“They are fighting about money and who will rule this
country. They are not fighting about any other thing.”
What does a “humanitarian” interventionist do when those he
intervened to “help” are worse off than
they were before? David Cameron overlooks his good guys turning bad in Libya and echoes Donald
Rumsfeld on Iraq, ‘Stuff happens.’ It’s not my fault. I have no regrets. Move on.
Let us not
forget that Cameron and Hague later tried intervening on behalf of the “good”
opposition in Syria. More recently they want to escalate military support for
Ukraine. Lessons are rarely learned. Libya is a disaster but our media hasn't
bothered to tell us. Remember the wall-to-wall coverage of Libya and the
overthrow of Gaddafi? Libya dropped down the TV ratings once Gaddafi was killed.
Post-Gaddafi Libya is not a subject the UK media nor the government want to talk about
and it's pretty clear why.
In 2011, Libyans revolted against the dictatorship of
Muammar el-Qaddafi, looking to end his forty-two-year grip on the country.
After a bloody civil war, he was toppled by NATO-backed rebels. Four years
later, the country is still at war. For over six months, two rival coalitions,
each with its own government and parliament and backed by a loose federation of
militias, have been engaged in a bitter power struggle that is engulfing the
country. After a weeks-long battle for Tripoli over the summer, the
internationally recognized government fled to the eastern city of Bayda under
the protection of Khalifa Hifter, a renegade general who heads a coalition
dubbed Operation Dignity. Meanwhile, the self-declared government in the
capital is backed by a group of militias calling itself Libya Dawn. In
Benghazi, the birthplace of the 2011 revolt, fierce fighting has raged since
May between Operation Dignity and Islamist militias. Radical groups have taken
advantage of the chaos to gain a foothold across the country, with Libya’s
affiliate of the Islamic State seizing control of Derna and Sirte. The
conflicts has brought Libya to the brink of collapse.
The United Nations estimated that the number of internally
displaced people between May and November 2014 alone was 400,000—the equivalent
of one out of fifteen Libyans. In western Libya, entire towns have been
displaced. Many have been forced to flee two or three times. Most Libyans who
want to leave the country have found that the world has rejected them. “Europe
doesn’t accept us as immigrants now,” explained Abdel Rahmi Ebedi 45-year-old
mechanical engineer a refugee from Benghazi. “I lost one of my relatives, I
lost my job,” he says. “I lost everything…Nothing is functioning here.” He sees
no future in Libya, and applied for a visa to Italy but was denied despite
having previously lived there for over a decade.
“People have to stop fighting so things can get better,
especially for the patients. I don’t know what they are thinking,” says Dr.
Massoud Mohamed, “They are destroying the whole country.”
Though the battle for Tripoli ended months ago, the capital
does not feel secure. At night the streets are largely deserted and controlled
by masked gunmen at makeshift checkpoints. Journalists and civil society
activists have fled. Kidnappings are increasingly common and assassinations are
on the rise. Extremist groups—including the Libyan affiliate of the Islamic
State—have staged bold attacks on hotels and embassies. Last month, Italy
closed its embassy and repatriated its staff, the last Western power to do so. Destroyed
in a weeks-long battle between rival militias last summer, the ruined
international airport now stands as a symbol of the conflict that is destroying
the entire country. Mitiga, Tripoli’s second airport, is now the main hub.
“It looks like a gradual descent into the abyss,” says Hanan
Salah, the Libya researcher for Human Rights Watch. “I’m hoping that there is a
way out, but from everything that I’m seeing, that I’m hearing—no one is
backing down, everyone is accelerating, everyone is becoming more territorial,
more positioned on their issues. Everything indicates that it’s heading toward
disaster.”
Our politicians don't care about Libya, or Syria, or Iraq,
or Afghanistan or anywhere. They squeeze political capital out of those
conflicts with phony outrage and then turn their backs upon innocent refugees to capture votes in upcoming
elections.
