Italy's humanitarian corridor for migrants provides safe alternative to smugglers' routes

It's hard not to look at the group of 81 travellers crowded into a waiting room in Terminal 5 of Rome's Fiumicino airport and imagine alternative fates for them: trappedand hungry inAleppo, Syria;losing hope in a crammed migrant holding centre in Greece;drowning while trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea.

Since the start of this year a short span in a crisis that haslasted over a decade morethan 200,000 people escaping conflict and hardship in Africa, the Middle East and South Asia have made it to Europe by boat.Almost 3,000have died en route, in most cases,drowning after theovercrowded vessels they were travelling insank.

An unknown number of others die along the migrants' desert route to Libya.Lastweek's gruesome discoveryof 34bodies in Niger was the most recent reminder of that.

But at the Rome airport, the recent group of several dozen mainly Syrian refugees, many with urgent medical problems, arrived safelythanks to a new private sponsorship initiative that functions asa humanitarian corridor a safe, legalalternative to the dangerousroutes smugglers have been using to get to Europe for years.

The program is the result of acollaboration between theCommunity ofSant'Egidio, a Catholic lay association,and the Federation of Protestant Churches of Italy, with the backing of Italy's foreign and interior ministries.

Its goal is twofold: stop the most-vulnerable people from embarking on the dangerous sea route to Italy by providing them with a safe alternative, and help themfully integrate into Italian society.

As the United Nations marks World Refugee Day Monday, some who work with refugees say itis the most-promising grassroots refugee initiative to come out of Europe since the migrantcrisis began.

'You don't have the basics of life'

Among the group of new arrivals isKhaledAbdu, 33, from the city ofHoms in western Syria, which he fled three years ago.Sitting beside him in a wheelchair is his five-year-old son,Naser, who can barely keep his eyes open after the long trip.

"He needs medical help for his legs," saidAbdu. "Now, this is a possibility."

GeorgeTeskf, 50, a tall, exhausted-looking lawyer from Aleppowho once studied and worked in Canada, is another new arrival.

For the past few months, he had been trapped in the besieged city with his wife, Wafaa, a civil engineer whosuffers from aheart conditionand developed a shoulder injury from the strain of having to carry buckets of water several kilometres home.

"In Aleppo, we were just surviving. No work. You only think about bringing water and food. You don't have the basics of life," Teskf said.

Organizers of the humanitarian corridorhelped Teskf andhis wife flee.Getting out of Aleppo, he says, was a dangerous 16-hour ordeal that required the careful co-ordination of several different forms of transportation. They made it to Beirut, where they met up with the others in their group and boarded a plane for Rome.

He says if he'd been alone, he might haveriskeda boat crossing, buthis wife's heath problems meant thatwas out of the question.

"Now, we just want peace in our countryand to live comfortably," he said.

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It's clearly asentiment shared by the whole group the fourth to arrivesince the initiative was launched in February and began bringing refugees toItalyon discounted commercial flights from Beirut.

Italian organizers work closely with a local network of humanitarian organizations in Lebanon who help identify particularly vulnerable asylum seekers those with disabilities and serious health problems, pregnant women and single mothers with young children and then assist with visas and other support to get them to Italy.

Once in Italy, the refugees are dispersed throughout the country where different church groups house and support them, arrange schooling for the kids and professional training and assistance for the adults. The groups commit to support the refugees for up tonine months, after which they enter the state-sponsored refugee programif necessary.

While Christian groups spearheaded the program, they make no religious distinctions in selecting refugees. Most of those whom they've broughtto Italyhave been Muslim.

Learning from Canada

So far, only fewer than 300refugees have arrived inItaly with the help of the safe corridor.But the initiative is the first of its kind in Europe, and organizers insistit's a promising model that can be exported throughout the continent.

Spain, France and Polandhave already expressed interest.And later this month, the Italian ambassador to the UN will host a presentation about the initiative forother EU nationsin a bid to bring them on board.

Organizers say Canada's private sponsorship refugee program has been a valuable model.

"I have just one complaint about the Canadian program," jokes Paolo Naso, a political science professor and organizer of the corridor, "and that's that the Canadian refugees arrived before the Italians. But really, Canada has been an inspiration for us."

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Still, there are some significant differences that mightaffect just how much the Italian program can grow.Unlike the Canadian sponsorship program, which has brought in almost 10,000 privately sponsoredrefugees since November 2015, Italy's humanitarian corridor hasmuch looserrules and expectationsand is essentially run bychurch groups.

"This program is taking people out of difficult situations and specifically targeting vulnerable groups that may have been overlooked, and it's doing so without much red tape," saidFedericoSoda,the Rome-based director of theInternational Organization for Migration's co-ordination office for the Mediterranean.

Butreplicating theprogramon a large scale means establishing more formal guidelines governing who can besponsored, who can be a sponsorand what are their commitments and responsibilities.

"In terms of scaling it up, all these questions need to be answered," Soda said. "You also need to open it up to non-faith groupsor other faithsto replicate. Poland may be interested, but they'll be interested probably in taking Christians out of Lebanon. So, it's limited in that sense."

Still, observers thinkthe humanitarian corridor might offer new hope where it is badly needed and a model for how to safely bring asylum seekers to Europe. With the right backing and proper regulation, it could one day meanfar fewer corpses washing up on Mediterranean shores.