Drowned migrants, beheaded Ethiopians: the price of indifference – Al-Arabiya

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There is a connection between the increasing flow of migrants from Libya and the recent beheadings of the Ethiopian Christians in Libya. And that is the indifference of power to lawlessness—the lawlessness that prevails in Libya.

Abdallah Schleifer

Much of that lawlessness is due to the refusal of the U.N. Security Council to end the embargo on any significant sale or provision of arms and ammunition to the internationally recognized legitimate Libyan government based in Tobruk and Beida. The Libyan National Army of that legitimate government is simultaneously fighting the ISIS affiliates responsible for the beheadings in Libya (most notably of Egyptian as well as Ethiopian Christian expats), and on the other hand, the Libyan Dawn militias led or allied to Islamist forces that rejected the results of the free election of a new parliament last summer and drove that newly elected government and its armed supporters out of the capital Tripoli.

Pious declaration

These are the same Libyan Dawn militias that control the port cities of Zuwara, Zansa, Tajoura, Garabulli and Mistrata, where almost all the migrant traffickers and their boats operate from. Yesterday the Libyan Dawn-installed regime in Tripoli piously declared they are ready to cooperate with the EU to stop an illegal migration that has been tolerated if not abetted by their own local officials in the port cities under militia control. These local officials are believed by the large Libyan community in Cairo to be in the pay of the traffickers. But none of the EU leaders most actively concerned are ready to speak directly to this point. If they were, they would not have opposed ending the embargo as applied to the legitimate government.

The EU is equally pious in appearance – it condemns migrant trafficking which it compares to the slave trade – a righteous –sounding but curiously inappropriate analogy: We can reasonably assume that the 18th century black African victims of that trade had no interest in being bound up and shipped off to the Americas as slaves, while the migrants who cough up anywhere from $1,000 to $2,000 for the increasingly deadly voyage from Libya to Italy, are more than anxious to get to Europe.

Far-right

Would the EU open its ports and its arms to the migrants at present being trafficked, if altruistic philanthropists instead operated safe, sturdy ships and provided water, food and free passage to what would be hundreds of thousands, perhaps even a million or more a year migrants without visas, instead of the estimated tens of thousands now coming from sub-Saharan Africa. Of course not, and reasonably so, given the high unemployment rates and relatively stagnant economies in much of the EU and the growing political problem of rising anti-immigrant sentiment that accounts for much of the recent success of far-right, or at least anti-immigrant opposition political parties in Europe and the UK.

The EU is equally pious in appearance – it condemns migrant trafficking which it compares to the slave trade – a righteous –sounding but curiously inappropriate analogy: We can reasonably assume that the 18th century black African victims of that trade had no interest in being bound up and shipped off to the Americas as slaves, while the migrants who cough up anywhere from $1,000 to $2,000 for the increasingly deadly voyage from Libya to Italy, are more than anxious to get to Europe

Abdallah Schleifer

So the most decisive talk that goes beyond rhetoric at the emergency EU meeting now underway is of military action against the traffickers and their docked ships along the Libyan Coast. But assembling such an Armada would inevitably takes much time and money and the increasingly fatal flow of illegal migrants can only intensify during the interval. At best such a limited yet massive and expensive intervention – if it be successful –treats the symptom not the cause: and that is the ability of the traffickers to operate with such ease from Libya and not, let us say from Morocco’s Tangier which is as close if not closer to Europe than the Libyan ports.

Meanwhile David Cameron gets a bit closer to the real problem – that nearly all of this illegal trafficking has to do with lack of stability — but then he evades his own point –which allows him to avoid the real problem by saying “ Let’s also try to stabilize these countries – not just Libya but also Nigeria, Somalia, Eritrea, Ethiopia. Its these instable countries that people are coming from that’s part of the problem.”

But if one checks out the origin of the migrants , he has managed to leave out Senegal, Mali, Sudan, Syria, Iraq and even Egypt which is to say –as far as as serious, critical, immediately relevant (I.E. Libyan) stabilization goes — is to do little or nothing.

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Abdallah Schleifer is a veteran American journalist covering the Middle East and professor emeritus at the American University in Cairo where he founded as served as first director of the Kamal Adham Center for TV and Digital Journalism. He is chief editor of the annual publication The Muslim 500; a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute (USA) and at the Royal Aal al Bayt Academy for Islamic Thought (Jordan.) Schleifer has served as Al Arabiya Washington D.C. bureau chief; NBC News Cairo bureau chief; Middle East correspondent for Jeune Afrique; as special correspondent (stringer) , New York Times and managing editor of the Jerusalem Star/Palestine News in then Jordanian Arab Jerusalem