E.U. Vows to Slow Migration on Sea Route That Claimed Thousands of Lives

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/03/world/europe/eu-mediterranean-migrants.html

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VALLETTA, Malta — European Union leaders pledged on Friday to slow the movement of African migrants crossing the Mediterranean in a desperate and often deadly bid to escape war, chaos and poverty.

A record 4,579 people died last year along the so-called Central Mediterranean route — typically while trying to reach Italy from Libya. This year, as of Thursday, 254 people have perished along that route.

“With hundreds having already lost their lives in 2017 and spring approaching, we are determined to take additional action to significantly reduce migratory flows along the Central Mediterranean route and break the business model of smugglers,” the leaders said in a joint statement in Malta, which holds the six-month rotating presidency of the European Union.

The bloc’s leaders met as anxieties mounted about President Trump’s comments disparaging the European Union. France’s president, François Hollande, said that Mr. Trump “should not interfere in the life of the European Union,” adding that he “can have opinions, but it is up to Europe to decide how big it wants to be and how it wants to conduct itself.”

Mr. Hollande acknowledged the tremendous uncertainty that Mr. Trump’s off-the-cuff remarks and improvisational views had injected into international affairs.

“Who knows what the president of the United States really wants?” Mr. Hollande said. National leaders, he said, “should think of their future as being first in the European Union,” instead of focusing on their relations with the Trump administration. “We must have a European conception of our future.”

The leaders agreed on a plan that would increase support and training for Libya’s Coast Guard, and give African countries more aid to discourage the paying of smugglers to undertake the perilous maritime journey.

European leaders said their goal was to save lives and choke off the flow of profits to unscrupulous smugglers who have taken advantage of Africans’ desperate circumstances, without regard to their safety or well-being.

They stopped short of taking more severe actions — like declaring Libya a “safe third country,” which would obviate the legal obligation to consider asylum claims from people who have reached Europe through Libya, or screening migrants and processing their asylum claims in centers based in North Africa.

“Can refugees only come to us if they entrust their fate to smugglers, to traffickers? I must say no to that,” Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany said at a news conference. She said the bloc should consider supporting countries like Ethiopia “to set up humane possibilities for giving people shelter,” so that those fleeing countries like Eritrea, Somalia and Sudan did not make their way farther north, or onward to Europe.

Nonetheless, immigrant rights groups expressed concern on Friday that the latest plan would result in the warehousing of migrants in decrepit centers.

“We believe that, given the current context, it is not appropriate to consider Libya a safe third country, nor to establish extraterritorial processing of asylum seekers in North Africa,” the International Organization for Migration said in a statement. “We urge a move away from migration management based on the automatic detention of refugees and migrants in inhumane conditions in Libya towards the creation of proper reception services.”

Arjan Hehenkamp, a Doctors Without Borders official who returned to Amsterdam on Thursday after visiting migrants held in Tripoli, the Libyan capital, said in a statement that the European Union was “delusional about just how dangerous the situation in Libya really is.”

He added: “The declaration does not refer to any alternatives for people who are unable to stay in Libya and would be at risk if they were returned home. The suggested ways of improving the situation in Libya for refugees and other migrants are dangerously lacking in detail.”

He said his organization was treating about 500 people a week, at seven dangerously crowded detention centers in and around the capital, for respiratory tract infections, acute diarrhea, skin disease and urinary tract infections — illnesses resulting from the unsafe conditions in the centers.

A huge influx of migrants in 2015 has tested Europe’s ability and willingness to absorb people fleeing desperation and has stirred a backlash in countries like France, Germany and the Netherlands — all of which are scheduled to hold elections this year — among people who fear that the migrants cannot assimilate and may intensify the threat of terrorism.

Last year, the European Union reduced another major stream of migrants — people entering Greece via Turkey, most of them by the Aegean Sea — to a relative trickle by stopping the exodus of people from Greece through the Balkans and by offering the Turkish government various inducements.

Turkey has taken an authoritarian turn and been destabilized by the longstanding civil war in neighboring Syria, but it has a relatively strong government. Libya, by contrast, is all but a failed state, with rival governments and Islamist and Tuareg insurgencies.

And while the bulk of those fleeing for Europe through Turkey were Syrians escaping the persecution and sectarian violence of the civil war, those leaving through Libya are a more heterogeneous group, including many West Africans escaping privation, who may not qualify for asylum.

“Not even Greece and Italy can effectively manage mass arrivals within their own borders, so I don’t know how this is supposed to be done in even more volatile conditions like in Libya,” Elizabeth Collett, the director of the Migration Policy Institute’s European office in Brussels, said in an interview on Friday.

“Unfortunately, E.U. leaders cannot afford to publicly acknowledge a blunt truth — that Libya will not be able to do much of what is being asked of it,” she said.

Some European officials expressed anger on Friday that the European Union was not being more welcoming to migrants at a time when Mr. Trump is turning them away and planning a wall on the Mexico border.

“Criticizing Trump’s wall, but establishing barricades against refugees from Libya at the same time, is hypocritical,” Sven Giegold, a German lawmaker at the European Parliament, said in a statement. “In the battle for our core values, Europe weakens its own position towards the U.S. if it does not adhere to these values.”