We must reclaim Europe’s borders to stop such tragedies

THE deaths of up to 1,000 EU-bound migrants at the weekend has focused minds on the appalling human tragedy unfolding in the Mediterranean. The Italians have rescued 13,000 people in the past week alone, while Italy has accommodated 31,000 refugees since the start of this year. How on earth has it come to this?

The fact is that the Western-backed overthrow of Colonel Gaddafi from power in Libya in October 2011, without ensuring a stable replacement regime, was a monumental mistake.

Libya is now a failed state with two parallel governments at war with each other, and no control of its borders. It is also home to hundreds of warring militia and terrorist groups, including Islamic State – who moved in comparatively recently, and only this week were shown in a video to have beheaded 30 local Christians on a Libyan beach.

The anarchy and the absence of border controls mean the country has become a gateway to Europe for migrants from all over Africa and the Middle East. They also mean human traffickers can operate with impunity amid the lawlessness, raking in £670million a year from their sordid trade.

And while the Italian navy and coastguards have been heroic, rescuing boatloads of people on a nightly basis, the problem will only intensify in coming months as calmer seas and warmer weather over the summer encourage more migrants to try their luck.

I am not suggesting that Gaddafi was anything other than a brutal, manipulative tyrant. Indeed, he himself was not above cynically exploiting the migrant crisis. In 2004, when Tony Blair’s muchtouted ‘deal in the desert’ – allowing the Libyan leader to come in from the cold in diplomatic terms, in return for abandoning his country’s nuclear weapons programme – went sour, Gaddafi gave people- smugglers the green light to increase their trade.

Likewise, in 2008, he tried to demand a payment from the European Union of £4.1billion a year in return for halting the flows of migrants in and out of Libya.

But Gaddafi could at least stop the boats when he chose to. Under the despotic leader’s regime, the Libyan navy still operated and his informers and secret police struck such terror into human traffickers that they dared not operate without sanction.

Today, there is no effective navy to patrol the country’s Mediterranean borders, nor any immigration service to safeguard its frontiers on land. This explains the escalation in migrants arriving by sea to Italy and Malta, from 4,500 in 2010 to an astonishing 170,760 in 2014.

Simply extending a heartfelt welcome across Europe to all these asylum seekers is not a political option, given the strength of feeling among voters on immigration.

Nor does the European Union seem up to the task of dealing with this major humanitarian crisis on its southern threshold. How many more deaths will there be before it takes this crisis sufficiently seriously? Alessandro Bechini,

the head of Oxfam’s operations in Italy, said he was left breathless by Europe’s indifference to the migrants’ fate.

For while the EU happily promotes free movement of people within its borders, it has no immigration policy per se, because it insists it is the business of national governments. The one EU agency responsible for co-ordinating national border agencies – called Frontex – is palpably inadequate. Not only is it based for political reasons in Warsaw – about as far in Europe from the crisis in the Med as you can get – it has actually made matters worse.

Until last year, the Italians operated an effective long-range naval mission to stop migrants called Mare Nostrum, which cost the country £9million a month, reaching deep into Libyan waters to intercept migrant boats. It was replaced last year by a Frontexoperated mission, Operation Triton, at a third of the cost, in which vessels patrolled no more than 20 miles from the European coastline – and the number of refugees arriving in Italy and Malta shot up between 2013 and 2014 by more than 130,000.

The burden of dealing with this crisis should not fall on Italy alone. And since the EU is manifestly failing to cope, other alternatives must be urgently considered.

One solution would be something like the multinational naval task force that has successfully rid the seas off the Horn of Africa of Somali pirates. Ships from many nations (including Australia, China, Turkey and the US) take part under alternating naval commanders from member nations.

Then there is Australia’s Operation Sovereign Borders – a naval ‘ring of steel’ and part of Conservative Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s wider effort to stem the numbers of boat people landing on the continent.

These refugees come from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Iran, and Sri Lanka, and come by boat from Indonesia’s 13,000 islands. Where possible, refugees are intercepted close enough to Indonesia to tow them back to shore. Alternatively, if detected far out in the ocean, refugees are sent to camps rented by Australia on the remote Pacific island of Nauru, off Papua New Guinea. Conditions in these camps are admittedly rudimentary and have caused disquiet in Australia’s Left-wing media.

These solutions involve hardship for the migrants. But at least people are not drowning in their thousands, and the immigration policies are consistent.

As Major General Jim Molan, who helped design the scheme, said: ‘If Europe does not want to control its borders, it should establish a sea bridge across the Mediterranean and let everyone in who wants to come, and not let these people die.

‘If it does want to control its borders, as voting patterns in almost every country in Europe indicate, European governments should realise that border control can be done and start showing a bit of leadership.’

With the anarchy in Libya showing no signs of abating, that leadership cannot come a moment too soon.