#europe-mediterranean migrant crisis

[worldspotlightnews]

Italian Coast Guard escorting 1,200 migrants on boats in Mediterranean Sea | CNN

CNN  —  The Italian Coast Guard was on Tuesday escorting two boats carrying 1,200 migrants in the Mediterranean Sea, as part of a major operation in a region that has seen migrant arrivals spike in the past year. Emergency workers were racing to rescue a barge with 400 migrants onboard that had ran out of fuel, according to the volunteer-run service Alarm Phone. The Coast Guard told CNN later…

[head-post]

60 migrants die in Mediterranean Sea boat crash

At least 60 migrants have died after a rubber boat capsized in the Mediterranean Sea, survivors say.

Ocean Viking, a vessel operated by humanitarian group SOS Méditerranée, picked up the 25 survivors. They told rescuers they had travelled from Zawiya on the Libyan coast seven days before being rescued. After three days, the boat’s engine broke down and they were left without food or water. Survivors said the victims included women and at least one child.

SOS Méditerranée said the Ocean Viking crew spotted the dinghy through binoculars on Wednesday and organised a medical evacuation in cooperation with the Italian coastguard.

The crew said the survivors were in “very poor health” and all were under medical observation.

Two who were unconscious and in a critical condition were flown to Sicily by helicopter for further treatment, the team added.

Last week, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) said 2023 was the deadliest year for migrants since record-keeping began a decade ago, with at least 8,565 people killed on migration routes around the world.

Read more HERE

[indizombie]

According to monitoring groups, more than 20,000 people have died or gone missing at sea in the central Mediterranean since 2014... Regina Catrambone, director of the Migrant Offshore Aid Station which carries out search and rescue operations in the Mediterranean, said that European countries must work together to help those in need. She also called for an end to the "myopic vision" that says that countries that are physically closer to Africa and the Middle East should take the lead on tackling the issue. "Still there is no co-operation among the European states to actively co-ordinate together to go and help the people in need," she said, urging governments to work together to improve search and rescue efforts and develop safe and legal routes.

Kathryn Armstrong, ‘Italy shipwreck: At least 59 migrants killed off Calabria coast’, BBC

[opencommunion]

"While largely toothless as a democratic body—shorn of true legislative capacities and having never developed a genuine transnational dynamic—the European Parliament is nonetheless an important bellwether to track the continent’s political winds. As the results of the parliament’s June 6-9 elections confirm, those winds are blowing in a bleakly reactionary direction.

... There are two principal causes for this. First, the fact that for many decades now European national governments and federal European institutions have legitimized — through emergency measures, moral panics and murderous border policies that have led to thousands of migrant deaths in the Mediterranean — the far Right’s defining claim that migration threatens the material and cultural survival of white European civilization. The far Right’s obsessive talk of borders and births, and its promotion of the myth of the Great Replacement, were enabled by the EU’s political center. Governments across the continent advanced anti-migrant policies on the grounds that stricter regulations would sap the foundations of extremism. But it turns out voters often prefer the original brand, choosing bellicose nativism over technocratic repression when it comes to the ​'migration crisis.'

The second engine of Europe’s turn towards authoritarianism is the EU’s promotion of fiscal austerity policies that have particularly impacted Southern Europe and Ireland, but which have led to welfare state retrenchment across the board. Beyond eroding livelihoods and exacerbating inequality, austerity also led to the rise of multiple movements to reclaim national sovereignty, almost all of which (after the punishment and capitulation of Syriza’s left-wing government in Greece) are now monopolized by reactionaries. While all of Europe’s far-right parties have played on this supposedly populist register, none have challenged the hegemony of markets and the rating agencies that dictate cuts to social programs. ... The real social malaise that plagues so much of Europe — overburdened and privatized healthcare, labor precarity, anemic social security, accelerating climate-related emergencies — is projected onto the far Right’s favorite scapegoats: primarily migrants, but also ​'gender ideology' and its alleged assault on the family as Europe’s moral and material core."

[there-are-4-lights]

"Agadez has long been a transit point for people trying to pass through north Africa and across the Mediterranean to Europe. Now the Nigerien city is a hub for the flow of drugs heading towards Europe too.

For those such as Azizou Chehou, trying to provide support for the increasingly desperate migrants coming through the city, the impact of the greater availability of cocaine on the streets is clear. Agadez is in the grip of an addiction crisis and its biggest victims, says Chechou, are female migrants.

“Women are held by traffickers in houses where men pass by and use them,” says Chehou, who runs a Nigerien development organisation in Agadez. “When they have paid that debt these women are passed to another trafficker. Even after leaving a trafficker, the women are caught in a cycle of dependence on earning money from sex work and drug use to block out the nightmares.”

Chehou and others in Agadez say the recent increase in the amount of cocaine in Niger is to blame for the addiction crisis, which the local health system is ill-equipped to cope with."

[mariacallous]

Over the last 10 months, the world’s attention has been focused on Israel and the Gaza Strip. The war that began on Oct. 7, 2023, with Hamas’s attack on Israel has been cataclysmic. But the conflict has overshadowed another crisis enveloping the region: intense heat and water scarcity.

