Business has never been so good for Libya’s human-trafficking gangs. Since the collapse in law and order that followed Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s fall, the beaches of the Mediterranean have been the perfect launchpad for boatloads of migrants towards Europe. Some 15,000 people have been despatched this year alone, netting the smugglers millions of dollars in fares for the privilege of riding in rickety, overloaded vessels. If they are worried about a boat from this miserable armada sinking — as happened last Sunday, with the loss of 400 lives — they can always ring the Italian coastguard to pick its benighted passengers up.
As the Telegraph reported, traffickers now routinely tip the Italian coastguard off about arrivals. According to Graham Leese, a former British adviser to the European Union border force, Frontex, they even cut the amount of fuel in the expectation that the boats will be met halfway by Italian coastguards. Such cosy arrangements are not entirely new. Italian MPs have long complained that the search and rescue operations effectively act as a “taxi service” for the traffickers.
However, as migration across the Mediterranean reaches unprecedented levels — last year 170,000 crossed from North Africa alone — the traffickers hold all the aces. In effect, a giant hole has been opened in the continent’s border control policies, making a mockery of European leaders’ promises to keep tighter curbs on immigration. Those promises mask the reality, which is that at the highest level Europe is bitterly divided over how to respond and riven even over whether search and rescue should continue or not.
That sounds heartless. And, admittedly, for the United Nations and human rights groups there is no debate to be had. Speaking to the BBC yesterday in the aftermath of last Sunday’s tragedy, Laurens Jolles, of the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), said the incident highlighted an urgent need for a “strengthened capacity to carry out rescue”. It is hard not to have sympathy for the migrants’ plight. The journey they make is the humanitarian equivalent of leaping across the Berlin Wall during the Cold War, facing a very real risk of death in the hope of a better life.
But there are those who argue that the UN’s pleas do not help the situation. “Saying that we must help people in need should not absolve them of the practical realities of taking unlimited numbers of refugees in,” said Alp Mehmet, the vice-chairman of Migration Watch. Right now, those realities have never seemed more pressing.
The current crisis has its roots in the decision last October to end Operation Mare Nostrum, an Italian-led, EU-funded operation that significantly increased search and rescue operations off Italy’s southern coast. It was started in response to the drowning, in October 2013, of 360 migrants within sight of the island of Lampedusa. In the following 12 months it rescued some 150,000 migrants, a huge increase on the influx of the previous year.
So did Mare Nostrum end up actually causing a spike in numbers attempting the journey across the Mediterranean, as migrants and traffickers considered the once-perilous journey safe? The row over cause and effect has raged since last autumn, when Mare Nostrum was replaced by Operation Triton, a scaled-down mission that does not conduct active search missions. Britain, among other European nations, argues that Mare Nostrum was indeed acting as a “pull” for further migration and therefore did not justify its $6 million (Dh22 million) a month funding.
The UN took the view that the huge number of rescues simply reflected growing demand for asylum, citing chaos in the Middle East and Africa, notably in countries such as Libya and Syria. Border experts like Leese question this, pointing out that many of the boat people are primarily economic migrants and that the extra numbers are more likely to reflect word getting around within the smuggling networks that Europe was making things easier.
“The UN idea that one is obliged morally to take in people coming across in boats is a dangerous one, because you are encouraging the very process that you are seeking to stop,” he said. “Some of these people are desperate, but a good proportion are economic migrants and, either way, you shouldn’t be encouraging people to risk their lives in a boat.”
Nor, it might be argued, would one want to do anything that makes life easier for the smugglers, whose lack of respect for human life should trouble anyone who professes a humanitarian motive. Stories abound of smugglers sinking boats, throwing passengers overboard and raping women. Nor, despite an often admirable spirit of get-up-and-go, are those who make it to Europe’s shores necessarily equipped to thrive there. Many from sub-Saharan Africa arrive with little more than the soaking clothes they are picked up in, and little in the way of language skills or qualifications. In places such as Malta and Italy, they form a growing, painfully visible migrant underclass, sleeping in overcrowded dosshouses, with few ways of making money other than casual labour or street hawking. Few would argue that it makes a positive case for immigration, and in Greece, their presence has helped fuel the rise of the xenophobic party Golden Dawn. Increasingly, also, it is not just southern Europe’s problem.
While roughly 170,000 migrants reached Italy last year, only around 27,000 applied for asylum there, with the rest thought to be heading north in search of better job prospects. “The UK is very much a favoured destination,” said Leese. As an island and not a member of the Schengen collective (the 26 EU countries that have eliminated passport and immigration controls at their joint border), Britain is harder for these migrants to get into, but immigration officials say anecdotal evidence suggests that anything up to 150 migrants a week do manage to get into the UK, many of them by climbing into lorries at Calais.
That equates to more than 7,000 a year, most of whom are unlikely to ever return home — thanks to an asylum process already burdened with a years-long backlog of deportation orders. So what is to be done? Already, there are signs of revolt among politicians in Italy, where regional authorities have been asked to cater for more than 10,000 new arrivals in the last week alone, and where numbers are expected to increase, now that summer’s calmer seas are here.
Claudio Palomba, the prefect of Rimini, described the system as “close to collapse”, while Matteo Salvini, the head of the Northern League and a rising star of the Italian Right, called on his supporters to blockade hostels, barracks and other places that might be used as holding centres.
The real solution, of course, is tackling the smugglers themselves — something that an EU maritime intelligence unit, set up in The Hague last month, will dedicate itself to doing.
But success there is only likely to come by depriving them of their safe operating havens in Libya — which, given the scale of that country’s collapse into lawlessness since 2011, will be an exercise not just in crime-fighting, but in nation-building as well. Neither Britain nor the EU has shown much appetite for that since Iraq and Afghanistan.
And as they ring their contacts in the Italian coastguard to advise them of yet more ships on the way, it is something the smugglers will be relying on to keep them in business for a while to come.
— The Telegraph Group Limited, London, 2015
