Europe is in a complete mess over the flow of migrants from Libya. Italy is being overwhelmed by the tidal wave of humanity that is being launched from beaches in western Libya. At a Paris meeting this weekend, it appealed to France and Germany to do something to help. So bad has the problem become that Rome is even talking of closing its ports to any non-Italian vessel carrying rescued migrants.
Such a threat is aimed at the nine Non-Government Organizations (NGO) which are operating vessels at their own expense, picking up people from overcrowded rubber rafts. A Sicilian prosecutor is investigating alleged links between Libyan people-smuggling gangs and these charities. One of the questions he wants answered is how some of the smaller organizations can afford to operate ocean-going vessels and fast launches which are used to transfer migrants from their flimsy craft. The NGOs have angrily denied any collusion but it is known that Libyans have actually collected the outboard motors and the rafts themselves once the migrants have been rescued. In at least one case, a vessel bearing the markings of the Libya Coastguard with uniformed and armed men aboard was filmed doing this. In the course of boarding the still migrant filled rubber raft, it was punctured and sank, drowning a number of the luckless passengers.
More than 83,000 people have arrived in Italy so far this year and over 2,000 are known to have died while trying to make the crossing. Many thousands more have been picked up by the Libya Coastguard and taken to detention camps in Libya. Conditions in these places have been described by the United Nations as deplorable. Those in charge protest they do not have the money to feed the detainees, let alone provide decent living conditions. One solution Italy has proposed for its own migrant crisis is to fund the expansion of the camps in Libya and send rescued migrants back to Libya. Given credible allegations that some of these detention centers exploit their prisoners as slave labor, EU aid that has been given Libya to help it with migrants may, therefore, be funding crimes against humanity.
One straw at which the Europeans are grasping is to help Libya secure its southern border principally with Niger, across which sub-Saharan African migrants are pouring. Given the vast expanses of desert and mountains, the general lawlessness and the fact that local tribes are making a very good living out of human-trafficking, such a plan is doomed to be an expensive but pathetic failure.
Another option being explored is to fund economic development in the countries from which these largely young economic migrants come. The irony is that such a move is only likely to increase the local wealth that will be used to pay people-smugglers.
The harsh option is to screen all migrants and send back home all those who have no grounds to seek political asylum. The UN’s International Organization for Migration is already doing this to an extent by arranging papers for failed migrants kept in humiliating detention centers who finally despair of finding their way to Europe. But the IOM is flying home people only in the mere hundreds. As these planes head south across the Sahara desert, beneath them the smugglers are driving convoys of thousands of hopeful migrants heading north to the Libyan coast.