People are fleeing their home countries for a number of
different reasons these days. It might be the civil war in Syria or the Islamic
State terror in Iraq. They could also be fleeing the dictatorship in Eritrea or
the threats and chaos in a failed state like Somalia. Many thousands of people
who would have a credible chance of being given the right to stay in Europe are
being compelled to enter the country illegally. They entrust criminal
smugglers, dare to make the perilous journey across the Mediterranean or they
find other ways to penetrate Europe's highly fortified borders. In Germany they
are confronted with Article 16 A, which stipulates that people faced with
political persecution at home be granted the right to asylum. It includes no
provisions for other factors that might drive people to flee their homes:
hunger, droughts, crime, poverty or the lack of any prospects in a broken
country. But that doesn't stop the refugees from coming. The federal government
responded by drastically curbing the right to asylum. Refugees who had arrived
from a "safe third country" were stripped of the right to asylum in
Germany. Berlin declared Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia and Serbia to be
"safe countries," meaning it will be a lot easier to reject asylum-seekers
from these regions back home. Some 17 percent of all asylum-seekers in Germany
come from these three countries, but fewer than 1 percent are approved. Given
that every single country that shares a border with Germany is considered to
have that status, it means that "the only way a refugee could still apply
for asylum in Germany would be to land here by parachute," criticized the
refugee advocacy organization Pro Asyl. But it is no longer possible for
Germany to seal itself off.
Most migrants reach Europe through Italy or Greece and many
of them die on the way. The United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR, describes the
route across the Mediterranean as the world's deadliest. After fleeing from
Somalia in the summer of 2008, Hirsi a 21-year-old refugee from Somalia, tried
several times to reach Europe through Ukraine. He was detained once each by
Ukrainian and Hungarian border patrols, and twice by police in Slovakia.
Ukrainian security forces robbed, beat and tortured him, he says. After being
apprehended, he spent almost three years in four different Ukrainian prisons --
for committing no crime other than seeking shelter and protection in Europe.
This eastern route, and the fate of migrants like Hasan Hirsi, interest has
thus far been limited.
The western Ukrainian city of Uzhgorod is a transit point
for migrants from all over the world. Even last year, despite the conflict in
Ukraine, hundreds still tried to reach the EU from Eastern Europe. Refugees
often spend months in Uzhgorod, waiting for relatives to send them money for
the next part of their journey. For several hundred euros, Ukrainian
traffickers take migrants from Uzhgorod across the border to Hungary or
Slovakia, usually choosing secret paths through the Carpathian Mountains.
Refugees freeze to death almost every winter along the arduous mountain route.
EU member states are required to examine asylum requests, but countries along
its outer borders, like Hungary and Greece, often ignore the regulation and
send refugees back to non-EU countries. The UNHCR is also familiar with such
cases of "push-backs" into the EU-Ukrainian border region. When
migrants are apprehended in Ukraine, they are usually sent to semi-official
detention facilities for a few days before being transferred to prisons. Few
refugees have the chance to speak with an attorney.
The European Union has provided Ukraine with €30 million
($34 million) in funding, which Kiev is using to build and renovate migrant
detention centers, along with other facilities where they are housed
temporarily. According to Human Rights Watch, about three quarters of the money
went to private security firms. In 2010, the scope of a so-called readmission
agreement between the EU and Ukraine was expanded to include citizens of other
countries. Since then, Kiev must take back refugees who entered the EU through
Ukraine. In return, the EU has made it easier for Ukrainian citizens to enter
Europe. The International Organization for Migration received several million
euros to support Ukrainian authorities in such areas as the internment of
undocumented migrants. Brussels is apparently hoping that the system will
reduce the number of asylum seekers in Europe -- without attracting too much
attention. In 2010, the human rights organization Human Rights Watch criticized
the EU for investing millions to divert flows of refugees from Europe toward
Ukraine, while neglecting to take sufficient steps to ensure the humane
treatment of refugees in Ukraine. The refugee crisis along the eastern edge of
Europe could now escalate in the course of the Ukraine conflict. The government
in Kiev has its hands full caring for almost a million internally displaced
persons fleeing the fighting between government troops and rebels in eastern
Ukraine. It is hardly capable of providing for asylum-seekers from the Middle
East and African countries.
Pavshino, an internment camp for illegal migrants in western
Ukraine. At the time, Pavshino had a reputation among refugees as the
"Guantanamo of the East." Human rights organizations reported that
facilities were overcrowded and hygienic conditions were disastrous. As long
ago as 2005, the Council of Europe's Committee for the Prevention of Torture
was sharply critical of Ukraine for its inhumane and denigrating treatment of
refugees. In 2010, Human Rights Watch reported on the abuse and torture of
refugees by Ukrainian border guards. Several refugees independently told Human
Rights Watch that they had been tortured with electric shocks. "They tied
me to a chair. They attached electrodes to my ears and gave me electric
shocks," said an Afghan refugee. A Somali complained that Ukrainian
security forces had robbed him and threatened to kill him. "Listen
carefully. You are in Ukraine now. Not in Germany. Not in England. There is no
democracy here," a Ukrainian reportedly told them during questioning.