In mid-July, the heat index in Dubai was 144 degrees Fahrenheit. In late June, the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, registered a temperature of 125 degrees. This heat coincided with Hajj season. When it was over, more than 1,300 people had lost their lives. And in Egypt, temperatures have rarely fallen below 100 degrees since May.

It was actually hotter in the Gulf region last summer, topping out at an eye-popping real feel of 158 degrees in the coastal areas of Iran and the United Arab Emirates. That reading and the unrelenting heat this season exceeded the “wet-bulb temperature” at which humans, if exposed for six hours, can no longer cool themselves off, leading to heat-related illnesses and death.

The World Bank estimates that by 2050, water scarcity will result in GDP reductions of up to 14 percent in the region. In 2021, a UNICEF report stated that Egypt could run out of water by 2025, with the Nile River coming under particular stress. Water stress in countries such as Egypt is exacerbated by the upriver flow of the Nile being restricted because of the construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. Syria and Turkey have been at odds over many years because the Turks have built dams along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, cutting the flow south. And among the many issue that divide Israelis and Palestinians is water and who has the right to tap into the Mountain Aquifer of the West Bank.

In addition to the extreme heat’s significant threat to life and livelihood in the Middle East and North Africa, a hotter region has the potential to destabilize politics well beyond its borders.

Before going further, it is important to underscore that this is not a column about “climate conflict.” About a decade ago, there was a spate of articles on this issue, highlighting the Syrian Civil War as an example of what the future would look like as the globe warmed. Even though this idea captured the imagination of a variety of notables including then-Prince Charles, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, and others, the claim about Syria in particular was based on incomplete data, faulty interpretation of that data, over-generalization, and, as a result, erroneous conclusions.

As the October 2021 National Intelligence Estimate on climate change dryly noted, the U.S. intelligence community had “low to moderate confidence in how physical climate impacts will affect US national security interests and the nature of geopolitical conflict, given the complex dimensions of human and state decisionmaking.” Basically, the spies are saying it is hard to make a causal connection between climate and conflict because there are so many variables that contribute to conflict.

A clearer and more pressing problem is how people adapt to rising temperatures and water scarcity. They migrate to places with lower temperatures and more water. According to the World Bank, as many as 19 million people—approximately 9 percent of the local population—will become displaced in North Africa by 2050 because of the climate crisis. And for people in the region, the destination of choice is Europe.

A number of caveats are in order: First, the bank is extrapolating. It is possible that there may be political, economic, or technological changes that limit the number of migrants. Second, not every person on the move will be migrating because of the changing climate. And finally, some of those displaced people will remain somewhere in the region given the resources necessary to make it across the Mediterranean. (That presents its own set of problems, however. Internally displaced people, who generally settle in urban areas, will put pressure on the budgets and infrastructure of places whose resources and capacity to absorb migrants are limited.)

All this said, in the abstract migration is positive for countries in the European Union, which have aging populations and need workers to pay into generous social safety nets. Yet the claim that migration provides benefits to society remains unconvincing to a significant number of Europeans who oppose large (or perceptively large) numbers of newcomers into their countries.

France’s National Front party, which long flirted with fascism and a coy version of Holocaust denial and rebranded itself as the National Rally in 2018 in an effort to shed this ugly legacy, has become a major force in French politics in large part due to its opposition to immigration, especially from Islamic countries. Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban, the avatar of European illiberalism, built his authoritarian system on fears of the threat that migrants pose to Hungarian society.

Brexit, which British voters approved in 2016, was about a lot of things, but immigration propelled the United Kingdom’s imprudent decision to leave the European Union. More recently, the proximate cause of the recent riots in England was the allegation that an immigrant was responsible for the murder of three young girls at a dance class in the seaside town of Southport. Despite the allegation being demonstrably false, the ensuing street violence suggests that simmering resentment toward migrants within a segment of the marginalized English working class stoked by, and combined with, right-wing populism is dangerous and potentially destabilizing.

Then there is Germany, where in 2015 hundreds of thousands of Syrians sought refuge from the violence enveloping their country. Then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel made the decision to grant Syrians entry. It was a decision that many Germans embraced, but it also produced a backlash that has helped drive the emergence of the Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) party. The AfD is different from other right-wing populist parties in Europe given its provenance. Although it began as a party based on Euro-skepticism, it has moved steadily toward embracing fascism, downplaying the atrocities of the Third Reich, spreading Islamophobia, and inveighing against foreigners in general. Of course, there is a whole host of reasons for the rise of the AfD and other fascist, illiberal, right-wing populist parties in Europe. But scholars agree that migration is the through line in this phenomenon.

The Unites States has a compelling interest in a Europe that is stable, whole, free, and prosperous. The emergence and success of xenophobic, fascist, or fascist-adjacent parties that make common cause with the enemies of Western liberalism are a threat to that core U.S. interest. That’s why Washington needs to help head off mass migration to Europe. There is not a lot that the United States can do about conflicts—such as the one in Sudan—that drive migration, but U.S. policymakers can help when it comes to the climate crisis, which will contribute to the increasing numbers of people seeking refuge in Europe.

This requires not increasing financial assistance or green infrastructure projects but something both more cost-effective and influential: creative diplomacy. High heat makes the problem of water scarcity worse, which is why people migrate. Using its own experience and technical expertise from managing resources in the increasingly hot western United States, the U.S government can play a useful role in helping countries in the Middle East do a better job managing what water they have.

