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North African and European leaders will set up an immigration task force following the Arab Spring uprisings, which have seen a sharp rise in people making risky boat crossings to seek a new life in Europe.
“We cannot accept that hundreds of people are dying in the Mediterranean,” Tunisian President Moncef Marzouki said Saturday at a summit bringing together the leaders of five European countries — France, Italy, Malta, Portugal and Spain — and five Maghreb states — Algeria, Libya, Morocco, Mauritania and Tunisia.
“This was the first meeting of this kind in nine years, held in a historic context of deep transformations,” said Maltese Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi.
The leaders adopted a declaration hailing the region’s “great shared heritage of culture, civilisation and history” and the goals of “democracy, stability, security and prosperity”.
They broached the sensitive subject of the thousands of people who migrate to the north, often risking their lives in rickety boats crossing the Mediterranean.
Marzouki announced a task force aimed at discouraging this migration, notably by better coordinating maritime resources.
“There are Tunisian, Libyan children, sometimes very young kids who die in shipwrecks. Each shipwreck is a catastrophe … and cannot be accepted,” Marzouki told journalists at the press conference closing the talks.
The speaker of the Libyan parliament, Mohamed Yousef el-Magarief, said the summit was “no doubt … (a) right step in the right direction in creating better understanding and stronger cooperation between countries”.
Marzouki said immigration was a “democratic urgency”.
The “Malta Declaration” stressed that illegal immigration “cannot be managed purely through control measures” such as border checks or repatriation of those who manage to get across to Europe.
“It also demands concerted action to tackle the fundamental causes of migration along with the development of an efficient, quick and tangible solidarity” between the countries concerned, it added.
Marzouki called on the summit’s members to “pool efforts and resources”, but said it “must not be a security operation, but a humanitarian one”.
Each year, thousands of illegal migrants, mostly from Africa, attempt the crossing of the Mediterranean in often overcrowded and unseaworthy vessels in a bid to reach the European Union and hundreds are lost at sea in shipwrecks.
The summit was the first held by the so-called “Five Plus Five” forum since the Arab Spring revolts, which greatly changed the Maghreb’s political makeup.
“The events in north Africa are historic and they have consequences for every other country,” Maltese Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi said at the start of the summit, calling for a future of “collective prosperity” for the region.
Issues on the table ranged from security in the region to cooperation deals to boost the economy and infrastructure on the Mediterranean’s southern shore.
Marzouki, who came to power in Tunisia last year after long-time ruler Zine el Abidine Ben Ali fled and the country held its first democratic vote, earlier said that the region’s transitions “are not a threat for Europe”.
He reassured the European leaders that “non-democratic Islamic systems would not be accepted by the people. We want Islamic democracy, not autocracy”.
It was the second summit for the forum, which was launched in Rome in 1990 after a first round of talks was held in Tunis in 2003.
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