The evolution of people-smuggling in the central Mediterranean is a story of unintended consequences. The increasing flow of refugees and migrants from the shores of north Africa has led to a shallow public debate in Europe, illustrated by haunting shipwrecks and mass drownings.
One of those shipwrecks, in October 2013, prompted Italy to launch Mare Nostrum, a search and rescue operation that patrolled close to the waters off Libya. It lasted a year before it was accused of attracting more migrants into making the crossing. This was replaced with military operations, Triton and Operation Sophia, whose priority has been the breakup of smuggling networks rather than rescue at sea.
But these networks have not been broken. Instead, the smugglers have adapted. When the larger, wooden boats they were using were destroyed by naval forces, they crammed people on to smaller, rubber boats, which are even less safe. These vessels have no hope of reaching European shores, and are in need of rescue almost as soon as they push off.
With no European state willing to lead the effort to save lives in the Mediterranean, it has been NGOs that have answered the humanitarian imperative and filled the gap. Meanwhile, Italy and the EU have begun to direct support to the Libyan coastguard, under the pretence that it can operate as a legitimate national force, despite the civil war in the rest of the country and allegations that it has colluded with people-smugglers.
The result is that today there are more people departing the Libyan coast in less seaworthy boats, more deaths by drowning, more rescue operations, fatter profits for smugglers, and more people than ever arriving in Italy.
This week’s House of Lords report on the EU naval mission in the central Mediterranean was justly scathing: “Operation Sophia has failed to meet the objective of its mandate — to disrupt the business model of people smuggling. It should not be renewed.”
Every European move to relieve the humanitarian and political crisis in the central Mediterranean has instead made it worse. We have a situation that manages to appal Europe’s security hawks, its xenophobes, its nervous centrists, its humanitarians and its pragmatists.
Elections loom in Italy, and the stream of new arrivals threatens to reinforce nationalists and populists. Unrealistic promises to control migration poll well in the short term, which is the only term that counts for now, and help to legitimise lethally wrong-headed policies. In Italy and elsewhere there are influential actors who continue to believe that a more hardline deterrence strategy will offer a way out – that more-of-the-same-but-tougher will work.
In their narrative, it is the NGO search-and-rescue missions that are to blame. They argue that their willingness to patrol waters close to shore and rescue refugees and migrants constitutes a “pull factor” that is responsible for the increasing number of crossings. The presence of a growing number of charities including Médecins Sans Frontières closer to shore, they allege, has driven new and more dangerous tactics from the smugglers, such as using cheaper, rubber boats.
Italian prosecutors – with loud approval from the EU’s border agency, Frontex – have even tried to build the case that NGOs are colluding with people smugglers. Italian courts have summarily rejected this.
When EU interior ministers met earlier this month to address the crisis, their top recommendation was a code of conduct for charity boats, to be written by Italy. A leaked draft of the rules of this code shows it is clearly designed to curtail their activities: it seeks to bar NGO ships from transferring migrants to other vessels, thus limiting their operations. Missions that do not comply with the code would be barred from entering Italian ports.
There is more of a link between the NGO rescue missions and dangerous tactics by smugglers than charities such as Amnesty are willing to concede. But the concerted effort to blame the rescuers ignores the reality that the number of people attempting the crossing is driven by migratory trends and refugee flows – or push factors – and not the anticipation of rescue.
There have been no rescue operations to the west of Libya, but the same increased trends have been visible. And the switch to flimsier boats and riskier launches was already under way when there was only one NGO search-and-rescue mission, in late 2015 and early 2016.
*****************************************************************************
So a fairer assessment would be that European naval missions drove the switch in smugglers’ tactics by destroying smugglers boats, and the increased presence of NGOs compounded that switch. But the squabble over who is to blame for the sequence of unintended consequences is a distraction from any real solution to the crisis.
Baroness Verma, the chair of the Lords committee that reported this week, was right to point out that: “People smuggling begins onshore, so a naval mission is the wrong tool for tackling this dangerous, inhumane and unscrupulous business. Once the boats have set sail, it is too late.”
There are few European politicians willing to tell voters that there is no quick fix, and that longer-term thinking about the root causes of the Mediterranean crisis is needed. The most hawkish clearly want to use the prospect of death at sea as a deterrent, and get the Libyan coastguard to intercept those who do take the risk and return them to appalling conditions inside the country, something that European navies cannot legally do. But these ruthless tactics cannot be fully deployed while humanitarian organisations remain witnesses just off the coast. So we can expect the sly campaign to remove them to intensify.
The fight to stop Mediterranean people-smuggling starts on land, not at sea
Daniel Howden is a senior editor of the news website Refugees Deeply