EU to launch military operations against migrant-smugglers in Libya

By The Guardian

The European Union is to launch military operations against the networks of smugglers in Libya deemed culpable of sending thousands of people to their deaths in the Mediterranean.

An emergency meeting of EU interior and foreign ministers in Luxembourg on Monday, held in response to the reported deaths of several hundred migrants in a packed fishing trawler off the Libyan coast at the weekend, also decided to bolster maritime patrols in the Mediterranean and give their modest naval mission a broader search-and-rescue mandate for saving lives.

 

A summit of EU leaders is to take place in Brussels on Thursday to hammer out the details of the measures hurriedly agreed on Monday. The 28 EU governments called for much closer cooperation with Libya’s neighbours, such as Egypt, Tunisia, and Niger, in an attempt to close down the migratory routes. But senior political figures and EU officials conceded this would be difficult and also voiced scepticism about the emphasis on targeting the traffickers.

 

Following the reported deaths of around 1,300 migrants in three incidents in less than a fortnight in the waters south of Sicily, the pressure was on the EU and its member states to come up with new policies addressing headlines branding the incidents “Europe’s shame”.

 

“I hope today is the turning point in the European conscience, not to go back to promises without actions,” said Federica Mogherini, the former Italian foreign minister who is the EU’s chief foreign and security policy coordinator and who chaired Monday’s meeting.

 

The meeting “identified some actions” aimed at combatting the trafficking gangs mainly in Libya, such as “destroying ships”, Mogherini said.

 

Dimitris Avramopoulos, the European commissioner for migration issues, said the operation would be “civil-military” modelled on previous military action in the Horn of Africa to combat Somali piracy. The military action would require a UN mandate.

 

No detail was supplied on the scale and range of the proposed operation, nor of who would take part in it. But European leaders from David Cameron to Angela Merkel and Matteo Renzi, the Italian prime minister, were emphatic on Monday in singling out the fight against the migrant traffickers as the top priority in the attempt to rein in a crisis that is spiralling out of control.

 

“[This is] a systematic effort to capture and destroy vessels used by the smugglers. The positive results obtained with the [Somali] operation should inspire us to similar operations against smugglers in the Mediterranean,” said the European commission.

 

But Rihards Kozlovskis, the Latvian interior minister, said the scheme could run into problems. “How can it be done?” he asked. “It’s not so easy this civil-military operation. We’re talking of the territorial waters of third countries.”