The conflicts that span the region make assistance harder, given the fact that water sources often cross boundaries. But that is a challenge that can be overcome. Not only are there technical solutions to the problem of water scarcity, but there are also political incentives to come to agreement even across conflict zones.

Leaders across the region may disdain their citizens, but they have a political interest in satisfying at least their people’s minimum demands, including access to water. Even with all the nationalist huffing and puffing of their governments, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed have a strong interest in sharing the waters of the Nile. Without such an agreement, the political and economic problems of both countries will deepen, threatening both leaders.

Of all things, the maritime border agreement between Israel and Lebanon can be a template of sorts for the way U.S. officials approach the problem of water sharing in the region. There was a range of critics of the agreement in the United States, Israel, and Lebanon, but the actual substance is less important than the way U.S. diplomats brought it about. They separated Israeli concerns about Lebanon and Lebanese concerns about Israel and focused instead on the upside for each country. Once that became clear—the exploitation of gas deposits off the Israeli and Lebanese coasts—it was hard for the two countries that nonetheless remain in a state of war to not agree to a boundary. Despite 10 months of conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, the agreement has not been breached. That is important and suggests a way forward for negotiations over water.

It is tempting to want to place efforts to deal with water scarcity in some broader climate agenda for the Middle East. That is exactly what U.S. officials should not do. Washington should focus on issues where it has a realistic chance of making a difference. There is little the United States can do about the intense heat, and mitigation of greenhouse gases is not a pressing problem in the region because it does not actually emit that much greenhouse gas. Water, however, is critically important, and it is an area where the United States has expertise to bring to bear.

Indeed, helping strike agreements to manage water scarcity in the Middle East is a low-cost way the United States can mitigate the perversions of European politics and help shape the global order to come.

[fettesans]

Top, page from Raymond Buckland, Solitary Seance: How You Can Talk with Spirits on Your Own, 2011. Via. Bottom, photograph via NASA, Toroid inflatable station concept during testing, 1961. Via. More.

Using the pendulum is known as radiesthesia—also rhabdomancy, or cleidomancy. One of the best-known uses of the pendulum is in dowsing, in finding where to drill for water. But it is also used for many other things, not least of all for communicating with spirit.

Unlike many other early space station concepts, this design actually made it out of the concept phase and into production, though no models were ever flown. This particular station was 30-feet and expandable. It was designed to be taken to outer space in a small package and then inflate in orbit. The station could, in theory, have been big enough for 1 to 2 people to use for a long period of time. A similar 24 foot station was built by the Goodyear Aircraft Corporation for NASA test use. The concept of space inflatables was revived in the 1990s. Via Wikipedia.

--

‘If an artist who conceived a work says that it is unfinished and should not be exhibited, it isn’t – and shouldn’t be.’ The court felt differently: ‘When an artist makes a decision to begin work on a piece of art and handles the process of creation long-distance via e-mail, using someone else’s property, someone else’s materials, someone else’s money, someone else’s staff, and, to a significant extent, someone else’s suggestions regarding the details of fabrication – with no enforceable written or oral contract defining the parties’ relationship – and that artist becomes unhappy part-way through the project and abandons it,’ wrote the presiding judge, Michael Ponsor, ‘then nothing in the Visual Artists Rights Act or elsewhere in the Copyright Act gives that artist the right to dictate what that “someone else” does with what he has left behind, so long as the remnant is not explicitly labeled as the artist’s work.’ (...)

Essentially a horrific readymade, Barca Nostra sunk in April 2015 between Libya and Lampedusa with an estimated 1,000 migrants onboard, of whom 28 survived. The Italian government recovered the wreck in 2016 and moved it to a base in Sicily before it was placed under the care of the Augusta municipality, a landing site for Operation Mare Nostrum, Italy’s response to the Mediterranean migrant crisis. Mare Nostrum, or ‘Our Sea’, cost the Italian government a reported £7 million per month, and ensured safe passage for over 100,000 people within a year of its launch in October 2013. But after Italy appealed for assistance, EU states criticised the operation for encouraging people to risk the sea crossing, so EU agency Frontex replaced Mare Nostrum with Operation Triton in 2014, with a slashed budget and focus on border security.

Effectively a policy of nonassistance, as Forensic Oceanography concluded in their 2016 report Death by Rescue: The Lethal Effects of Non-Assistance at Sea, Triton created a situation where commercial ships were increasingly called into rescue missions they weren’t suited to conduct – such was the case with the sinking of Barca Nostra in 2015, they found. That year, European Parliament president Martin Schulz called for ‘burden sharing’ based on the fact that five out of 28 EU member states were taking in 50 percent of refugees to Europe at the time. Yet no effective cooperation manifested. Neither in creating humanitarian responses to a global crisis, nor in mediating the ultraright sentiments and movements that rose as a result – as demonstrated in 2018, when Italy’s far-right interior minister, Matteo Salvini, launched a campaign to block search-and-rescue vessels from docking in Italian ports, and drafted a hardline anti-migrant bill adopted by the Italian government.

