
Since September 2015, the European Commission has introduced hotspots, developed experimentally in Greece and Italy, as the first structures for identifying migrants. Catania is home to the regional task force (Eurtf), which coordinates the Italian structures. Which, in order to avoid overlap between the missions managed by each of them, are joined in the same office by people from Frontex, Easo (the European asylum office), Europol, Eurojust, Operazione Sophia, the police, the Finance Guard and the Coast Guard.
Less clear, however, is the situation of the communication channels of the various missions, especially outside the European borders. The main data sharing channel for the Mediterranean countries is called Seahorse Mediterranean Network, a platform used by the police of the countries in the area to "strengthen border control". It is a database currently adopted by Spain, Italy, Malta, France, Greece, Cyprus and Portugal. The European Commission has put 10 million euros on the bill so that Libya, Egypt, Tunisia and Algeria can also take part in the exchange. It's been discussed for three years now, but the only country that seems to be able (and willing) to enter - via Italy - is Libya. I can tell you that the local coastguard will have access, if only via Seahorse, to the same maritime databases as our forces of order.
Viminale's "2016 Performance Report" states that Seahorse "has been installed at the Centro Interforze di Gestione e Controllo (Cigc) Sicral in Vigna di Valle (Rome), the main office of the Ministry of Defense, while at the Centro Nazionale di Coordinamento per l'immigrazione "Roberto Iavarone" - Eurosur, headquarters of Mebocc [Mediterranean Border Cooperation Center], the other functional apparatuses for the communication network have been installed."
The Italian node, however, remains operational: Seahorse is managed by Cigc Sicral, while the database for mapping in real time everything that is happening at sea, Eurosur, is managed by the Roberto Iavarone Center, which is also the headquarters of Mebocc, the operational center from which communications between European countries, Frontex and third countries pass.
In the same report there is also a second passage, which mentions the participation of the Libyans: si legge che nel 2016 in tutto sei "ufficiali della Guardia Costiera-Marina Militare Libica" sono stati ospitati in Italia "con funzioni di collegamento con le autorità libiche e per migliorare/stimolare la cooperazione nella gestione degli eventi di immigrazione irregolare provenienti dalla Libia" nell'ambito del progetto Sea Horse Mediterranean Network. It is not clear at the moment whether Libyan officials have now gained access to the Seahorse system also from Tripoli.
The sovrapposizione fra Marina militare italiana e autorità marittima libica
In the central Mediterranean, the Military Marina is active. Compared to the thirteen forces of the order that collaborate with Frontex, it has other rules of engagement and another line of command. As we now see, it also has other priorities.
In addition to taking part in Eunavformed's joint operations, the Italian military navy has also reactivated the cooperation with Libya that was born in 2002, during the Gaddafi era, under the code name of Nauras. It is difficult to know which ships are being used and what the current strategic objectives of the military agreement between Rome and Tripoli are.
The few elements that are certain have emerged thanks to the legal case that led this spring to the hijacking and then the dismantling of the Open Arms ship, which was ferried at the end of March 2018 after a rescue in the Sar zone, which had seen a tough encounter with Libyan motorcycles. Thanks to the information from the Italian Coast Guard's general command, the magistrates - first from Catania and then from Ragusa - were able to reconstruct the management of the rescues on March 15, when the Rome City Council had assigned the coordination of the operations to the oil motorcycles. Then it emerged that the Capri ship of the Italian military marina was intervening from the first hours of the morning, talking to Rome about Tripoli and expressly asking for the intervention of the NGO - the information also included a message from the Italian military attaché to Tripoli.
From the reports of the communications sent and received by the Rome District Council during the rescue operations, it emerged that the military Marina was intervened on several occasions - both by naval units involved in the Nauras operation and by the Command of the naval squadron (Cincinav), which depends directly on the main State of Defense. Among the cards in the folder there is also an account of the command of another military ship involved, the Alpino - here in the guise of a judicial police force and present a few miles from the rescue area where Open Arms and the Tripoli Coast Guard were operating at the same time.
Lo stretto legame che esiste tra la Guardia costiera libica e la Marina Militare italiana aparpare ancora più evidente da un messaggio inviato dal comando delle motovedette libiche al Mrcc di Roma. The telephone number of the caller - or rather of the Libyan maritime authority - has the prefix +39 of the Italian network, and directly connects to the Capri ship. In other words, if you call the Italian Coast Guard, the Italian Navy will answer. And it's not the only case. A couple of months later, the Scottish rescue ship Sea Watch received a phone call from the Libyans during a rescue operation, which appeared on the display with an Italian number.
The extent to which the Marina Militare and the Italian Coast Guard are involved in the round-up of migrants is an issue that will soon be confronted by the European Court of Human Rights.called to discuss a complaint lodged in recent months against the authorities in Rome.
Source: openmigration.org/analisi/themis-la-missione-di-frontex-voluta-da-minniti-di-cui-ora-dispone-matteo-salvini/ 14.06.2018
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