Italy Seeks to Use Forces to Halt Illegal Immigrants From Tunisia

Would-be immigrants from Tunisia were detained after arriving by boat on Lampedusa, a small Italian island closer to Tunisia than the Italian mainland.

By RACHEL DONADIO
NYT

ROME — Italy’s interior minister said Sunday that the country hoped to send its armed forces to Tunisia to help stem the flow of illegal immigrants, after more than 3,000 Tunisians arrived by boat on an Italian island in recent days.

“I will ask Tunisia’s foreign minister for authorization for our forces to intervene in Tunisia to block the influx,” Interior Minister Roberto Maroni said in an Italian television interview on Sunday, a day after the Italian cabinet declared a state of humanitarian emergency and called for help from the European Union.

With thousands of miles of hard-to-patrol coastline, Italy faced waves of immigrants from North Africa throughout the 1990s and into the last decade. Under the government of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, in 2009, Italy signed a renewed bilateral accord with Tunisia, pledging financial support in exchange for help in preventing would-be immigrants from leaving the country’s shores.

But that accord seems to have unraveled in the turmoil in Tunisia’s interim government a month after President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali was forced from power in a popular uprising.

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