Libya navy blocks foreign ships from migrant 'rescue' zone

Enca / Afp

10 August 2017

LIBYA – The Libyan navy on Thursday ordered foreign vessels to stay out of a coastal "search and rescue zone" for migrants headed for Europe, a measure it said targeted NGOs.

Six years since a revolution that toppled longtime dictator Moamer Kadhafi, Libya has become a key departure point for migrants risking their lives to cross the Mediterranean to Europe.

Tens of thousands of migrants have resorted to paying people traffickers for the journey, often on overcrowded and unseaworthy boats.

Charities have dispatched boats to rescue migrants from drowning, while Libya and Italy, where the vast majority land, have worked together to stem the flow.

"We want to send out a clear message to all those who infringe Libyan sovereignty and lack respect for the coastguard and navy," Libyan navy spokesman General Ayoub Qassem told a news conference in Tripoli.

General Abdelhakim Bouhaliya, commander of the Tripoli naval base where the conference was held, said: "No foreign ship has the right to enter" the area without authorisation from the Libyan authorities.

Libya has "officially declared a search and rescue zone", said Bouhaliya, without specifying the scope of the exclusion zone.

Qassem said the measure was aimed against "NGOs which pretend to want to rescue illegal migrants and carry out humanitarian actions".

He urged humanitarian organisations to "respect our will... and obtain authorisation from the Libyan state even for rescue operations".

Italy has also said it wants to keep a tighter rein on NGOs helping the multinational search and rescue operation by making them sign up to a new code of conduct.

Italian authorities last week impounded a boat operated by German aid organisation Jugend Rettet on suspicion its crew effectively collaborated with people traffickers in a way that facilitated illegal immigration.

Right to asylum at risk

Its crew is suspected of taking on board migrants delivered directly to them by people traffickers, and of allowing the smugglers to make off with their dinghies to be used again.

The Libyan coastguard has accused NGOs of aiding people traffickers in their lucrative business.

Italy has sent naval vessels at the request of Libya's UN-backed Government of National Accord to assist Tripoli in intercepting migrants, on a mission disputed by rival authorities in eastern Libya.

More than 111,000 migrants have reached Europe by sea so far this year, the vast majority of them arriving in Italy, according to the latest figures from the International Organization for Migration.

Over 2,300 have died attempting the crossing.

On Tuesday, the United Nations's new envoy to Libya endorsed Italy's drive to stem the flow of migrants leaving the North African state for Europe, despite misgivings among human rights groups.

Rights campaigners fear Italy's focus on strengthening the Libyan coastguard to ensure boatloads of migrants are intercepted before reaching international waters could place thousands of people with a right to asylum at serious risk.

But Ghassam Salame, a former Lebanese culture minister appointed in June to head UN operations in Libya, described the cooperation between Tripoli and Rome as a "very constructive" way of dealing with an acute problem.

"It would be absolutely unrealistic to ignore the seriousness of the challenge of irregular migration," Salame said after meeting Italian Foreign Minister Angelo Alfano in Rome.

Apart from the Libyan navy providing technical assistance to the coastguard, Rome has also supplied Tripoli with new patrol boats and training.

Alfano said the cooperation was beginning to bear fruit, in a reference to a more than 50-percent fall in the number of migrants rescued at sea during July, compared to the same month in 2016.

Source: http://www.enca.com/africa/libya-navy-blocks-foreign-ships-from-migrant-rescue-zone

Drop-off in migrant rescues on Mediterranean by Irish Naval Service

Irish Examiner

By Sean O’Riordan

11 August 2017

A combination of factors, including the deliberate sinking of wooden fishing boats, has resulted in a significant fall-off in the number of migrants being rescued by the Naval Service.

Figures released by the Defence Forces show that in 2015 three ships deployed by the navy in the Mediterranean Sea carried out 57 rescue operations during which they brought 8,631 migrants onboard.

Last year three ships were involved in 41 operations, rescuing 6,837 migrants.

This year LÉ Eithne carried out six rescue missions during her tour of duty, picking up 1,188 migrants.

LÉ William Butler Yeats made her second rescue yesterday, saving 149 migrants 54 miles north of Tripoli.

The crew’s first rescue was on July 30 when they plucked 109 migrants from the sea.

Sources within the Defence Forces say there are a number of reasons for the decline in rescues.

The Naval Service has deliberately sunk wooden fishing vessels when it has rescued migrants from them so that people-smugglers will be unable to use them again.

So too have warships belonging to the EU-led Operation Sophia, which is taking a more robust approach to stopping the people smugglers.

