Years of criticism of an EU-backed migration pact between Italy and Libya are coming to a head as migrant rescuers say the Libyan coastguard has begun firing directly at them.
"Hundreds of bullets were fired during 20 terrifying minutes" in an attack "deliberately targeting crew members on the bridge... at head height", said SOS Mediterranee, the charity running the Ocean Viking ship, in August.
Last week, German charity Sea-Watch said its rescue ship was also shot at by the Libyan coastguard using live ammunition.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni's government and the European Union provide funding and training to the Libyan coastguard to intercept people attempting the crossing to Europe.
The project is credited with sharply reducing the number of migrants reaching Italy via sea -- a priority of Meloni's far-right Brothers of Italy party.
But the agreement, signed in 2017 by the then-centre-left government, has been increasingly criticised amid numerous reports that EU-funded detention centres in Libya are run by human traffickers, who also collude with the coastguard.
Critics say that makes Italy and the EU complicit in human rights breaches by war-torn Libya, and opposition parties are calling for the deal to be scrapped before it automatically renews in February.
Italy would have to give notice on pulling out by next month -- although there is no sign that Meloni's government will do so.
"Libya holds at the moment quite an important leverage over Italy in the same way that Turkey did over the EU in terms of threatening" to let millions of migrants leave for Europe, said Diana Volpe, a postdoctoral fellow at the Free University of Brussels and expert in Italy's outsourcing of migration control.
- 'Outsource dirty work' -
Libyan patrol boats have long used aggressive tactics while attempting to stop charities picking up migrants, but the shift from warning shots to direct fire is alarming.
"It's unacceptable that the Italian government and the EU allows criminal militia to fire on civilians," said Sea-Watch spokeswoman Giorgia Linardi after last week's incident.
Mediterranea Saving Humans, another rescue charity, last month also published photographs which it said showed a militia allied with the Libyan government trafficking people in the Mediterranean.
Some 42 civil society groups have written to the Eiuropean Commission to denounce the use of EU funds for "organisations that attack European citizens and people in distress at sea", and to demand the Italy-Libya deal be axed.
The patrol boats involved were given to Libya by Italy as part of a deal to train and equip the coastguard, according to the charities and Italian investigative journalists.
Volpe said the accord was "specifically created" by Italy to get around the fact Libya is not considered by the UN to be a "place of safety", so Rome cannot return migrants there itself.
Instead of Italy performing illegal "pushbacks" -- the forced return of people to countries where they would be unsafe -- Rome enabled Libya to perform its own "pullbacks".
Those picked up by the Libyan coastguard are locked in detention centres that are regularly denounced by the UN for poor conditions.
Matteo Orfini, an opposition MP who campaigns against the Italy-Libya deal, told AFP it was "a tool through which we... outsource dirty work to Libyan armed gangs".
- EU awaits probes -
Italian opposition parties say the accord has exposed the government to blackmail.
They linked Rome's release in January of a Libyan war crimes suspect wanted by the International Criminal Court to a desire not to jeopardise the deal.
Osama Almasri Najim is accused of charges including murder, rape and torture relating to his management of Tripoli's Mitiga detention centre.
It is difficult to know how much money Rome and the EU have spent on the Libyan scheme.
The EU says it spent some 465 million euros ($545 million) on Libya in the area of migration between 2015 to 2021, while another 65 million euros was allocated for "protection and border management" in Libya from 2021 to 2027.
The bloc also provides assistance to the Libyan coastguard through two civilian and military missions.
After the shots were fired at the NGO boats, Commission spokesman Guillaume Mercier said Brussels would "await the developments of the investigations" taking place in Libya.
But Volpe was dismissive. "It's been almost a decade now of videos of human rights abuses happening at sea and in the detention centres."
Yet those have not stopped the EU or Italy retracting "their support, either financial or political".
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