Your Thalassa

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". Read More