This has led the people-smugglers to become increasingly reliant on inflatable dinghies, which they are importing from the Far East.

However, when the wind is blowing inshore they are unable to launch them beyond the surf.

In the meantime, the Libyan coastguard has become more effective in turning back migrant boats within their 12-mile limit.

Volunteer ships from non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are also increasingly going in close to the coastline to pick up migrants.

It has been claimed that on a couple of recent occasions, they have got in so close that migrants moved to one side of their craft in an effort to be the first to be rescued and as a result caused it to capsize.

Meanwhile, the Irish navy ships, which would have previously been reasonably close to shore, are now further out to sea, meaning the NGOs are far more likely to be first to the scene of rescues.

More than 110,000 migrants from northern Africa and the Middle East have made a perilous journey across the Mediterranean to Europe this year, according to the UN.

The Irish ships are currently working with the Italians under the purely humanitarian Operation Pontus and are under the command of an Italian admiral.

The Italians previously positioned Naval Service ships in a more frontline role, but according to well-placed sources they have now positioned LÉ William Butler Yeats further off the Libyan coast, to be held in reserve should the NGO ships get overwhelmed, or to respond should there be a security risk.

Islamic State still has a presence in Libya and therefore is a security threat.

In the meantime, the country is being torn apart by a number of other different armed groups.

The Irish Government recently agreed to switch the Naval Service’s role, which will occur while LÉ William Butler Yeats is still on her tour of duty.

The ship will then be involved in a more aggressive anti-people-smuggling role, which will include ensuring a UN weapons embargo is imposed on Libya, training Libyan coastguard units and seeking and destroying shipments of inflatable dinghies.

Source:  http://www.irishexaminer.com/ireland/drop-off-in-migrant-rescues-on-mediterranean-by-irish-naval-service-456843.html

Irish Navy rescues 149 people in the Mediterranean

The LÉ William Butler Yeats has now rescued 258 people since deploying in July

Newstalk

10 August 2017

The Irish Navy has rescued 149 people from a rubber boat in the Mediterranean.

The migrants were picked up by the LÉ William Butler Yeats naval vessel around 47 nautical miles North East of Tripoli in Libya.

The two-and-a-half hour operation was completed by 11:15am this morning and the rescued people are now receiving food, water and medical treatment.

The LÉ William Butler Yeats has now rescued 258 people since deploying to the Mediterranean on 14th July.

The vessel’s role is currently to provide search and rescue capability and undertake humanitarian missions at sea.

That mission could be set to change in the coming months however, after the government approved a proposal to transfer troops to participate in the EU Common Security and Defence Policy mission - ‘Operation Sophia.’

The mission will see Irish troops moving away from their humanitarian role and joining a military operation targeting gangs and vessels involved in trafficking refugees out of Libya.

Source: http://www.newstalk.com/Irish-Navy-rescues-149-people-in-the-Mediterranean

Those helping migrants must respect law-CEI chief

Bassetti warns against being seen to help traffickers

ANSAmed

10 August 2017

PERUGIA - Cardinal Gualtiero Bassetti, the president of Italian bishops conference CEI, said Thursday that those helping migrants must stick strictly to the law to ensure they are not seen as being accomplices of human traffickers. "I reiterate the clearest rejection of any form of modern slavery in the face of the aberrant plague of human trafficking," Bassetti said. "But I also lay claim with equal vigor to the need for an ethic of responsibility and respect of the law. "Precisely to defend the interests of the weakest, we cannot run the risk - not even for pure idealism that dramatically transforms into naiveness - of giving the pretext of collaborating with the traffickers of human meat, even if this is false".

Some politicians have criticised the work of NGOs involved in migrant rescues in the Mediterranean, saying they are encouraging traffickers.

Sicilian prosecutors recently seized a ship run by a German NGO in a probe over alleged aiding of illegal immigration.

The NGO in question refused to sign a code of conduct at the interior ministry for organizations involved in rescues.

Source: http://www.ansamed.info/ansamed/en/news/sections/politics/2017/08/10/those-helping-migrants-must-respect-law-cei-chief-2_d81f2343-62b1-4cb1-8065-0b542029f630.html

Spain could top Greece for 2017 migrant sea arrivals, as video emerges of beach being 'stormed'

The Telegraph

By Hannah Strange, Barcelona and Nick Squires, Rome

10 August 2017


Spain could surpass Greece this year as a gateway for migrants entering Europe by sea, international monitors warned on Thursday, as the number of arrivals swells to treble that of 2016.

