Geographically, the Mediterranean Sea passes along countries of southern Europe like Spain, Malta, Italy, Portugal and Greece, as well as the shoreline of North African states, including Libya, Egypt and Tunisia. Strategically, the mammoth sea is one of the most important routes for facilitating trade and commerce between Europe and Africa through shipping. However, the Mediterranean is currently on the front burner of international headlines. Obviously, this is on account of worsening crisis of rickety, overcrowded and unsafe migrant boats that often capsize in the sea while on illegal journeys to Europe from North Africa in recent months, alas leading to tragic and unnecessary loss of hundreds of lives. The worst of such incidents, seen as the deadliest in the Mediterranean and source of renewed international focus on the plight of illegal migrants, was the one that happened off the Libyan coast in the middle of last April, in which nearly 900 people reportedly died.
From all accounts, most of the stream of Mediterranean migrants are Africans seeking to escape from hard realities of life in their homelands like misrule, political instability, armed conflict, insecurity, persecution, economic adversity, crushing poverty, chronic unemployment, hunger, famine and environmental depredation (including the adverse effects of climate change and the associated global warming). They principally come from countries wracked by bloody conflict and abysmal human rights records, including Eritrea, Somalia, Libya, Sudan, Egypt, Mali, Sudan, South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The would-be migrants from these countries are joined by people fleeing sectarian violence and persecution in far-flung places like Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Palestine, Afghanistan and Myanmar (Burma). Others from countries like Nigeria, Ghana, Mauritania, Tunisia, Senegal, The Gambia and Bangladesh are in desperate search of greener pastures or economic prosperity in Europe.
Going by the recurrent terrifying reports of migrant boat capsizing in the Mediterranean Sea in recent weeks, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) has estimated that more than 30,000 people may die by the end of this year from the festering crisis if drastic actions are not taken by the international community to arrest this unfolding humanitarian tragedy.
In the face of the mounting death toll from the Mediterranean migrant crisis, it is gratifying that European Union (EU) leaders, after an emergency meeting last April, decided to treat the crisis with greater urgency. Part of the 10-point action plan they have unfurled to wrestle with the precarious situation are tripling the funding for rescue operations by naval patrols of EU countries under the Triton programme, sharing of intelligence about people smuggling networks, systematic effort to capture and destroy vessels used by the smugglers (including the possible use of military action), anti-piracy campaign on the scale of Operation Atalanta (in which EU helicopters would attack the boats and fuel dumps of people smugglers just as they were deployed to fight Somali pirates at the peak of their criminal activities in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden several years ago) and spreading the burden of taking in refugees. To be candid, without delay and prevarication by the EU countries, some of these plans are achievable, including the tasking one of national quotas for housing asylum seekers, which countries like the United Kingdom (UK), Germany, France and Hungary may oppose because of their tough asylum policies, fear of public opinion and threat from far-right racial supremacist movements and political parties.
To vigorously address the plight of the Mediterranean migrants, now dubbed Europe’s boat people, the EU should go beyond her current spending plans on the crisis by considering a number of confidence–building measures. One of them is establishing asylum processing camps in entry points in North African countries like Libya, Egypt and Tunisia to handle both migrants trying to reach Europe overland and those saved from the seas. These countries, as an incentive, should be paid by the EU to maintain the camps. It is expected that asylum process for the Mediterranean migrants would be fast, fair and effective. While concessions should be given to migrants seeking to escape oppression, gross human rights abuses and violent conflict, those rejected on the grounds of hankering for economic opportunities abroad should be repatriated to their countries.
More importantly, the EU countries are obligated to sign up to their share of refugees, as conceded to the Vietnamese boat people fleeing communist repression in their homeland in the 1970s and 80s. Thankfully, the judgment by the European Court of Human Rights this year stipulated that migrants must be given a fair chance to apply for asylum and may not automatically be sent back even if rescued in international waters. This landmark ruling is in tandem with the UN conventions that make refugees the responsibility of any country where they turn up. It is expected that such resolutions would serve as a moral suasion to countries like the UK, Spain, France and Germany to change their stance on not allowing hapless migrants to reach their shores due to fear that allowing a few to come in would lead to an unstoppable flow.
So far, it is delightful that the EU has called on such European nations to take in 40,000 asylum seekers from Eritrea and Syria who landed in Italy and Greece after April 15 of this year over the next two years. There is much hope that this directive would help relieve some of the pressure on southern European states like Italy, Malta and Greece, which are kindly disposed to receiving vulnerable migrants. Remarkably, Italy has borne the burden of Mediterranean migrants by doing incredible work trying to rescue as many as possible with her navy and coastguard, as well as accommodating most of them on her island of Lampedusa, which is closer to North Africa. It is also expected that member states of the EU would reconsider the more comprehensive search-and-rescue mission launched by that country last year for Mediterranean migrants, known as Mare Nostrum. Other European states like the UK, apart from dismissing the mission as encouraging people smugglers who take illegal immigrants to Europe, said they could not afford to fund it, hence its replacement with the EU’s Triton surveillance operation, run by Frontex, the union’s border-control agency.
No doubt, the Mediterranean migrant tragedies have amplified the need for developed countries to show unity and resolve in helping to address the sad condition in different parts of the so-called Third World, particularly Africa. Of course, there is a dismal record of inaction and lethargy on the part of the West (Europe and North America) in terms of responding to heartrending events like monumental hunger and starvation in the Horn of Africa (Ethiopia and Somalia) in 1984/85, genocide in Rwanda in 1994, subsisting brutal armed conflicts in the DR Congo and abysmal human rights violations in Isaias Aferwoki’s Eritrea that ought to shock and shame its civilisation. In the light of this, former Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain had warned during an international conference on Commission For Africa (CFA) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 2004 that failure by the developed world to take urgent and firm action to help Africa escape bad governance, political instability, vicious conflict, economic collapse, debt overhang, extreme poverty, misery and despair would negatively affect the world by creating weak or failed states like Somalia. Admittedly, such states could contribute to international insecurity through trans-national crimes like terrorism, proliferation of small arms and light weapons, fraud, counterfeiting of hard currencies, drug peddling, human trafficking and trade in contraband, artefacts and endangered species.
- Emeh is a social researcher based in Abuja