Tunisia will take back migrants who have flooded the tiny Italian island of Lampedusa, an EU official said Friday.
European Home Affairs Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom confirmed the move Friday in Brussels, EUobserver reports.
It quotes Malmstrom as saying Tunis is accepting "a well-managed, organized and gradual repatriation" of the Tunisians among the roughly 20,000 migrants who crossed the Mediterranean to Lampedusa in the past weeks. Malmstrom had just returned from a three-day visit to Tunis together with Neighborhood Commissioner Stefan Fuele.
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has been to Lampedusa this week to promise the islanders a swift resolution of what aid groups have called a humanitarian crisis caused by worsening hygiene on the small island.
Italy has begun moving migrants off the island into temporary camps and is planning to start sending them to Tunisia as soon as possible. Rome is mulling whether to give each migrant leaving voluntarily more than $2,100, news Web site EurActiv reports.
During the past weeks, Italy had demanded more help and money from the European Union and Tunisia to stem the crisis but Malmstrom said Brussels had provided more than enough funds.
"Italy was given quite a lot of money for 2010-2011 and there can be more funds allocated. But so far, as I understand it, Italy has not fully spent these funds," EUobserver quoted her as saying.
Meanwhile, migrants are still pouring out of Libya, where rebels have been locked in intense fighting with regime forces. An estimated 220,000 refugees who have left Libya since the violence erupted there.
While around 100,000 migrants have already been evacuated to their home countries in Asia and Africa, some can't return because of conflicts in their nations.
"Sweden offered to take a couple of hundred people. I hope the rest of member states show that EU solidarity works in practice," Malmstrom said.
The International Organization for Migration, an intergovernmental agency, estimates that some 1.5 million migrants were staying in Libya, a popular end destination as well as transit country, before the unrest began.
Although a significant number of them are from Africa, there are also migrants from other parts of the world. Among them are Filipinos, Sri Lankans, Bangladeshis, Pakistanis and Chinese, the IOM said, many of them guest workers.
European nations have been concerned of what Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini has likened to a "biblical exodus" of migrants flooding Europe's southern countries.
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