MIGRANTS NOT WELCOME
European warships to block boats
Europe is in a deep quandary over how to respond to a huge and growing influx of desperate migrants crossing the Mediterranean Sea from North Africa in rickety boats totally ill-suited for this perilous journey.
The exodus, which has caused a strong backlash against immigration from Italy to Scandinavia, has become a key issue in elections everywhere in Europe, including next month’s ballot in Britain. It was brought into sharp focus last week by the drowning deaths of about 1,000 Africans, Arabs and South Asians fleeing war and poverty amid suggestions as many as one million more would-be migrants were gathering on the Med’s southern shores to make the same 450-kilometre crossing.
Despite shocking images of the refugees’ bloated corpses being collected from the water, affluent countries such as Britain, France and Germany, which have long taken great pride in their welcoming liberal social policies, have no interest in organizing a managed resettlement program.
Rather, their response has been to devise ways to keep most of these wretched travellers out of Europe, while repatriating many of those who have miraculously succeeded in reaching what for them seems like the Promised Land.
More than 50 former European leaders described the calamity unfolding in Italian, Maltese and Greek waters as a “stain on the conscience of our continent.”
After many similarly anguished words from sitting politicians, too, the plan, such as it is, became clear Thursday. An emergency summit of 28 European leaders in Brussels decided an armada of warships, assisted by reconnaissance aircraft, will gather off the coast of North Africa.
The sailors’ orders would be to block the migrants at source, particularly those leaving from Libya, the origin of those who drowned last weekend. To do that, they would use attack helicopters to destroy vessels used in this business before they loaded their human cargoes.
As for welcoming the refugees who had made it to Europe, the niggardly response of the continent’s presidents and prime ministers was to offer a safe haven to only 5,000 of them. Their intention is to send back to where they came from the 185,000 or so others who made it to Italy last year and during the first four months of 2015.
Of course, none of this will solve the wars, the extreme religious and ethnic persecution, and the economic paralysis that are causing convulsions in Iraq, Syria, Libya, the Horn of Africa and West Africa and which are the root cause of this latest immigration crisis.
But unless Europe is prepared to go to war in all these places — which it is not — it is hard to know how it could help when civil order in those countries has disintegrated and, as is the case in Libya, there is nobody in power to talk with.
Many Europeans have been appalled by what Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi has called a “21st-century slave trade.” This has apparently produced huge profits for people-smuggling gangs from Ethiopia, Eritrea and Nigeria who transport their human cargo thousands of kilometres overland to North Africa. Once there, they board ships that are in such dire condition the travellers are doomed before they put to sea. For all that, most Europeans do not want the gangs’ victims to settle in their countries.
Europe has not yet completely digested refugees fleeing the fighting in Ukraine, as well as the hundreds of thousands displaced by wars in the Balkans and Horn of Africa in the 1990s. Beset with grave economic problems of their own, voters are telling their leaders enough is enough.
Britain’s hugely popular Daily Mail captured the public mood here with a front-page headline this week that screamed, “Voters tell (Prime Minister David) Cameron to act on migration.”
Cameron took the bait. In an article published by the Mail, he moved to protect his Conservative Party’s right flank from anti-immigration sentiment by accusing Labour leader Ed Miliband, who could be Britain’s next prime minister May 7, of intending to allow “a return to uncontrolled immigration ... His arrogant refusal even to discuss numbers — let alone speak of any reduction — tells you all you need to know.”
Cameron’s government has decided any migrants plucked from the Mediterranean by the Royal Navy would be landed in Italy and would not be necessarily be given refugee status in Britain, as would have been the case previously.
The most obvious problem with the EU plan to stop people before they can put to sea is that it will probably take months, if not years, for their navies to get organized to do anything.
Even if they act sooner, much more than high-minded words and warships are needed to staunch the stream of frantic would-be migrants.
Even if more overloaded ships sink in the Med, as is certain, the political mood is so gloomy it is unlikely previously open-minded and open-hearted Europe will reverse itself and welcome this exodus on to its fair shores.