Europe's migrant security crisis swells

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-32845165

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The plight of refugees, cast adrift in leaky and unserviceable boats by criminal traffickers, presents policymakers in the European Union and Asia with some harrowing and unpalatable choices.

The tide of people seeking to escape northwards across the Mediterranean from the Libyan coast is now not just a humanitarian issue, but one of the EU's major security challenges.

The plight of the Rohingya boat people fleeing persecution in Myanmar, also known as Burma, presents similar dilemmas for the governments of Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia.

The Malaysian Navy has now despatched four ships to search the Andaman Sea for the Rohingya refugees and the Malaysian and Indonesian governments have belatedly agreed to accept migrants for one year until they can be settled elsewhere.

Major population shifts caused by war and crisis are of course not a new phenomenon.

Look at Europe in the aftermath of World War Two, or the Indian sub-continent in the run-up to independence.

A catalogue of wars since 1945 have each thrown up their own tide of misery.

But the scale of what is going on today is immense.

Deaths at sea

Consider the extraordinary statistics from Syria where some four million refugees have left the country and more than seven million people have been displaced within its borders.

By these standards the Rohingya crisis is relatively small scale.

But still more than 120,000 have taken to the seas and an unknown number have perished.

The Muslim Rohingya are fleeing persecution and violence in predominantly Buddhist Myanmar, including state-sanctioned discrimination.

The crisis exemplifies the combination of state action (or inaction); the role of criminals who run the people smuggling networks; and the diplomatic ramifications of the population flow.

If this is the case in South East Asia then it is doubly so when the population movements are prompted by the collapse of any kind of order.

Libya has essentially become a failed state and its coast has become the jumping-off point for a tide of would-be immigrants to Europe.

Many come from Libya or the wider North African region, but many are refugees from sub-Saharan Africa, smuggled to the Libyan coast by elaborate and sophisticated networks whose tentacles extend into countries within the European Union itself.

Mustering the levers of state power, to tackle a crisis that originates in an area where organised government does not exist, is presenting the European Union with a problem from hell.

Deaths at sea prompt a call for action - the humanitarian response to be followed by offering a welcome to at least some of the refugees in EU countries.

But a number of governments have already baulked at the idea of EU imposed quotas.

Boat destruction?

With economies under strain and populist right-wing parties on the march in several countries, immigration policy is a particularly delicate area right now.

The EU is also looking at what military steps might be taken to interrupt the flow of hundreds of thousands of refugees towards Europe each year.

Planning is already under way, and there is vague talk of destroying vessels before the refugees board.

Libya's rival would-be governments both oppose any action in Libyan territorial waters.

Military steps there would require a UN Security Council resolution - perhaps unlikely given the current tensions between Russia and the West.

To the humanitarian, criminal, diplomatic and domestic political aspects of the crisis facing the EU, you can also add a significant security dimension with fears that jihadists from groups like Islamic State may be using the refugee flow to infiltrate European countries.

This is the kind of problem that western governments struggle to deal with.

They are torn between harrowing images in the media that call for action, with the understandable but more pragmatic considerations dictated by domestic politics.

Who are the Rohingyas?

Myanmar's unwanted people

Unanimity, even within the EU, is difficult.

Hindsight is an easy vantage point, but it looks as though the western intervention in Libya to overthrow the Qaddafi regime that was championed by Britain and France has prompted a series of unintended consequences.

After an initial period when there were hopes that Libyan society could be reconstructed, chaos ensued.

In the wake of the setbacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, western nations neither had the appetite nor the means to step up their involvement.

Irrelevant borders

But a failure of policy was compounded by a failure in the broad strategic assessment.

The so-called "Arab Spring" was largely interpreted in the West through a media prism which focused on the middle-class Twitter generation in the Arab world.

It was believed that a democratic society could be constructed from the ruins of brutal authoritarianism in a matter of months rather than decades.

Such hopes proved an illusion.

They took no account of where power really lay.

Nor any account of the myriad divisions in the region, which are fast making the borders - largely inherited from the post-World War One settlement - as irrelevant as the colonial powers that drew them up.

The consequences of this failed strategic assessment are now washing up on Europe's shores, demanding that they not be turned away.