EU leaders commit to ships and aid for migrants crisis as division lingers

European Union leaders on Thursday started committing ships, planes and helicopters to save lives in the Mediterranean at an emergency summit convened after hundreds of migrants drowned in the space of a few days, and were discussing laying the ground for military action against traffickers. The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because the summit was continuing, said diplomatic preparation for military action would likely take a couple of months, putting off talk of immediate action against the traffickers. The task ahead is huge, with more than 10,000 migrants plucked from seas between Italy and Libya just over the last week, fleeing poverty and conflict.

First and foremost now, we have to save lives and take the right measures to do so.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel

The draft statement also called for “a first voluntary pilot project on resettlement, offering at least 5,000 places to persons qualifying for protection." That resettlement plan would amount to about half of the number which arrived in just the last week and a tiny fraction of the tens of thousands likely to arrive this year. Here too a continental rift was already obvious, with countries like Germany, Sweden, France and Italy dealing with a disproportionate number of asylum requests while many eastern and Baltic member states hardly take any. Five of the 28 member states are handling almost 70 percent of the migrants coming in.

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