It was within this desperate context that Barca Nostra was brought to the Venice Biennale – in cooperation with Augusta’s municipal council and Comitato 18 Aprile, which lobbied against government plans to scrap the ship – with Büchel covering transportation costs. Presented with little information – not for the lulz, it seems, but out of contempt for a wilful ignorance – the vessel’s arrival was lambasted as ‘tasteless’ by those at the vernissage, seemingly more concerned with the insult of its presence – and those taking selfies with it, like a Martha Rosler collage come to life – than discussing the exclusionary policies that brought it into being. (Granted, as curator Alexandra Stock wrote in a scathing takedown, ‘The optics [were] bad because Büchel set it up that way’.) While the stunt drew international attention – including responses from Salvini himself, countering the idea that the Venice Biennale is an ineffective stage for protest – it also revealed the limits of internationalism, whether in the artworld or the world at large.

Stephanie Bailey, from Christoph Büchel: Fear and Loathing in Venice, for Art Review, April 14, 2024.

[eretzyisrael]

by Judith Miller

Last fall, Egypt was on the brink of economic collapse. A decade of debt-fueled spending on a pharaonic-scale had emptied its Central Bank coffers. By February, Cairo’s public debt was 89% of its gross domestic product. External debt had soared to 46% of GDP. The pound, its currency, was one of the world’s worst performing. Unable to import supplies and repatriate profits, foreign companies were leaving, or threatening to leave Egypt in droves. Annual inflation was over 35%, and double that for some food staples. Egypt seemed on the verge of a sovereign default—its first ever.

Then came Oct. 7.

Officials, businessmen, and financial analysts say that however horrific the war has been for Israelis and for Palestinians in Gaza, Oct. 7 has helped save Egypt from economic ruin and growing political unrest. To be sure, Egypt is paying heavily for the ongoing Israel-Hamas war on its border. Its three main sources of revenue—hard currency from the Suez Canal, tourism, and remittances from Egyptian workers abroad—have plummeted by between 30% and 40%. But without Hamas’ horrific massacre, which killed 1,200 people and took another 240 hostage, and Israel’s much criticized retaliation in Gaza, Egypt would probably not have gotten the international financial lifeline that has rescued it yet again from economic ruin, just in time.

“Just after the attack, the government began strategizing, successfully it’s turned out, about how to use the crisis to secure a bailout,” said Ahmed Aboudouh, an Egyptian expert at Chatham House, a London-based think tank. “Oct. 7 helped save Egypt’s economy, at least temporarily.”

Last February, the Abu Dhabi Developmental Holding Company (ADQ), Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund, unveiled plans to develop a city by the sea on part of the 65-square-mile peninsula of Ras el-Hekma, one of the few undeveloped areas on the Mediterranean coast, part of a sale worth $35 billion in investment and debt relief, the largest foreign direct investment deal in Egyptian history. Egypt will retain a 35% stake in the project. Since Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the chairman of ADQ, is Emirati President Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan’s brother and the UAE’s national security adviser, the Ras el-Hekma purchase was far more than a financial transaction. It was part of an Egyptian bailout.

Egyptians bristle at the loss of their nation’s diplomatic clout. By reviving its regional profile, Oct. 7 has bestowed another gift on Egypt.

Then in March, Cairo secured a critical $8 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund, with strong American support. The IMF infusion, in turn, opened other foreign faucets. The European Union promptly agreed to provide another $8 billion in grants and loans, ostensibly to help Egypt’s economy, but in reality, to assure Egypt’s help in preventing Arab and African migrants from reaching European shores. In total, the IMF, Europe, and the Gulf have now poured well over $50 billion of foreign currency into Egypt’s cash-strapped coffers. “The U.S., Europe, and the Gulf clearly agreed that the Sissi government could not be permitted to fail,” said Steven Cook, an expert on Egypt at the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations. “Geopolitics has taken over.”

Only months before, the IMF had not completed the review of Egypt’s loan agreement approved in December 2022, thereby withholding a tranche of the $3 billion rescue package, as the government had failed to deliver on agreed benchmarks. While the fund attributed its about-face in March to the increasing damage being done to Egypt’s economy by the Israel-Hamas war—or what it euphemistically called a “more challenging external environment”—absent American pressure on the fund and on Egypt to agree belatedly to financial reforms it had previously rejected, the IMF loan and even the Ras el-Hekma deal would not have gone through. Since Washington is the fund’s largest shareholder with a 16.5% stake, it holds sway over its key lending decisions.

The Biden administration, too, was obviously unwilling to risk the economic collapse and political destabilization of the Arab Middle East’s largest country and the first Arab state to make peace with neighboring Israel in the midst of one of the region’s deadliest wars in modern history and with other conflicts around it still raging—especially since Egyptian mediation with Hamas was crucial to White House policy. “Egypt has proven, yet again,” said Aboudouh, “that it is, as its elite believes, too big to fail.”

[beardedmrbean]

At least nine migrants have drowned after their boat capsized while trying to cross the Drina River, which separates Serbia and Bosnia.

Authorities said at least 18 other migrants, including three children, arrived safely on the Bosnian side of the border.

But teams from both countries are searching for several people still unaccounted for. Parts of the river are up to 200 metres wide.

Local media also reported a search is under way for a smuggler who took the migrants across the river.

Vlada Rankic, the leader of the civil defence rescue team, told reporters that rescuers were also searching for a mother and a baby.

"Unfortunately, we don't think there will be survivors," he added.

