Migration the hot topic at summit
IVORY COAST: European leaders under pressure from a far-right revival at home hope to avoid a difficult debate about immigration when they meet their African counterparts in Ivory Coast from today.
Reports this month of abuses against African migrants in Libya have sparked anger across the continent, however, threatening to drive migration to the top of the summit agenda and shine a spotlight on an issue fraught with political risk.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron, who head the Franco-German axis at the heart of the European Union, will have its next major political test in mind when they sit down with African Union heads of state.
Italy, which is on the front line of the campaign to slow illegal migration to Europe, is due to hold elections early next year, and the populist 5-Star Movement is leading opinion polls. The antiimmigrant, eurosceptic Northern League is also gaining support.
‘‘We all have our own interests in not turning this into a migration conference,’’ one EU official said ahead of the meeting in Ivory Coast’s commercial capital, Abidjan.
The summit is meant to focus on development, long the cornerstone of EU policy in Africa and tangentially related to migration. The theme of investing in youth, though, is a nod to the rampant unemployment and poverty that drives many young Africans to leave home in search of a better life.
But it now looks increasingly unlikely that the EU leaders will be able to avoid hard questions from their African counterparts.
Soon after CNN aired grainy images from Libya this month appearing to show migrants being sold as slaves, African governments began recalling diplomats from Tripoli. Protests erupted in France, Senegal and Benin. Ivory Coast President Alassane Ouattara called for Libyan slave traders to be prosecuted by the International Criminal Court.
Libyan authorities have promised to investigate the slavery allegations. But the EU too has been the target of anger and frustration.
‘‘They’re the ones who blocked the way and left us in the hands of these Libyans,’’ said Cherifou Sahindou, sitting at a makeshift tea stand by a muddy, rubbishstrewn track near a mosque in Abidjan’s Yopougon neighbourhood.
Sahindou and some of the other men around the tea stand said they made it to Libya, but no further. All had heard about the slave markets, and all knew someone who had ‘‘stayed in the water’’ - the local euphemism for death on the migrant trail.
Like many African leaders, Ouattara has called for Europe to broaden the legal avenues for migration from the continent, using mechanisms such as student and temporary work visas.
‘‘Europe and Europeans ... should not be afraid, because Africa and the African youth can bring a lot to Europe,’’ he said in an interview with the France 24 news channel this week.
But in the current political climate, any proposal for more Africans to enter Europe is a nonstarter for many EU leaders.
Merkel herself is the most highprofile victim of an antiimmigration backlash. At the peak of the migrant influx into Europe in 2015, she declared an open door policy for refugees and asylum seekers, allowing in more than a million migrants.
The anti-immigrant, far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party campaigned hard against the policy, and won 13 per cent of the vote in a September election complicating Merkel’s efforts to form a coalition government, and weakening her position as the leading EU advocate within Europe.
In an indication of how heated things have become, the mayor of a small town in Germany, who won an award from Merkel for his liberal migrant policies, was stabbed in the neck on Tuesday in an attack believed to be politically motivated.
‘‘If you say, ‘I’ve got a right to total access without conditions’ ... I can’t explain that to my middle class, who’ve worked, who pay their taxes,’’ Macron said during a rowdy exchange with students in Burkina Faso yesterday. ‘‘What do I tell them?’’
It is those kinds of political calculations that are hindering muchneeded policy solutions, said William Swing, head of the International Organisation for Migration.
‘‘The heart of the problem is the very toxic atmosphere that’s been fairly widespread for some years now ... That’s not just in Europe,’’ he said. ‘‘The drivers [of migration] are there, and they’re not going away. So clearly, our policies need to change.’’
European delegates at the summit, however, are expected to pledge aid, repeating often-voiced calls for a ‘‘Marshall Plan’’ for Africa that would create jobs and lift incomes to give would-be migrants a reason to stay at home. The African security sectors charged with clamping down on migrant flows will also get their share of European money.
EU support for the Libyan authorities, including Italian assistance for its coastguard, has helped to halve the number of migrants arriving in Europe via the Mediterranean Sea this year.
Abdoulaye Dosso, another man at the tea stand in Yopougon, said he crossed the Sahara Desert, played dead to survive as rebels shot other migrants, and then spent weeks in one such camp awaiting repatriation to Ivory Coast.
‘‘There have been too many deaths,’’ he said. ‘‘There must be a change.’’