"If you lie, you will not leave this place alive." Human Rights Watch
believes that the refugees' claims are credible. The accounts are
"convincing" and precise, according to the 2010 report. They also
coincide with individual observations by another human rights organization, the
Hungarian Helsinki Committee. The German human rights organization Pro Asyl
describes the Ukrainian asylum system as highly corrupt. "It doesn't
matter if it's securing release from detention, getting papers or finding a bed
in a camp, refugees have a hard time getting any of this in Ukraine without
paying bribes," the report reads.
The Ukrainian military once used Zhuravychi as a barracks,
but today the government houses migrants in the building. Most of the inmates
in Zhuravychi are refugees who were caught in an attempt to cross the EU's
external border. They are held in the camp for up to a year, with some landing
there more than once. The drastic punishments are intended to deter refugees
from attempting to enter the EU, says Marc Speer of the group
bordermonitoring.eu. Officially, politicians in Brussels and Kiev don't refer
to camps like Zhuravychi as prisons, but as "accommodations."
Nevertheless, they are internment camps that the refugees are not permitted to
leave. The inmates in Zhuravychi live behind barbed wire and concrete walls,
and men in military garb guard the premises. Some of the prisoners, like Hasan
Hirsi, fled the wars in Somalia and Afghanistan. Their arrest serves "no
legitimate purposes" and constitutes a violation of the European
Convention on Human Rights, the UNHCR says critically.
The European Union has been leaning on neighbouring
countries like Serbia, Morocco and Turkey for some time in its efforts to repel
migrants and refugees. But the outsourcing of the EU's asylum policy is more
advanced along Europe's eastern edge than anywhere else. Hardliners, for
example, are fond of saying that the refugee problem shouldn't be solved here
in Europe but back home in the countries of origin. It is, they argue, their
responsibility, perhaps with a bid of development aid from the EU. Were the
situation in Africa to improve, they believe, more people would opt to stay. It
is a pleasant notion. But development aid isn't even close to sufficient to
save the world. One could just as well ask God to make it rain twice a day in
the Sahel region so that rice could be planted there. Hardliners also demand
that asylum seekers whose applications have been rejected be deported immediately.
They argue that such a policy would send a signal to those in Asia or Africa
who are thinking of trying to emigrate to Europe. What they don't say, though,
is that a large share, if not the largest share, of asylum seekers can't be
deported. Many of them come from countries that are wracked by civil war,
making it illegal to return them. Other countries refuse to take their citizens
back. And in many cases, the country of origin simply isn't known.
The only goal should be that of coping with the suffering. Limiting
asylum rights only to those people who are being persecuted is a distortion --
an arbitrary curtailment -- of the right to a dignified life. Do people facing
death by starvation have less of a right to assistance than people facing death
via torture? Do we really want to keep out those who have nothing to eat while
accepting those who are oppressed? Every day, people are dying because the
wealthy would like to hang on to their prosperity.
In 2011 Philip Hammond, then the UK’s new Defence Secretary,
urged British businessmen to get ahead in the expected rush to cash in on
Libya’s reconstruction and vast oil industry. It was time for British companies
to be “packing their suitcases and looking to get out to Libya... as soon as
they can”, he said. In 2015 now Foreign Secretary, Mr Hammond’s department’s
advice is “The Foreign and Commonwealth Office advise against all travel to
Libya due to the ongoing fighting and deteriorating security situation... The
British Embassy in Tripoli has temporarily closed, and is unable to provide
consular assistance. There is a high threat from terrorism.”
In 2011 Cameron visited Libya and declared “It is great to be
here in free Benghazi, and free Libya,” he said. In 2015, Libya is no-where on
any of his travel plans for the foreseeable future if he follows his Foreign Office’s
advice. And when Cameron announces “I am
proud that the UK offers genuine refugees and their children an opportunity to
build a new life.” He is simply a blatant unrepentant bare-faced liar.
Sources
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