Bosnia's border police confirmed the incident took place early in the morning, but did not provide more details.

Serbian officials also confirmed that an incident had taken place near the border town of Ljubovija, with police adding that the majority of the migrants were people from Morocco.

Serbia and Bosnia are among the main transit countries on the route through the Western Balkans into the European Union.

In September 2023, according to the EU's border police organisation Frontex, the route overtook the Central Mediterranean route through Italy in numbers of irregular border crossings, with many migrants crossing through Bulgaria.

The Serbian government says over a million people from Asia and Africa have crossed into the country since the refugee crisis of 2015. More than one million migrants entered Europe that year, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

According to government data, the majority attempting to cross into Serbia in recent months came from Syria, Afghanistan, Turkey, Morocco and Pakistan.

But the number of migrants transiting through Serbia has decreased significantly over the years.

Serbian police recorded 10,389 illegal entries in the first half of 2024, which is nearly 70% less than the previous year.

Serbian officials have credited the drop to tighter cooperation with Austrian police and with Frontex.

Many migrants use smugglers to enter Serbia from Bulgaria and North Macedonia and then try to cross into EU members Hungary or Croatia.

[jihadibaddie123]

I think it could be a very pivotal moment in Pan Mediterranean history if they "handle" the migrant crisis to their own advantage rather than be guard dogs for western Europe. You have an influx of young working ppl, and you're not capitalizing it to increase your industry beyond tourism or even create broader trade ties... I remember talking to this Nigerian man who said he loves living in Greece since it's warmer and easier to fly back home. There's a lot of African migrants throughout Greece, but the sad part is that major industry is further north of the continent. The Med shall rise again, inshaallah

[worldspotlightnews]

Rescue workers race to save 400 migrants adrift on boat in Mediterranean sea | CNN

CNN  —  The Italian Coast Guard is leading rescue efforts to save at least 400 migrants adrift on a boat in the Mediterranean Sea between Italy and Malta, along an immigration route that NGOs have warned is perilously dangerous. Three rescue operations involving several vessels are ongoing to assist the boat of 400 migrants, as well as another boat with an estimated 800 people on board, the…

[nando161mando]

The migrant crisis in Latin America is the consequences of the Capitalist Modernity

Those people that are fleeing their land at thousands, if not millions, are met with the military and oppressive apparatus of the “first-world”, the “north-world”, European countries letting people die in the seas of the Mediterranean sea so they don’t get to the borders of the south Europe or the concentration camps in the Mexico-US border where agents of ICE and the United States Border Patrol behave as Gestapo agents by leaving people without food or any human care as they are caged – even children are separated from their families. This happens due to the eugenicist mentality of this countries, their white policies that had origin in the colonisation and the bases of the creation of the nation-state mentality.

[tropylium]

Unsure if I'm a few days late in timing, or actually just right, but I wanted to mention a recent essay from Roger Blench on recent world events in Africa

abstract:

The years 2021-2023 have seen a seismic shift in the political map of West-Central Africa. The Francophone countries, which have broadly maintained a consensus relationship with their former colonial rulers, underpinned by the Cfa which is tied to the Euro, have one by one thrown off the link to France. French troops have been asked to leave and there has been a re-orientation towards Russia, through its surrogate, the Wagner group. Even where coups have no direct link to Russia, such as in Niger, pro-Russian statements have become part of the currency. Although the absence of analogous links between Britain and its former Anglophone colonies has impeded similar regime change, the overspill of insurgency from the Sahel and the unprepared and incompetent security services in these countries means that they will not be protected from instability.

The paper considers the roots of this astonishingly rapid wave of change, as well as where things are likely to go in the next few years. As importantly, it argues that European governments have been seriously inept in their policy responses and that this is likely to have consequences. The reason for this is the privileging the endless to and fro of bloodshed in the Near East, most of which makes good television, but which has limited consequences. The creation of a zone of freelance insurgency across the Sahel is likely to significantly increase the operation of the trade in weapons and drugs from the region to the Maghreb and thence into southern Europe. In addition the Mediterranean ‘migrant crisis’ is already creating a highly effective channel for bad actors to enter the European crime and terrorism ecosystem. The paper makes a strong recommendation that greater in-depth and sophisticated analysis be applied to the region of West-Central Africa, and that far more effective policy responses be developed.

Includes also a chapter "The damaging obsession with the Near East"; but as far as critiques of Western mistakes go, I like somewhat more the chapter "Why has international development been serially incompetent?";

Why then have (…) out of focus development strategies remained on the agenda? There are four issues here; – relentless propaganda proclaiming success and hence a complete failure to learn lessons from failure – ill-informed direction from central governments in Europe and the United States, together with rapid policy shifts within those governments – astounding failure to understand the basic science, leading, for example, to the ‘climate change’ alibi – rapid turnover of staff and hence a complete lack of institutional memory No development agency is going to admit failure; all want to be seen as ‘punching above their weight’, even when this is entirely at odds with the empirical data. Annual reports feature the usual smiling natives testifying to the improvement of their lives to due to some project or other. Collectivities, such as the European Union, are usually worse than national governments, since national diversity rather than competence is a requirement to be responsible to hand out grants.