Amid a crackdown on migration through Libya, more than 8,000 people have turned to the so-called Western Mediterranean Route from Morocco into Spain this year, compared to 2,500 during the same period in 2016.

On Wednesday, sunbathers on a beach near Cadiz were shocked to see a black rubber dinghy loaded with migrants landing on the shore, its occupants quickly leaping from the vessel and running away.

Jose Maraver, head of the Maritime Rescue centre in nearby Tarifa, told the Telegraph that a second boat had landed on another beach in the area on Thursday while two vessels had to be rescued. This was now a regular occurrence along that stretch of coast, he said.

“Every day there are boats, every day there is migration," Mr Maraver added. "The situation is getting very complicated."

African migrants are also increasingly setting their sights on Ceuta, a Spanish enclave in Morocco which has seen a 230 percent rise in arrivals in recent weeks. On Wednesday, authorities there said they had closed the border to trade for a week in order to cope with with the surge, after a string of mass incursions through its security fence.

On Monday, almost 200 migrants stormed the double fence and ran through security checkpoints, one officer suffering a broken leg in the stampede, which was captured on CCTV.

A group of some 700 sub-Saharan Africans tried to break through on Thursday but were pushed back by Moroccan police, officials said. An earlier attempt by around 1,000 migrants, armed with sticks and home-made spears, was thwarted by officers from both countries.

Migrants are resorting to ever more creative ways to evade such controls. On Wednesday, twelve arrived in Ceuta’s waters on jet-skis, one of them - a 28-year-old Guinean man - drowning before authorities reached him.

Spain has already received more arrivals this year than in the whole of 2016, the International Organization for Migration said on Thursday.

Almost 8,200 migrants had arrived on Spanish shores by August 6, according to the IOM. Italy remains by far the biggest gateway, accounting for 85 per cent of arrivals by sea since the start of 2017 with more than 96,400. But Spain is catching up with Greece, where 11,713 have landed.

"It's possible that Spain will outperform Greece this year," Joel Millman, an IOM spokesperson, told AFP. "If so, that's a big change.”

The Spanish government has remained quiet on the issue, the Interior Ministry not responding to the Telegraph’s request for comment. But opposition parties and leading media outlets have been sounding the alarm. An editorial by the centre-left newspaper El Pais on Thursday urged that “Spain cannot be left alone as the guardian of the south of Europe,” saying it was “obvious that the migratory pressure has transferred to the western Mediterranean” and that action from Brussels was needed.

Horrific conditions in Libya and a new policy by the Libyan coast guard of blocking migrant boats heading to Italy may be behind the surge in the number of Africans trying to reach Europe via Spain. Mr Millman said the crossing from Morocco was considered by migrants to be a “safe route”.

Flavio Di Giacomo of the IOM said migrants may be hearing about conditions in Libya, and the crackdown by the Libyan coastguard, and changing their plans accordingly.

"Back in January, when we had a surge of arrivals, the migrants said that was because the smugglers told them that the Libyan coast guard would soon start stopping boats. So they are very well informed."

So far this year the Libyan coast guard has blocked around 12,000 migrants from leaving the coast towards Italy.

They are doing so at the request of the EU, which is seeking to collaborate with the Libyans to choke off the exodus. Since 2014, more than half a million migrants and refugees have reached Italy from North Africa.

Tens of thousands of migrants in Libya are now being kept in detention centres. "They are prisons," said Mr Di Giacomo. "Conditions are unacceptable and the situation must change."

Migrants and refugees are being raped, abused, tortured and in some cases killed in Libya, according to a report out this week by Oxfam. Some are sold in modern-day slave markets and are used as unpaid labour.

Penny Lawrence, deputy chief executive of Oxfam GB, said that safe routes to Europe must be provided. “Outsourcing the policing of our borders to Libya isn’t the solution," she added.


Source:  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/08/10/spain-could-top-greece-migrant-sea-arrivals-2017/

Italy’s Libyan ‘vision’ pays off as migrant flows drop

Minister says Libyan coast guard now saving more migrants than ‘the whole international apparatus.’

Politico

By Giulia Paravicini

10 August 2017

ROME — When the migration dossier landed on his desk back in December, newly arrived Interior Minister Marco Minniti was sure of one thing — to stop migrants making the dangerous Mediterranean crossing, Italy and Europe had to invest in an unlikely partner: Libya.

At the time, his EU counterparts considered this a risky and unrealistic strategy because of the political chaos in Libya since the fall of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. Seven months later, the latest figures released by Minniti’s ministry on Thursday suggest his vision was right.

