A radical European anti-immigrant group says it has crowdfunded almost $100,000 to block humanitarian rescue boats on the Mediterranean in an attempt to stop them from saving migrants and bringing them to the European mainland.
“Mass immigration is changing the face of our continent – we’re losing our safety, our way of life,” one member of the identitarian group said in a promotional video.
Intercut with footage of young men speaking are images of migrant rescues and terror attacks on mainland Europe.
More than 71,000 migrants have travelled across the Mediterranean so far this year, the majority arriving in Italy.
Packed into overcrowded, unseaworthy boats, more than 1,700 have drowned making the journey in the past six months.
Government-operated rescue ships and passing commercial vessels have rescued thousands of migrants in recent years, though EU officials estimate that roughly 40 per cent of stranded migrants are picked up by boats deployed by charities and NGOs.
The Sicily-based anti-immigrant identitarian group says with its new funding it will gather a crew, organise a boat and take to the Mediterranean to block NGOs and “chase down” trafficking ships.
A video shows several members navigating a small boat and lighting flares in front of the Aquarius, an SOS Mediterranee rescue ship supported by Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders).
On its website – available in English, French, Italian and German – the group accuses humanitarian rescuers of colluding with people smugglers.
In response to previous criticism, MSF has said rescue boats are not the cause of the crisis, but a response to it.
The NGO has described its response as humanitarian, not political, noting that without intervention many more deaths would occur at sea.
Fabrice Leggeri, head of the EU border protection agency Frontex, earlier this year told a German newspaper that while everyone at sea has a duty to save people in need, he did have concerns over the way NGOs operated.
“We must avoid supporting the criminal networks and smugglers in Libya through European ships rescuing migrants ever closer and closer to the Libyan coast,” he told Die Welt.
“This means that the smugglers force even more migrants than the years before onto unseaworthy boats, without enough water and fuel.”
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