Gaddafi: The EU's Border Fence

As millions of people around the world rejoice over the death of Muammar Gaddafi, one suspects that FRONTEX,  the European Agency for the Management of Operational Cooperation at the External Borders of the Member States of the European Union,  may not share the same degree of enthusiasm.

The reason is very simple: namely, that while Gaddafi was an erratic dictator, he did deliver when it came to cracking down hard on African immigrants seeking to pass Libya and the Libyan strait. Whatever the cruelty of his methods, this was undeniably convenient for FRONTEX and governments affected by the increasing flow of African immigrants such as Italy.

The past cooperation between Libya, FRONTEX and the Italian government has long been a political guilty pleasure for Italy’s populist political factions such as the Lega Nord. Libyan migrants today account for around 8% of Italian illegal immigration. As in the US, this inspires discontent that can sound suspiciously like xenophobia.

FRONTEX – supposedly a responsible institution - has already deployed two missions designed to intercept immigrants in the Channel of Sicily named Nautilus I (October 2006) and Nautilus II (June-July 2007, September-October 2007).

Innocuous enough, right? Actually, the list of shame reads long in the case of FRONTEX and the EU’s operations: deaths in the desert and in the Channel of Sicily, tortures and rapes in detention centers funded by Italy, deportations to the Sahara, collective refoulements, the repatriation of refugees on flights paid for by Rome, deportations from Lampedusa, murders in police stations, and racist attacks in Tripoli.

FRONTEX was able to proceed with these actions through a chilling arrangement with the Libyan government: FRONTEX would illegal aliens at sea, then escort the ships and dinghies back towards Libyan territorial waters, at which point they would be seized by the Libyan coast guard. The Libyan authorities then dumped the illegal aliens into “migration centers” - a euphemism for sub-human prisons marked by conditions so bad that sometimes 60 to 70 people would end up packed in cells measuring six meters by eight with a single toilet. After the detention phase the illegal immigrants would be loaded onto military lorries and dropped off in the Sub-Saharan desert.

Official figures indicate that between 1998 and 2003, over 14,500 people have been abandoned in mid-desert along the Libyan border with Niger, Chad, Sudan and Egypt. All these grave human rights abuses are recorded in Italian activist and immigration blogger Gabriela Del Grande’s report “Escape From Tripoli: Report on the conditions of migrants in transit in Libya.”

The EU practice of refoulments at sea although treated as “rescue operations” contravene international human rights conventions. The SAR Convention on rescue at sea itself, states the duty to carry shipwreck victims to the safest port, not the closest one and absolutely not to a port owned by a country where systematic human rights abuses are commonplace. In other words, not Libya. Expulsion to third world nations where a person is at risk of suffering inhuman or degrading treatment is also forbidden by the United Nations Convention against Torture and the European Charter of Human Rights.

What makes the matter even more bizarre and ironic is the European Court of Human Rights decision of May 2005m in which collective refoulements were forbidden rom the Italian island of Lampedusa to Tripoli.

And how does Libya profit? Consider the following example: On October 8, 2004, Muammar Gaddafi proclaimed that alone in the month of September, the Libyan government had deported around 5,000 immigrants to the desert in Niger. On the same day the flamboyant dictator inaugurated a new methane pipeline between Mellitah and Gela, Sicily. Three days later, on October 11 2004, the European Union withdrew its embargo against Tripoli.

This could be a coincidence, but it would be naïve to assume as much. Especially since Silvio Berlusconi also proudly proclaimed back in 2004 that “MuammarQaddafi is a great friend of mine and of Italy.” Berlusconi’s next line should make those of us who are glad to live in a post-Gaddafi world cringe:

“He [Gaddafi] is a leader of freedom.”