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Canary Islands fear disaster as number of migrants soars
A record number of African migrants, almost 1,200 in 36 hours, reached the shores of the Spanish Canary Islands at the weekend, crammed into eight rickety boats that set sail from Mauritania, officials said. Police have intercepted about 20,000 migrants this year. Rescue workers say 550 have drowned en route. In all, 674 arrived on Saturday and 522 yesterday. "This is a humanitarian catastrophe of the first degree," Paulino Rivero, a Canary Island official, told the newspaper El País.

The number of migrants landing on the Canary Islands, off the west African coast, has risen steadily this summer. Close to 6,000 arrived in August, compared with 4,751 for the whole of 2005. Television news footage of Red Cross workers covering dehydrated young men with blankets, or carrying away corpses, is broadcast nearly every evening. As refugee camps overflow and tourists help bedraggled migrants on to the beach, Madrid is pushing the EU to help cut off this new sea route to Europe.
The EU will be as successful at this as it is with everything else it does.
Spain has pushed immigration to the top of the agenda at the EU summit next month. Ministers from France, Italy, Portugal, Greece, Cyprus, Malta and Slovenia have also been invited to a crisis meeting this month, said a spokeswoman for the Spanish prime minister's office, where the coordination of sea patrols, rescue operations and repatriation will be discussed. "We are the southern frontier of Europe," she said. "Anyone who enters our country enters the EU. Their final destination may be France or Belgium."

Posted by: Steve White 2006-09-04
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=164949