Expdonaloaded News; Challenge of the Mediterranean migrant crisis (1)

Geographically, the Medi­terranean Sea passes by 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 public discourse worldwide. Obviously, this is on account of the worsening crisis of rickety, overcrowded and unsafe migrant boats which have been capsizing in the sea during illegal journeys to Europe from North Africa in re­cent months, with attendant loss of hundreds of lives. The worst of such incidents that has now re­newed international focus on the plight of illegal migrants is the one that happened off the Libyan coast in the middle of April, which claimed nearly 900 lives.From all accounts, most of the Medi­terranean migrants are Africans seeking to escape from the hard realities of life in their homelands. They are people trying to escape from misrule, political insta­bility, armed conflict, insecurity, per­secution, economic adversity, crushing poverty, chronic unemployment, hunger, famine and environmental degradation (including the adverse effects of climate change and the associated global warm­ing).post by expdonaloaded.blogspot.com..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 and economic prosperity in Europe.Not helping matters in the increasingly deadly migrant crisis now playing out in the Mediterranean are the so-called peo­ple smugglers. These callous smugglers have made the chaotic and anarchic post- Muammar Ghadafi’s Libya the hub of the illicit business after the lull in the use of other transit countries like Morocco (en route to Spanish Canary Islands and en­claves of Ceuta and Melilla) and Tunisia (entrance to Greece via the Aegean Sea). They have capitalised on calmer seas and the desire of people to migrate to Europe at all costs to aggravate the crisis be­cause of the material gain. According to the United Nations (UN), the net profit of people smuggling in Libya was in the re­gion of $170 million last year. The smug­glers use unseaworthy and overloaded vessels, mostly rafts, fishing boats and rubber dinghies, to ply their trade, which account for the high rate of shipwrecks in the Mediterranean Sea in recent weeks and the attendant heavy casualties. At the last count, over 1,800 people have died this year in the course of such hazard­ous journeys across the sea. Altogether, between 2014 and 2015, about 5,000 mi­grants have perished in the waters of the Mediterranean, with most of them head­ing to Italy.
It is worrisome that despite the gory tales of death in the Mediterranean Sea, almost every fortnight, if not every week, many intending migrants still embark on these dangerous journeys. Many of the migrants whose ships ran into trouble have been rescued since the beginning of this year. The total number of people saved so far from drowning in the sea by the mari­time forces (navy and coastguard) of south­ern European countries like Italy is put at over 10,000. Going by the recurrent terri­fying reports of migrant boats 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, have 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 conflicts, 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 judgement 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 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. To be continued

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