In the first 10 days of August, the number of migrants making the crossing to Italian shores, mainly from Libya, fell 76 percent compared to the same period last year, meaning 1,572 migrants made the journey as opposed to 6,554 a year ago. Strong indications of a clear change in migration patterns had already emerged in July when the number of arrivals halved compared to the previous year.

“We had a strategy, a vision, which like every vision could be right or wrong, but at least we had one,” Minniti told POLITICO in an interview at the Viminale, the interior ministry’s palatial headquarters named after one of the seven hills of ancient Rome.

“When we said we had to relaunch the Libyan coast guard, it seemed like a daydream” — Italian Interior Minister Marco Minniti

Having spent over a decade in government, as state secretary for the security services during two administrations and as deputy interior minister under Romano Prodi before that, the 61-year-old Calabrian — a former communist — was convinced from the outset that Europe’s real migration struggle was “playing out on the other side of the Mediterranean.”

“No one was really convinced that a real operation could be carried out in Libya. The idea was to intervene in neighboring countries, since the mainstream understanding was that Libya was structurally unstable, and so all efforts would end up wasted,” Minniti said.

“When we said we had to relaunch the Libyan coastguard, it seemed like a daydream. Last weekend they saved 1,180 migrants while the whole international apparatus only saved 130. In the past four years that had never occurred,” Minniti said.

Now, he wants to capitalize on Italy’s success and ask Brussels to foot the bill, after the summer break.

Sustainability

The Italian minister has three requests to Europe. The first: to allocate to Africa — and especially Libya, which currently accounts for 97 percent of departures — the same amount of “effort and resources” that it devoted last year to stemming migration flows through the Balkans.

Minniti does not expect €3 billion overnight — but he wants Europe to consider stumping up “a similar amount,” and he wants it “to happen rapidly since the mechanism is working in Libya and needs to be sustained.”

Such resources should mainly be committed to the protection of borders, both on the coast and along Libya’s southern frontier, including providing funding and training for the country’s coast guard and border guard services.

Minniti’s second request is for help tackling the problem of migrant reception centers in Libya, where he envisages increased cooperation between the EU and the United Nations. Last week, a report drafted by EU officials detailed severe shortcomings in sanitary conditions in the refugee centers in Libya.

In April the European Union allocated €90 million to Libya, with more than half the amount devoted to improving reception centers and the rest designed to boost local government and socio-economic development. Minniti wants “more money,” but most importantly he wants to see new projects launched as soon as possible.

His final request — and perhaps the biggest one — is for Europe to make a five-year commitment to invest in the mayors of the 14 main Libyan cities where migrant smuggling takes place. The best way to stabilize the country, the minister said, is to create viable economic alternatives to the business of human trafficking, which currently constitutes “the only functioning enterprises in Libya.”

Source: http://www.politico.eu/article/italy-libya-vision-migrant-flows-drop-mediterranean-sea/

   

The Med Migrant Crisis and Defend Europe

Center for International Maritime Security

By Claude Berube and Chris Rawley

8 August 2017

This summer while many European vacationers bask on sunny Mediterranean beaches, out in the water, hundreds of people are fighting for their lives while an increasingly more complex and robust collection of maritime non-government organizations (NGOs) (see Table 1) alternatively try to rescue them from drowning or send them back to Africa. The line between maritime human trafficking and a flow of refugees at sea has been blurred. In response to the ongoing migrant wave, the group Defend Europe recently raised enough money to charter a 422-ton ship, the C-Star, to convey a team of its activists to Libya. They arrived in the search-and-rescue zone off the Libyan coast on August 4-5.

The authors understand the complexities of this situation in the central Mediterranean particularly with regard to strongly held political positions by both sides. We try not to take sides in political battles, especially as we sit on the board of directors of the Center for International Maritime Security (CIMSEC). Our interest is simply to discuss how organizations use the sea as a venue to proactively accomplish their own goals and deter their opponents’ goals. Our piece at War on the Rocks discusses the search-and-rescue NGOs and the approaching counter-NGO ship C-Star. As it has arrived on station off Libyan territorial waters, we spoke with Thorsten Schmidt, spokesman for Defend Europe.

What is the C-Star’s mission?  “We came to the conclusion,” Schmidt says, “to get activists who are independent and fair. We need to get our own ship to get people there and to observe the left-wing NGOs.” Schmidt contends that the media has been embedded with the NGOs and therefore have a bias in support of their work. When asked if C-Star had an embedded reporter or asked for a reporter from any media organization, he stated that they just wanted their own activists to report with cameras.

