‘Stop criticising Libya’

It's funny how certain words come back to haunt you every now and again. The above three specimens accosted me suddenly yesterday evening, as I was listening to a parliamentary debate (look, some of us just don't have a life, OK?) on the whole pushback/deportation affair.

Funnily enough they come from another parliamentary debate, also about immigration, this time in 2009. They were addressed to the Opposition by former Home Affairs minister, Carm Mifsud Bonnici.

"It is a mistake to speak out against Libya in this issue," he said. "We recognise that immigration is also a problem for Libya, and we are doing our bit by putting pressure on Europe to offer more aid to Libya to help it control its borders."

It must have surprised Dr Mifsud Bonnici to hear his colleagues enthusiastically doing what he had urged the opposition not to do in 2009. Yet there they all were - Gonzi, Fenech Adami, Busuttil et al - hammering away at Libya's "atrocious" human rights record, as if the country they had helped to liberate themselves (from the same 'brutal dictator' they had also defended tooth and nail just the preceding year) was now part of an axis of evil.

The irony is inescapable, but this time I'll resist the impulse to make a meal of it, because Mifsud Bonnici's earlier words suddenly seem to be relevant for an unexpected reason. Once again we face large-scale arrivals of asylum seekers by boat - no larger than last year or the year before, but large all the same - and once again the last point of departure is Libya, as it has always been in the past.

Only it is a different Libya from the one we're used to.

One immediate difference is that unlike before - when, for better or for worse, you knew you were dealing with Gaddafi - I'm not sure we still know who we're dealing with in Libya at all.

This, for instance, is from a March 2012 Human Rights Watch report: "The state is slowly taking control of detention facilities, and this is welcome. But militias still illegally hold between five and six thousand detainees, and most of them have not had any judicial review. The government should redouble its efforts to bring these detainees under its control, and give them prompt judicial reviews or release them...."

That was over a year ago, but I have found no more recent indication of the situation as it stands today. But other indications suggest that sizeable parts of that country are no longer under the direct control of the State: and in a country with a 1,000-km maritime border, this means that the government we helped to install in Libya cannot possibly be in more control of its borders than the one we helped overthrow in 2011.

Another difference is that the number of arrivals in Malta has dramatically increased, with individual boatloads now numbering well over a hundred at a time (460 have arrived in the past week or so).
OK, now put those two differences together, and add CMB's earlier comment about 'pressuring the EU to help Libya control its borders'... and suddenly the question becomes: What control? What borders?

This, I fear, is the real problem underlying the current standoff regarding pushbacks and all that. This time, nobody blames Libya for deliberately loosening its grip to wring more money out of the EU (as was the cause of the original criticism alluded to by CMB); instead we all tacitly acknowledge that Libya can simply no longer control its borders at all... and the reason is the weakening of the State's infrastructure by the recent conflict, with the approval and participation of Europe.

Again this compounds an existing irony: it seems we are now legally prevented from sending migrants back to their last point of departure because of a human rights black hole we have helped to dig ourselves.

And I'm not exaggerating the 'black hole' bit: this is from the same HRW report: "Of deep concern are reports of torture and maltreatment in detention facilities run by militias, sometimes resulting in deaths"...

But again let's look at the wider picture - as I was recently asked to do myself. The problem, as I see it, unfolds along these lines. Unless Libya retains some control of its borders, we can only expect large-scale arrivals to continue happening. And as long as Libya's human rights situation remains as it is today, deportation cannot be considered an option - and this by order of the European Court of Human Rights (note: legally, we cannot deport anyone anywhere until their asylum application has been processed and rejected, but anyway...).

At this point, I would argue that the question of whose responsibility it is to address the logistical nightmares in Libya becomes strikingly relevant. Gonzi and Co. were hardly the only people to try and bask in the 'glory' of Gaddafi's overthrow at the time. Other European countries made much more radical contributions to the same regime change: the UN approved a no-fly zone, as I recall. France and the UK practically peppered the country with weapons - some of which are now in the hands in  militias controlling detention centres - and so on.

So my question is this. When the decision was taken to intervene... were any conditions ever attached to the final deal? Like, for instance: you guarantee minimal standards of human rights protection and good governance - with maybe a teenie-weenie detail about border control in the small print - and we'll provide XYZ assistance, etc? And if not: shouldn't the people who helped create the situation in Libya (including ourselves - proportionately, of course) be at least trying to get one now?

I would take the same argument one step further: the countries which assisted in Gaddafi's overthrow must be made to see that they have a moral obligation to the people they 'liberated': to ensure safety, stability and a reasonable standard of human rights protection. They owe this debt to Libya, not because of our immigration problem, but because their own actions have helped dismantled that country's basic security infrastructure, without which you cannot have a functional state at all.

And who knows? Perhaps this argument might even land on the occasional sympathetic ear in Europe: Malta is not exactly the only member state to be affected by the resulting instability in Libya. (Pop question: Where did Pope Francis visit on his first official trip?).

In any case: rather than stamping our feet and insisting, rather petulantly, on a 'burden sharing agreement' that the EU has already repeatedly rejected anyway... shouldn't we be making the case at international level that Libya is owed assistance to get itself into a state of (at least semi-) normality... following a conflict in which much of Europe was heavily involved?

This way we could even prove Carm Mifsud Bonnici right, in a weird, time-warping sort of way. 'Stop criticising Libya' - and instead, let's start cleaning up the mess we helped to create ourselves.