Italian PM confident in EU's commitment on migrant crisis

Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi on Thursday said he was confident in the new European Union (EU)'s commitment on the migrant crisis at an extraordinary summit on migratory pressures on Thursday.

"I am optimistic on the fact that we can bring home the sign that something has finally changed in Europe ... I believe I can say there are all the conditions for a change," Renzi was quoted by Italian media as saying.

European leaders agreed to reinforce the joint operations in the Mediterranean by increasing the financial resources.

The extraordinary summit was called after around 800 migrants were feared to have drowned in the Mediterranean while trying to reach Italy from Libya onboard a packed boat last Saturday.

The migrants suffered a heavy toll of violence, according to Italian authorities which have arrested around 1,000 people traffickers so far.

In fact Saturday's wreckage was the latest of countless disasters that saw thousands of migrants from different areas of Africa, including many women and children, lose their lives at sea in the past months.

Italian President Sergio Mattarella stressed on Thursday it is "unacceptable" that the Mediterranean Sea should become the "graveyard of those looking for a better life and running away from famine."

"The EU is facing two main challenges. The first is about financial means. The second is about political will," Silvia Cavasola, a political science researcher at LUISS University in Rome, told Xinhua.

Cavasola said the EU has to work to find a single vision on how the refugees have to be managed as "Italy alone is not able to welcome and offer protection to all of the migrants arriving on its soil."

The political unrest in some Northern African countries, most notably Libya, has produced opportunities for people traffickers, who take advantage of rampant instability in many African countries to make business out of migrants' despair, she explained to Xinhua.

In her view, any European strategy aimed at tackling the migrant crisis should therefore focus on finding a way out from political chaos in Libya through diplomatic intelligence operations.

"The most important step would be that of pushing the two Libyan governments of Tripoli and Tobruk to find an agreement to create some kind of national unity government, which would help Europe work to solve the crisis," Cavasola said. Endit