People will flee Libya, but Europe is not ready

By Claude Moraes MEP

The current revolutions in the Middle East – and there is no other word for them – were a surprise. No major commentators predicted them, and no current practitioner can truly predict where they will end. We must of course support any democratic change in these countries. The people in Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, Oman, Yemen and other nations deserve whatever support we can offer their aspirations. This is only right.

There is, however, a problem. As well as how to help protestors in the abstract – the possibility of supporting democracies that do not yet exist – we must address the concrete potential of a humanitarian disaster. Asking a single question of the situation in Libya throws this problem into very sharp relief. How do we help people who may flee violence if the situation turns against them, and against democracy, in the Middle East?

Right now, we cannot. In short, we have neither the legal nor the political framework to help anyone who might need to flee and cross the Mediterranean Sea unaided. This means the potential for an unprecedented humanitarian crisis. The number of people who fled and escaped across the Tunisian border in the first two weeks of the crisis was 100,000. Now that number is falling, prompting fears that Libya may be preventing people from leaving, but the number still stands as an example of the potential scale of emergency immigration.

But this part of the situation in the Middle East is not a surprise, especially to the members of the European Parliament who recently went on fact-finding missions to Libya and Malta. Europe is not ready to receive refugees on anything like the scale we may see and over the past few days and weeks I’ve been calling for an urgent unblocking of the asylum package. This package has been on the table for some time: although blocked by Member States it offers just the sort of practical burden sharing and thought out solutions on relocation that would be able to alleviate any mass exodus from Libya. I’ve made this point to Frontex, the EU’s border agency, and to the European Commission.

Sadly, however, it is not simply a question of making sound policy arguments on how we can help meet the potential for tens of thousands of refugees arriving in Southern Europe. This is because not everyone agrees that we should in fact receive such unfortunate people. Instead, countries like Italy are taking a hard stance on border security and asking for EU help in this task. In turn, this has irritated countries like Sweden who in recent years have taken in around 40,000 Iraqi refugees without fuss. Whatever the practical solution may be, and I believe that practical solution is the asylum package, we are also confronted with internal political problems that are holding up the creation of a practical framework for the potential migrant crisis.

And there is another dimension, one that I have written about before on LabourList – the far right in Europe. Are we prepared for an aggressive response to any spike in support for the far right that may emerge as a result of a Libyan refugee crisis? I would argue not, particularly when we have centre right governments in the UK, Germany, Italy, Holland, France and Sweden, many of which have been tempted into shabby attacks on migrants and immigration numbers in recent months. And as David Miliband has recently pointed out, we are not living in fair economic times, a situation which can only aid the far right in Europe. This is doubly important to consider when many thousands of Middle Eastern refugees may soon be reliant on European good will, and good organisation, to save them from disaster.

We have also to consider the many years of embarrassing realpolitik. When dealing with the Middle East, European leaders have all too often been happy to accept that stability was more important to the people of that region than democracy. Now that this convenient truism has been exposed as inarguably false, European governments will have to row back on their previously held positions, however subtly, and adapt to the new reality. There will be many in Europe on the right who will find this transition difficult, not to mention at odds with their natural political instincts.

However, the painful realities remain. Libya is in crisis and EU institutions should not pretend that, whatever happens there, people from Libya will not be coming to Europe. They will and, when they do, we must be prepared to help them. The alternative doesn’t bear thinking about. If we don’t help, we could end up creating a searing historical memory in the Middle East, one centred on how Europe abandoned the region – and its people – in their most pressing hour of need. Nothing else I can think of would do more to damage long term democratic development in the Middle East than a short term abandonment of people in need by inactive or disorganised European democracies.