The search-and-rescue (SAR) NGOs have operated between Libya and Sicily for two years. When Defend Europe began to consider their own maritime mission, they were approached by the owner of a ship to charter. The ship was the C-Star (formerly the Suunta – a Djibouti-flagged floating armory in the Red Sea). The owner is Sven Tomas Egerstrom, formerly associated with the Cardiff-based Sea Marshals which he was terminated from on 26 March 2014. Although there have been some questions as to whether C-Star has armed guards aboard, it is unlikely. Schmidt told us that the ship had no weapons aboard. More practically, we assessed in our previous piece that Defend Europe does not have the funds to support a ship for an extended mission beyond two weeks as well as the more costly endeavor of an armed guard team. Ships transiting the Gulf of Aden will only pay armed guards for a few days. That is a function of both need and cost in higher-risk areas.

The ship was detained both as it transited the Suez Canal and when it pulled in to Famagusta, Cyprus. It is unknown what exactly happened. Several reports suggested the ship had false documents or was transporting foreign nationals to Europe. Schmidt states that in both cases the authorities found nothing on the ships.

Once on station, C-Star will spend a week in the company of search-and-rescue NGOs and on the lookout for both migrant boats and human traffickers. Their cameras will be their weapons. According to Schmidt, nine out of ten migrants using the sea do not migrate from war-torn countries as refugees. When they reach the Libyan coast, he says, human traffickers put them on gray rafts and enough food and fuel to get to the 12 nautical mile territorial limit of Libya where search-and-rescue NGOs then pick up the migrants and take them to Europe. The traffickers use smaller, high-speed boats to follow the rafts then, when the NGOs have rescued the migrants, the traffickers take the motors and return them to Libya. Schmidt notes that in some cases, the traffickers join the migrants so that they can establish networks in Sicily and beyond. Italian authorities in Lampedusa this week seized the Iuventa, owned by the SAR NGO Jugend Rettet, accusing them of aiding and abetting traffickers.

If C-Star encounters a migrant boat in distress, Schmidt says it will render assistance first by notifying the MRCC in Rome, and then bring them aboard. According to Schmidt, the ship has “hundreds of life vests.” When asked about how it might accommodate for potentially dozens of refugees from a boat in distress, he says “the ship is fully equipped with an extra amount of water and food. Of course there are several activists on board with medical aid skills.” Instead of taking the migrants to Sicily or other European ports, they intend to take the migrants to closer, non-European ports such as in Tunisia. It is unknown if they have secured the diplomatic agreements to make those transfers happen. Defend Europe argues that this makes sense since there are closer countries than Italy that aren’t unstable like Libya.

Defend Europe wants an end to human trafficking but, as Schmidt says, “we are just one ship and you can’t stop it with just one ship…We are an avant garde but need help.” Though they have an abbreviated mission this time, the $185,000 they have raised ensures that they will look to a second and third mission. Already, he says, two more ship owners have contacted them.

Table 1: NGO Rescue & Interdiction Vessels Operating in the Mediterranean

Organization	Vessel	Gross Tonnage	Flag
Jugend Rettet	IUVENTA	184	Netherlands
Lifeboat Project	Minden	Unk.	Germany
MOAS	Phoenix	483	Belize
MOAS	Topaz Responder	1198	Marshall Islands
MSF	Bourbon Argos	2343	Luxembourg
MSF	Dignity I	648	Panama
MSF	Vos Prudence	2937	Italy
Proactiva Open Arms	Astral	Unk.	United Kingdom
Proactiva Open Arms	Golfo Azzurro*	350	Panama
Proactiva Open Arms	Open Arms	427	Spain
Save the Children	Vos Hestia	1678	Italy
Sea Eye	See-Eye	Unk.	Netherlands
Sea Eye	Seefuchs	Unk.	Netherlands
Sea Watch	Sea Watch-2	Unk.	Netherlands
SOS Méditerranée	Aquarius	1812	Gibraltar
Defend Europe	C-Star	422	Mongolia

Claude Berube teaches at the United States Naval Academy and is an officer in the Navy Reserve. He has published three non-fiction books and two novels. Follow him on Twitter @cgberube. Chris Rawley is a Navy Reserve surface warfare officer and entrepreneur. Follow him on Twitter @navaldrones. Rawley and Berube frequently write and speak on maritime organizations and both serve on the Board of Directors of CIMSEC. The views expressed are theirs alone and not of any organization with which they are affiliated.

Source: http://cimsec.org/med-migrant-crisis-defend-europe/33588