[ausetkmt]

International Organization for Migration recorded 3,789 deaths last year along land and sea routes in the MENA region – an 11 percent surge from 2021.

Last year was one of the deadliest for migrants using travel routes in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, with nearly 3,800 deaths reported.

The International Organization for Migration (IOM) recorded 3,789 deaths in 2022 along sea and land routes in the MENA region, including crossings in the Sahara Desert and Mediterranean Sea.

“This alarming death toll on migration routes within and from the MENA region demands immediate attention and concerted efforts to enhance the safety and protection of migrants,” Othman Belbeisi, IOM regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, said in a statement.

“IOM urges increased international and regional cooperation as well as resources to address this humanitarian crisis and prevent further loss of lives.”

The report said the death toll – 11 percent higher than recorded in 2021 and the highest since the 4,255 documented six years ago – was likely much greater because of scant official data and limited access to migration routes for civil society and international organisations.

“Our data shows that 92 percent of people dying on this route remain unidentified,” Koko Warner, director of the Global Data Institute, said in a statement on Tuesday.

“The tragic loss of life on dangerous migration routes highlights the importance of data and analysis in driving action.”

On sea routes from the region to Europe, IOM recorded an increase in deadly incidents that involved boats travelling to Greece and Italy from Lebanon.

IOM said the highest number of deaths on land routes in the region last year was recorded in war-torn Yemen, where the agency said violence against migrants increased.

At least 795 people, mostly Ethiopians, died on a route between Yemen and Saudi Arabia, the IOM said. Most of the deaths occurred in Yemen’s northern province of Saada. Libya recorded 117 deaths and there were 54 fatalities in neighbouring Algeria.

[mariacallous]

After decades talking tough on immigration and a year after becoming Italy’s most right-wing prime minister since the Second World War, Giorgia Meloni finds herself dealing with a surge in arrivals from Africa that is sorely testing her electoral pledge to keep irregular migrants away from Italian shores.

With political instability, war, poverty, and global warming plaguing much of Africa and the Middle East, more than 140,000 migrants have already reached Italy by boat this year, almost twice as many as in the whole of 2022. Thousands more lost their lives during the journey. Last month, 7,000 people arrived over just a couple of days in Lampedusa, a small Italian island between Malta and Tunisia that has become a flash point of Europe’s migrant crisis, overwhelming reception facilities there.

As the European Union reels from Islamist attacks in the French city of Arras and in Brussels, which highlighted the shortcomings of its migration system, and amid heightened security concerns linked to the war between Israel and Hamas, Meloni’s immigration woes show the struggles of populist leaders with so-called easy solutions confronted with the reality of government. More than 70 percent of Italians believe that Meloni has done less than she had promised on immigration, and 66 percent say the government is not capable of handling the issue.

“This is a big problem for Meloni,” said Matteo Villa, a senior research fellow at the Italian Institute for International Political Studies. “The government is under a lot of pressure.” 

Right-wing populists around the world are often accused of selling simplistic, unrealistic fixes to complex problems, especially immigration. Former U.S. President Donald Trump never did build the wall, though his successor still aims to do so. Britain continues to be reached by tens of thousands of irregular migrants every year well after pro-Brexit right-wingers convinced it to break away from the EU to “take back control” of its borders. France’s centrist President Emmanuel Macron repeatedly trounced far-right leader Marine Le Pen in presidential debates by laying bare the incoherence of her program. 

Italy, meanwhile, is the main point of arrival for migrants leaving from countries such as Libya and Tunisia in a bid to reach Europe by sea. During last year’s electoral campaign, Meloni claimed that “illegal immigration threatens citizens’ security and quality of life” and promised to stem the influx. Her proposals included establishing an EU “naval blockade” off North Africa’s coasts as well as setting up EU immigration centers in Africa to evaluate people’s asylum requests there.

One year on, Meloni’s government and her voters are facing a harsh reality check. 

An Italy-sponsored deal struck by the EU and Tunisia in the summer, entailing the payment of hundreds of millions of euros to the country in exchange for its help to stop departures, appears to be faltering, with Tunisian strongman Kais Saied saying this month that he will not accept any “charity.”

Meanwhile, despite some vague pledges from the European Commission to step up border surveillance, the kind of massive military operation that would be required to “blockade” large stretches of Africa’s Mediterranean coasts is nowhere near to becoming reality. Finally, repatriations of failed asylum-seekers, which over the past decade hovered at a dismal 18 percent of all those ordered to leave Italy, have only slightly grown on Meloni’s watch compared to last year.

In a bid to maintain support from hard-line voters, the Italian government—which includes Meloni’s post-fascist Brothers of Italy party, as well as the far-right League and the conservative Forza Italia—has resorted to a mix of blame game and headline-grabbing announcements.

Senior right-wing figures recently lambasted Germany over its public funding to a nongovernmental organization rescuing migrants in the Mediterranean, which the Italian government says incentivizes human trafficking. The NGO’s ship has rescued and disembarked 753 people in Italy this year, barely 0.6 percent of total sea arrivals, yet Meloni formally complained to her German counterpart, Olaf Scholz, with a letter leaked to the press, while a top League member alleged that the German left-wing government was seeking to make Meloni’s cabinet look bad by “filling us up with illegals.”

