Migrants in misery

News of slave auctions must be a call to action

The world situation regarding migration hit rock-bottom with recent reports of slave auctions of migrants taking place in Libya in North Africa. It was terrible already given the numbers of migrants, including children, who have died in unsafe boats in the Mediterranean Sea, trying to get from North Africa to Southern Europe.

A number of factors have brought us to this point. One of the first is the lamentable economic circumstances that prevail in Africa that put the migrants on the road in quest of either a better life in Europe or money to send back to impoverished relatives remaining in Africa. This global economic inequality is in no small part due to greedy misgovernance on the part of many African leaders, operating on the model of Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe or the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s Joseph Kabila, as examples.

The weakness of most African nations’ economies is connected to the fact that there are too many African states and an absence of cooperation among them. This helps doom their peoples to continued, perhaps eternal, poverty. There is also the element of continued deadly unrest in a number of them, including Somalia, Mali, Nigeria, the DRC, Burundi and South Sudan. That unrest provokes migration, for safety as well as economic improvement.

A second factor that has produced the atrocity of slavery, and sales of migrants as slaves, is the state of affairs in Libya. The United States participated avidly with France, Italy, Britain and some of the Sunni Arab states in the violent overthrow and eventual death of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, who ruled the country from 1969 to 2011.

It would be hard to argue that Gadhafi was any kind of constructive leader of his country. But it is also true that what has followed him in Libya has been an environment that facilitates the grim process of migration and, in fact, one in which slavery and now even slave auctions can occur and thrive.

There are now three governments in Libya, each of them backed by a variety of external parties, including the United States. The strongest one is based in Cyrenaica, in the east of the country, headed by Gen. Khalifa Hifter. He used to be backed by the CIA and now is supported by Egypt and Russia. The other two governments, one of which the United States backs, are based in western Libya in Tripoli, the former capital.

A third factor that has helped produce the ghastly migrant situation in Libya is the fact that the populations of a number of European countries have decided that their countries and their economies have by now absorbed enough migrants from Africa. Their initial reaction to the migrants was compassion. European citizens acknowledged that they were better off than the migrants, that they might even be able to make good use of the influx of labor. In any case, their societies were sufficiently prosperous to be able to absorb migrants relatively painlessly.

In most European countries, public and political opinion has been strongly influenced by the migration issue. Even Germany, among the most welcoming of the European countries, has now experienced something of a political backlash on the question with the increased vote of the right-wing, anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany party in this year’s elections. Some European countries, including Austria, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia, have taken what could be characterized as a xenophobic position. Whether that is reasonable or not, a significant segment of the populations of European countries has arrived at that position.

The United States has played almost no role in the issue, in fact reducing the number of immigrants it is admitting, somewhat counter to America’s historical tradition. There is also an argument that says that the United States should give priority to migrants from the Middle East, where we have been militarily active in recent years, stirring up the sort of unrest that provokes migration.

Whatever the overall situation, it is indisputable that the situation in Libya, where migrants are being auctioned off like cattle, is no tribute to the level of civilization in the world of 2017. If that means letting Mr. Hifter win so that someone can establish order in Libya, eliminating one negative factor, then the United States should allow that to occur.