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Italy: Police drag away refugees camped on French border

by Our Foreign Desk

REFUGEES camping on the Italy-France border were removed by Italian police yesterday as European nations failed to reach agreement on sharing responsibility for migrants.

Officers in riot gear dragged away dozens of African refugees at the Ventimiglia border crossing who had been demanding entry to France for five days.

Some of the migrants protested, grabbing on to signposts, while others had to be carried off by their arms and legs.

“We are human beings. We are not animals,” said Sudanese migrant Saddam.

“I know we are black and we are come from Africa, but we are still humans.”

Migrants squatting on the rocks where they had been sleeping were left in peace, but the rest were loaded onto a Red Cross bus and taken to the nearby railway station.

At talks in Luxembourg, EU interior ministers disagreed over how 40,000 new refugees arriving in Italy and Greece should be split up equitably among the EU’s 28 member states to ease the load on the two southern nations.

“We are working to avoid the political bankruptcy of Europe,” said Italian Interior Minister Angelino Alfano, adding that the scene in Ventimiglia was “a punch in the eye for those who refuse to see.”

His French counterpart Bernard Cazaneuve denied that France had closed its border.

“When migrants cross borders and it is established that they arrived in Italy, then it is only normal that they return to Italy,” he said.

Hundreds of Syrian and Iraqi refugees protested on Monday on the eastern Greek island of Lesbos, demanding better living conditions and faster processing of their asylum registrations.

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