But Meloni’s government has done more than rant. Over the past year, it has approved a slate of measures including tougher punishments for smugglers, stricter procedures to grant humanitarian protection, and more detention centers and longer detention periods for rejected asylum-seekers awaiting deportation.

“For years, center-left governments have simply been passive toward a phenomenon that, on the contrary, we are governing,” said Sara Kelany, a member of parliament with Brothers of Italy. 

Critics say most of these actions will achieve little but make asylum-seekers even more miserable than they already are. “Initial reception is being blended with a detention system,” said Fabrizio Coresi, a migration expert at Action Aid, a human rights NGO. And due to the lack of agreements between Italy and many of the migrants’ countries of origin, rejected asylum-seekers often can’t be deported, and after being locked up for a certain period, they are simply released. The government has also run into legal trouble, facing adverse rulings in recent weeks on parts of its asylum policy.

“These are measures adopted with an eye on the government’s base, rather than actual solutions,” said Lorena Stella Martini, a migration analyst based in Milan.

Meloni may be achieving better results on the European level, where she can take some credit with her electorate for putting the migrant issue back on top of the agenda. EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen accompanied Meloni to Tunisia over the summer and visited Lampedusa last month, aligning herself with the Italian prime minister on the need for urgent action to reduce arrivals and promising “a coordinated response.”

The EU is also making progress on a new pact on immigration, which entails stricter procedures for asylum-seekers coming from countries deemed safe, looser rules to expel rejected applicants, and the transfer of thousands of migrants from front-line countries, such as Italy, Greece, and Spain, to other member states—which would otherwise have to pay thousands of euros for every asylum-seeker they refuse to take. 

“For the first time in years, the majority of European countries are converging toward the Italian stance,” said Kelany, the Italian parliament member.

It might be less than a blessing. Experts note that the deal, which confirms the rule that most migrants should be processed by the country of first arrival, is less of an Italian triumph than an own goal. “Meloni’s diplomatic victory is being able to show that everybody in the EU now accepts that the objective is curbing irregular immigration,” said Villa, the research fellow, “but then when you look at the policies that are being discussed [from an Italian perspective], if they were actually implemented, it would be a disaster.”

And yet, for all the grumbling over her handling of immigration, Meloni’s party continues to top the polls with an almost 10-point lead. That might be because Italy’s so-called migrant crisis is not as bad as it seems. Since many migrants end up moving on to other countries, over the past decade, the total number of foreigners in Italy has actually remained stable. Italy has half as many residents born outside the EU as Germany, and 2 million fewer than France, which has only a slightly larger population.

Italy could even use more immigration: Over the summer, Meloni’s government quietly approved the entry of almost half a million non-EU workers by the end of 2025 to fill gaps in the Italian labor market.

The bigger question is how long her voters’ patience will last. “Despite the talk of stopping immigration flows and carrying out mass expulsions of irregular migrants, neither one will happen or is even possible,” said Martini, the expert from Milan.

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[ad_1] CALAIS, France — The lighting at the reverse facet of the English Channel have been visual on Thursday, emboldening Emanuel Malbah, an asylum seeker who has been residing in a makeshift camp on France’s northern sea coast for the previous week, dreaming of constructing a crossing.“I don’t imagine that I’ll die,” he stated. “I imagine I’ll get to England.”Only a skinny waterway separates Mr. Malbah, 16, and different migrants from their objective after lengthy trips throughout Europe from houses they fled within the Mideast and Africa. However the narrowness of the passage is devious, as used to be made transparent on Wednesday when no less than 27 folks died in a failed try to pass the Channel aboard a flimsy inflatable boat.In spite of the deaths — the crisis used to be one of the most deadliest involving migrants in Europe lately — Mr. Malbah and people have been nonetheless ready Thursday for the correct time to sprint out of the woods with their very own boats and make a wreck for the seaside.In contemporary months, the choice of migrants surroundings off into the Channel has soared since the government have cracked down on different routes to England, particularly via truck during the tunnel underneath the Channel.“This can be a new Mediterranean,’’ stated Mr. Malbah, 16, who arrived in Calais per week in the past, invoking the scene of the migrant disaster of 2015 that shook Europe.Mr. Malbah himself made the treacherous adventure around the Mediterranean to Italy after he left Liberia, in West Africa, greater than a yr in the past. On Thursday, he used to be talking in a wooded house close to the coast the place dozens of different asylum seekers have been looking for safe haven from the rain underneath blue tarps and seeking to stay heat round a fireplace.Caused via the tragedy at sea an afternoon previous, French and British leaders vowed to crack down on migrant crossings of the channel that separates their two nations, blaming arranged smuggling rings and likewise every different.The deaths introduced a sobering reminder of ways little has modified within the 5 years for the reason that French government dismantled a sprawling migrant camp in Calais. Each nations are nonetheless suffering to care for migrants within the house via following a coverage that migrant rights teams and immigration professionals say places asylum seekers in pointless risk.On Thursday, French officers showed that youngsters and a pregnant girl have been amongst those that had drowned, as crews labored within the chilly and wind to get better our bodies and to check out to spot the lifeless.Two survivors, one from Iraq and one from Somalia, have been discovered and have been taken to a French medical institution, the place they have been being handled for critical hypothermia.Gérald Darmanin, France’s inner minister, stated the government believed about 30 folks have been crowded onto a vessel that he in comparison to “a pool you blow up for your lawn.”President Emmanuel Macron of France and High Minister Boris Johnson of Britain spoke via telephone Wednesday and stated that they had agreed to step up efforts to stop migrants from making the adventure throughout one of the most global’s busiest delivery lanes. Britain these days provides France cash to lend a hand quilt the price of deterring crossings via surveillance and patrols.Regardless that each countries have lengthy accused every different of doing too little to curb the crossings, many immigration professionals and rights teams say that each side percentage accountability: Their means has consisted of constructing the placement of asylum seekers as tricky as imaginable, to deter them from surroundings out for Europe. “France is ready of subcontractor to Britain in the similar manner that Turkey is to Europe,” stated François Héran, knowledgeable on migration at Collège de France in Paris. “Why does France permit British cops on French soil to lend a hand forestall immigration?

