Now, due to Salvini's fault, the toy has broken, but them, evidently, they have no intention of giving up
Of Gian Micalessin
«Once is a coincidence, twice a coincidence, three times it is an action of the enemy". Matteo Salvini and the infrastructure minister Matteo Toninelli would do well to re-read Ian Fleming.
The actions of the Diciotti ship, the Coast Guard patrol vessel, for the third time at the center of a clash with the Government in less than two and a half months, in fact, they seem more like studied moves than simple coincidences. The chronicle of the silent dispute between the Coast Guard, on the one hand, and the Ministry of Infrastructure, on which in theory it depends, and the Interior Ministry on the other begins towards 10 of June. While Salvini recommends the end of the rescue operations in front of Libya and the Aquarius ship of SOS Mediterranee is kept away from Italian ports, the patrol vessel Diciotti carries out seven interventions near the coast of Tripoli, charging 937 migrants. Migrants that Salvini and Toninelli are forced to disembark in Catania. But Diciotti's incursions don't end there.
Il 9 July the patrol vessel approaches the tug Vos Thalassa and loads 67 migrants who, according to a version that has never been clarified – they threatened the on-board staff who were guilty of wanting to disembark them in Libya instead of Italy. The version does not convince Matteo Salvini who makes it clear that he considers it a pretext to justify the intervention of the Coast Guard unit. But the fatal move capable of bringing the clash with the Coast Guard into the open comes on Wednesday. That day the patrolman Diciotti intervenes to the rescue of a boat with 177 migrants just as the government is pressuring Malta to welcome them into one of its ports. An absolutely unmotivated intervention given that the boat is not in immediate danger and it is carried out, as Matteo Salvini notes, without the knowledge of the Interior Ministry. «Yesterday the Maltese had taken responsibility for an intervention to help a boat with 170 immigrants on board explains the Minister of the Interior – and a ship of the Italian Port Authority, without the Interior Ministry being informed of it, took the immigrants on board while they were still in Maltese waters, to head towards Italy".
Once again , to listen to Salvini, the Coast Guard would have taken advantage of an at least incomplete situation to contravene the government's provisions and put it in difficulty. And in fact the executive finds itself, once more, in the embarrassing position of denying access to Italian ports to one of its military ships. But what are the reasons for the silent struggle? To understand this we need to go back to the times of Mare Nostrum when rescue operations were initially entrusted only to the Navy, excluding the Coast Guard. An exclusion that lasted only a few months given that the Renzi government in 2014 it soon expanded its operations to a Coast Guard enthusiastic about making it its flag. So enthusiastic that she subsequently became the main contact person for the NGOs with whom she agreed on dozens of rescue operations up to the limit of Libyan territorial waters.
It is no coincidence that in July a year ago the then General Commander of the Port Authorities Admiral Vincenzo Melone – called to testify by the Senate Defense Commission on the activities of the NGO ships already investigated by the Catania prosecutor Carmelo Zuccaro – he does not hesitate to defend them with drawn sword. An obvious and obligatory defense given that migrant rescue missions had become the true raison d'être of our Coast Guard and its leaders. Now, due to Salvini's fault, the toy has broken, but them, evidently, they have no intention of giving up. Nor to give it up.
http://m.ilgiornale.it/news/2018/08/20/lo-strano-gioco-della-guardia-costiera/1566363/