by Nick O’Connell
EU Political Analyst

29 March 2021

As the European Union and national governments focus their energies on building the multi-billion euro Recovery Plan to carry it out of the economic and social crisis from the ongoing global pandemic, it omits a solution to safeguard the lives of people hoping to reach Europe’s borders.

Italy’s new government, led by Mario Draghi, was formed to support the country’s economic recovery with scant space for humanitarian issues, ignoring the economic benefits that can come from a sound long-term immigration policy.

In the first three months of 2021 the number of people that crossed the Mediterranean almost doubled compared to one year ago in the first three months of 2020. In the final weekend of February 2021, NGO and commercial ships rescued more than 400 people, while hundreds more were intercepted and returned to Libya by the so-called Libyan Coast Guard, funding in whole by European countries before they could reach international waters.

The adverse weather conditions in the Mediterranean last month, and Italy’s latest lockdown add to officials’ worries about what the coming months hold for humanity at sea. In the warmer spring and summer months of 2021, these numbers are expected to grow.

“The Libyan route is increasingly more active,” warned Lampedusa mayor Totò Martello just last month. But voices like his on the frontline have a history of going unheard.

The number of people crossing the Mediterranean in the past year has increased in spite of growing dangers. Fewer NGO rescue ships have been available for sea operations, after being targeted by European governments starting almost four years ago with the seizure of the Jugend Rettet Iuventa ship in Trapani in 2017 and continuing with Italy’s and other border countries’ multiple coronavirus lockdowns.

European governments have used the pandemic as an opportunity to further crackdown on the Mediterranean basin, adding to the fear that for years Europe’s far-right leaders have used to build a narrative depicting migrants as a threat to the continent’s cultural heritage and bearers of exotic disease.

Now, more moderate leaders are also following suit, closing borders and limiting migration, and by extension legitimizing years of fear-mongering that is incongruent with reality.

North Africa remains key to understanding the humanity at stake.

Tunisia, less than 200 kilometers from Italy’s island of Pantelleria, and the closest land point to Lampedusa where many MotM migrant profiles have been documented, is engulfed in prolonged civil unrest linked to years of economic stagnation, terrorism, and the ongoing pandemic.

In Libya on the other hand, there is hope for humanity, albeit limited, as the country’s more than forty factions have entrusted Abdul Hamid Dbeibah as its figurehead.

Dbeibah, a billionaire and former close associate of Colonel al-Qaddafi, has reportedly bought the required votes for election and to prepare the country for parliamentary elections slated to be held in December 2021. While skepticism remains high, given the country’s bloody history, any sign of hope has been welcomed by the humanitarian community.

Libya’s recent political history sheds light on the region-wide structural problems that have long prevented the country from outgrowing a decade of violence. It also gives cause for the European Union to implement a substitute of Italy’s Operation Mare Nostrum, as well as rewrite the Dublin Pact that currently puts overwhelming weight on border member states like Italy, Spain, or Greece to manage migration inflows alone.

There are now dozens of foreign actors involved in Libya, hundreds of factions at war for local and regional control of the country’s provinces, and an alarming influx of foreign fighters.

Local militias sponsored by foreign governments have notoriously played an active role in inflicting violence against people on the move. The Libyan Coast Guard is in fact a collection of local militiamen trained and sponsored by foreign governments to stop migrants from crossing into international waters where they are eligible for foreign rescue.

Italy has been supporting such operations for years, highlighting a weak political will to find tenable solutions to the tragedy the Mediterranean basin has continued to see since early 2011 with the fall of Qaddafi.

European countries have repeatedly preferred temporary solutions, like the funding of Libya’s Coast Guard, which itself has perpetuated the human rights abuses it purportedly aims to deter for those on desperate Mediterranean crossings.

When the Coast Guard seizes a dinghy, the people on board are often brought back onshore and detained indefinitely at one of the country’s hundreds of migrants detention centers, prisons were gross human right abuses have been recorded for years.

This reality is not only alarming, it is also illegal. People rescued at sea must be returned to the closest safe port, according to international maritime law, and Libya’s violence and history of migrant abuses disqualify the country as a safe port in spite of more recent accords. This is an argument often heard from the NGO groups that operate in the Mediterranean and ignored, if not dismissed, by European governments.

Instead of seeking Libya’s ongoing political transition as an opportunity to find humane solutions to safeguard the international human rights of all people, national governments continue to attack NGO operations, whose presence at sea is only in response to Europe’s abandonment of migration policy.

Rescuers at NGOs are often non-professional seamen and -women, but citizens stepping up for service when there is otherwise no maritime support for the thousands crossing the Mediterranean.

The situation in the Mediterranean has turned into a vicious cycle of violence, abuse, and growing threats to the vulnerable people that have already attempted crossing the Mediterranean.

Politically motivated court cases against the Iuventa, Seawatch, or Mediterranea, continuous support for the Libyan Coast Guard and local warlords, and growing unwillingness by the EU or national governments to revise the bloc’s migration policies continue to add fuel to an already volatile situation. It also reveals the stagnancy of European migratory policy, held politically hostage by decades of fear-mongering and hateful narratives.

A counternarrative is more important than ever. One that sheds light on the humanity of the people crossing into Europe and the economic benefits of a functioning integration system. Governments that serve millions of citizens must be able to deal with more than one policy issue at the same time.

Humanity has waited long enough.