It’s as a result of we percentage the similar ideology that those asylum seekers are unwanted.’’On the get started of Europe’s migration disaster in 2015, the English Channel used to be considered an unbreachable barrier, its moving currents and risky climate making any try to pass too unhealthy.Many attempted as a substitute to get onto vehicles getting into the tunnel underneath the Channel. However now the police often patrol roadways resulting in the channel, and 12-foot-high barbed-wire fences stretch for miles alongside a number of routes to the port of Calais. That has sharply lowered the choice of migrants hitching rides on shipment vehicles.Pierre Roques, the coordinator of the Auberge des Migrants, a nonprofit workforce in Calais, stated France’s northern sea coast “have been militarized” during the last few years, including that “the extra safety there may be, the extra the smuggling networks increase, as a result of migrants can’t pass via themselves anymore.”A number of Sudanese migrants lining up at a meals distribution at the outskirts of Calais stated that the police regularly swept via their makeshift camps, from time to time hitting them with electrical sticks. A Human Rights Watch Record launched in October described the strategy of harassing migrants to cause them to depart as “enforced distress.”Migrants play a cat-and-mouse recreation with the government.Mr. Malbah, the teenager from Liberia, described an tried crossing Tuesday that needed to be aborted since the engine at the inflatable boat would now not get started. The French police seemed quickly after and slashed the boat, he stated.Didier Leschi, the director of the French Place of job of Immigration and Integration, attributed the surge in Channel crossings — from time to time there are as much as 50 in line with night time, he stated — to “one of those mafia professionalism” via smugglers who inspire migrants to visit sea, at costs starting from $1,100 to $2,800.To watch the lengthy sea coast from which migrants activate, he stated, France would wish “tens of 1000's of cops.”Migrant rights teams stated that apart from cracking down, the government have carried out little to deal with the surge in boat crossings.Alain Ledaguenel, the president of a personal group that conducts sea rescues from Dunkirk, the town from which the migrants who died on Wednesday possibly departed, stated that during contemporary months his crew has been engaged in 3 times extra sea rescues.“We’ve been sounding the alarm for 2 years,” he stated. “Since September, it hasn’t stopped.”In a damning file launched ultimate month, the Nationwide Meeting stated that the French govt’s migrant coverage have been a failure and that it had ended in violations of migrants’ rights. In keeping with the file, of the entire cash spent via the French and British in 2020 to maintain the migrant inhabitants alongside the French coast, about 85 % used to be spent on safety, and simplest 15 % on well being and different help.That used to be proof that the government have been hewing to the coverage of constructing prerequisites in Calais as harsh as imaginable to dissuade others from coming, stated Sonia Krimi, a co-author of the file and a lawmaker in Mr. Macron’s birthday party, L. a. République en Marche.“It’s been 30 years that we’ve been doing that, and it doesn’t paintings,’’ Ms. Krimi stated. “Immigration has existed, exists and can at all times exist.’’However the politically explosive nature of immigration, particularly 5 months prior to presidential elections in France, makes it tricky to imagine new approaches, Ms. Krimi stated. Her file — which beneficial bettering the housing and dealing prerequisites of migrants in addition to streamlining asylum programs — used to be criticized, even via individuals of her personal birthday party.In Calais, migrants hoping to get to Britain are getting increasingly more determined.Sassd Amian, 25, a migrant from South Sudan, stated he used to be pinning his hopes at the vehicles sure for the Channel Tunnel.

A graduate in structure, Mr. Amian stated it used to be his “dream to get to England,” which he described as “a robust nation, with excellent schooling, and the place the English language is spoken.”Mr. Amian stated he had fled conflict in South Sudan 4 years in the past, and had continued the crossing of the Mediterranean to Italy, in need of meals and water, after stops in Egypt and Libya.When vehicles undergo a roundabout on their method to the Channel Tunnel, there's a second — only a few seconds — when one can attempt to slip in between the axles and discover a hiding spot, Mr. Amian stated. A number of folks have misplaced legs and a few have died attempting, migrants say.However, having made it thus far, Mr. Amian stated he used to be unafraid.“Loss of life,’’ he stated, “is not anything new on this lifestyles.’’Consistent Méheut reported from Calais, and Norimitsu Onishi from Paris. Aurelien Breeden and Léontine Gallois contributed reporting from Paris. [ad_2] #Undeterred #Channels #Perils #Determined #Migrants #Plan #Move