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ROME: Years of criticism of an EU-backed migration pact between Italy and Libya are coming to a head as migrant rescuers say the Libyan coast guard has begun firing directly at them.
“Hundreds of bullets were fired during 20 terrifying minutes” in an attack “deliberately targeting crew members on the bridge... at head height,” said SOS Mediterranee, the charity running the Ocean Viking ship, in August.
Last week, German charity Sea-Watch said its rescue ship was also shot at by the Libyan coast guard using live ammunition.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s government and the European Union provide funding and training to the Libyan coast guard to intercept people attempting the crossing to Europe.
The project is credited with sharply reducing the number of migrants reaching Italy via sea — a priority of Meloni’s far-right Brothers of Italy party.
But the agreement, signed in 2017 by the then-center-left government, has been increasingly criticized amid numerous reports that EU-funded detention centers in Libya are run by human traffickers, who also collude with the coast guard.
Critics say that makes Italy and the EU complicit in human rights breaches by war-torn Libya, and opposition parties are calling for the deal to be scrapped before it automatically renews in February.
Italy would have to give notice on pulling out by next month — although there is no sign that Meloni’s government will do so.
“Libya holds at the moment quite an important leverage over Italy in the same way that Turkiye did over the EU in terms of threatening” to let millions of migrants leave for Europe, said Diana Volpe, a postdoctoral fellow at the Free University of Brussels and expert in Italy’s outsourcing of migration control.

- ‘Outsource dirty work’ -

Libyan patrol boats have long used aggressive tactics while attempting to stop charities picking up migrants, but the shift from warning shots to direct fire is alarming.
“It’s unacceptable that the Italian government and the EU allows criminal militia to fire on civilians,” said Sea-Watch spokeswoman Giorgia Linardi after last week’s incident.
Mediterranea Saving Humans, another rescue charity, last month also published photographs which it said showed a militia allied with the Libyan government trafficking people in the Mediterranean.
Some 42 civil society groups have written to the Eiuropean Commission to denounce the use of EU funds for “organizations that attack European citizens and people in distress at sea,” and to demand the Italy-Libya deal be axed.
The patrol boats involved were given to Libya by Italy as part of a deal to train and equip the coast guard, according to the charities and Italian investigative journalists.
Volpe said the accord was “specifically created” by Italy to get around the fact Libya is not considered by the UN to be a “place of safety,” so Rome cannot return migrants there itself.
Instead of Italy performing illegal “pushbacks” — the forced return of people to countries where they would be unsafe — Rome enabled Libya to perform its own “pullbacks.”
Those picked up by the Libyan coast guard are locked in detention centers that are regularly denounced by the UN for poor conditions.
Matteo Orfini, an opposition MP who campaigns against the Italy-Libya deal, told AFP it was “a tool through which we... outsource dirty work to Libyan armed gangs.”

- EU awaits probes -

Italian opposition parties say the accord has exposed the government to blackmail.
They linked Rome’s release in January of a Libyan war crimes suspect wanted by the International Criminal Court to a desire not to jeopardize the deal.
Osama Almasri Najim is accused of charges including murder, rape and torture relating to his management of Tripoli’s Mitiga detention center.
It is difficult to know how much money Rome and the EU have spent on the Libyan scheme.
The EU says it spent some 465 million euros ($545 million) on Libya in the area of migration between 2015 to 2021, while another 65 million euros was allocated for “protection and border management” in Libya from 2021 to 2027.
The bloc also provides assistance to the Libyan coast guard through two civilian and military missions.
After the shots were fired at the NGO boats, Commission spokesman Guillaume Mercier said Brussels would “await the developments of the investigations” taking place in Libya.
But Volpe was dismissive. “It’s been almost a decade now of videos of human rights abuses happening at sea and in the detention centers.”
Yet those have not stopped the EU or Italy retracting “their support, either financial or political.”
 

CANTERBURY, England: The Church of England named Sarah Mullally on Friday as the next Archbishop of Canterbury, the first woman to serve as ceremonial head of Anglican Christianity worldwide, prompting immediate criticism from conservative church leaders in Africa.
The 63-year-old bishop, who once served as England’s top nurse, will, like her predecessors, face a Communion divided between conservatives and more liberal Christians over the role of women in the Church and the acceptance of same-sex couples.
While the appointment was welcomed by many religious leaders in Britain, Laurent Mbanda, archbishop of Rwanda and chairman of a global grouping of conservative Anglican churches, told Reuters that Mullally would not unite the Communion.
A bishop in Nigeria said the choice was “very dangerous” because women should follow men. The Church of England’s evangelical wing also called for a halt to what it called a drift away from scripture.

Mullally has championed liberal causes

Bishop of London since 2018, Mullally has previously championed blessings for same-sex couples, a major source of contention in the global Anglican Communion. Homosexuality is outlawed in some African countries.
In an address in Canterbury Cathedral on Friday, she said she would seek to help every ministry to flourish, “whatever our tradition.”
On same-sex relationships, she told Reuters in an interview that the Church of England and the broader Anglican Communion had long wrestled with difficult issues.
“It may not be resolved quickly,” she added.
Mullally said she wanted the Church to tackle the misuse of power after sexual abuse scandals and safeguarding issues, and she condemned rising antisemitism following an attack on a synagogue in Manchester on Thursday which killed two men.
The Church of England, which broke away from Roman Catholicism in the 16th century, has allowed women to be ordained as priests for more than 30 years and to become bishops for more than a decade.
Those reforms have been rejected by many churches in Africa and Asia which fall under the Anglican Communion and consider the Archbishop of Canterbury as their ceremonial head but set their own rules.
“Christ is the head of the Church, man is the head of the family, and from creation God has never handed over the position of leadership to woman,” Nigeria’s Funkuro Godrules Victor Amgbare, Bishop of Northern Izon, told Reuters in Abuja.
The Vatican, which does not allow women to be ordained as priests, welcomed Mullally’s appointment in a statement, noting that the challenges facing the Anglican church were “considerable.”

Safeguarding improvements needed

Mullally will replace Justin Welby, who resigned over a child abuse cover-up scandal and who was criticized by some Anglicans for taking an activist role on social issues.
In Friday’s cathedral address she spoke of the difficulties of an age which “craves certainty and tribalism” and a country which is wrestling with complex moral and political questions.
She noted the “horrific violence” of the previous day’s synagogue attack, saying it revealed “hatred that rises up through fractures across our communities.”
Mullally, who as a bishop already holds a seat in the British parliament’s House of Lords, is also an outspoken opponent of legislation currently being debated to allow assisted dying.

'It's all about people'

Mullally is a former cancer nurse who worked as England’s Chief Nursing Officer in the early 2000s. She was ordained as a priest in 2002 and became one of the first women consecrated as a bishop in the Church of England in 2015.
The married mother of two adult children said there were similarities between nursing and Christian ministry.
“It’s all about people, and sitting with people during the most difficult times in their lives,” she once told a magazine.
Linda Woodhead, professor of theology and religious studies at King’s College London, said the Church needed Mullally’s strong management skills.
“Her emphasis on unity, gentleness and strength is exactly what the Church, and nation, needs right now,” she said.
Reflecting the Church’s status as England’s established faith, the appointment was announced by Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s office and given formal assent by King Charles. The monarch has been supreme governor of the Church of England for nearly 500 years since Henry VIII broke from the pope in Rome.
David Pestell, 74, who heads a tourist guide group in Canterbury, reflected on Mullally’s predecessors.
“Some of them have been very good, some of them have been pretty bad,” he said. “Some of them have been very contentious, and some of them ended up murdered. I hope it doesn’t happen to this one. It’s delightful.”