Abstract
The EU’s response to the global ‘refugee crisis’ has involved the returning of refugees to war zones, for example in Afghanistan, in breach of human rights conventions. But it has also been so determined to stop further asylum seekers reaching European waters or shores that it has entered into the most dubious of agreements with countries outside the EU. Using bribery (aid, promises of investment, even the prospect of membership of the EU) and blackmail (threats of withdrawal of support for educational and health programmes), the EU has inveigled and browbeaten countries around the Mediterranean and as far afield as sub-Saharan Africa, to undertake immigration controls on its behalf. This has involved the EU in agreements with repressive regimes such as Turkey, Sudan and Eritrea, designed to block the movements of millions of people in the Middle East and Africa necessitated by war, famine, climate change and religious conflict. The outsourcing of migration policy to countries run by known dictators and war criminals has come at the expense of Europe’s humanitarian tradition, argues the author, who looks at the implications of policy by country and region.
Keywords
It is easy to abhor Donald Trump’s pledge to build a wall along the US-Mexico border, and his executive orders halting immigration of nationals from seven Muslim-majority states. It is easy, too, to recoil in shock at the razor wire and weaponry being used by guards and even freelance hunters of ‘illegals’ at Europe’s ‘uncivilised’ eastern borders, previously part of the Soviet bloc. But these moves are at least overt. What is less recognised, because often conducted behind closed doors, are the deals which make the European Union (EU) complicit in, or even the instigator of, similarly violent and repressive policies with horrific human rights implications. And the brutality of the EU’s policies is conveniently often being outsourced, and felt by those who have not even reached the EU’s ‘jurisdiction’. In other words, a worldwide crisis which sees millions of people displaced, especially from the most vulnerable regions of the world, is being treated to a pragmatic short-termism by politicians of EU member states unable or unwilling to counter the anti-immigrant ferocity of their new populist movements.
The Middle East and North Africa
Afghanistan
It took a petition signed by 14,000 people to persuade the UK’s Home Office to review the case of 20-year-old Bashir Naderi, whose mother sent him to the UK from Afghanistan as a 10-year-old after his father was shot dead by the Taliban. Bashir lost contact with his mother during his year-long journey to the UK, knows no one in Afghanistan and speaks none of its languages. A student in Cardiff, where his foster-mother Dawn Jackson lives, he was detained for deportation in October 2016 when he went for routine reporting, and he fears that he will not survive if he is sent back. 1
He is right to be afraid. A March 2016 document co-authored by the European Commission (EC) described the record levels of civilian casualties and terrorist attacks in the country, with over 11,000 casualties in 2015 and the situation likely to get worse. 2 In September 2016, the UN called for aid to the million internally displaced people in Afghanistan, as the conflict with the Taliban intensified, and malnutrition was affecting nearly three million people, including a million children. 3 In October, the BBC described the situation facing returning Afghan refugees as ‘an unprecedented humanitarian crisis’, with the Taliban attacking half the country’s provinces, food supplies running low and winter approaching. 4
The country’s slide into war prompted the UK Court of Appeal to impose a blanket ban on charter-flight deportations to Afghanistan in August 2015. But it lifted the ban in March 2016 (the same month as the EC report describing the worsening security situation) accepting that the Home Office was entitled to its view that although the provinces were not safe, the capital, where returnees would be sent, was (although as the court accepted, it was grossly overcrowded, having grown tenfold in a decade, and lacked basic infrastructure, jobs, housing and medical provision). The Home Office announced it would resume charter flight deportations to Kabul, despite objections from Afghanistan’s minister for refugees and repatriation. (Weeks before the judgment, the Home Office had admitted that since 2007 over 3,000 child refugees had been forcibly returned to countries at war once they turned 18 – including 657 to Iraq and over 2,000 to Afghanistan. 5 )
By the time the Court of Appeal deemed Kabul safe, in March 2016, the capital had already been shaken by half a dozen suicide bombs that year. Since then, the Taliban have escalated their attacks in Kabul, with targets including vehicles, restaurants and mosques. But the escalation of the conflict, and its spread to the capital, did not prevent the EU signing an agreement in October 2016 for the return of at least 200,000 Afghans from EU member states. The deal gives the Afghan government €1 billion a year in aid, with a further €5 billion to follow in military aid, and envisages the construction of a new terminal at Kabul’s airport, specifically designed for migrants rejected by EU member states. The EU also agreed to cover return travel costs and help finance an Afghan-led campaign to tell people not to seek protection in the EU. 6
The thinking behind the deal is laid bare in the EC’s March 2016 document, in which war and conflict are seen not in terms of the suffering they cause, but purely as drivers of migration. Acknowledging that identifying ‘safe’ areas in Afghanistan was ‘not obvious, given the rising insecurity in many provinces’, the document described the increasing chaos and bloodshed in the country in terms of ‘high risk of further migratory flows’ and stipulated the need for ‘leverage’ in the co-operation, development and partnership agreement being negotiated at the time – that is, making aid conditional on Afghanistan’s agreement to take back refugees refused asylum in Europe. The EU’s migration commissioner, Dimitris Avramopoulos, argued that Afghans were the second-largest group of irregular migrants to the EU in 2015–2016. But as the Greek Forum for Refugees pointed out, Afghans also had one of the highest refugee recognition rates: over 80 per cent in France, over 77 per cent in Germany and Belgium. 7 The two phenomena – irregular migration and the need for international protection – were clearly related.
Europe is, of course, not alone in blatantly disregarding human rights. Nearly 600,000 Afghans, including 365,000 registered refugees, have returned from Pakistan since July 2016 after facing abuses and harassment reportedly including night-time police raids, denial of health care and withdrawal of education from their children, in the Pakistan government’s version of a ‘hostile environment’ towards refugees. 8 And the Turkish government is giving Afghan refugees cash to return home – US$25 and a promise of more when they get back, to help them resettle (which is not honoured, according to Human Rights Watch). 9
But condemnation of such measures by the EU is unlikely, given its own prioritisation of returns over humanitarian protection and the Council of Ministers’ 10 bypassing of the European parliament in brokering its Afghanistan deal. Parliament’s approval is required when the EU enters into readmission agreements with third countries; the Council described the deal as a ‘Declaration’ to get round the requirement. As Statewatch director Tony Bunyan said, this was not the first time the EU’s executive had avoided democratic scrutiny of a controversial deal: ‘Under the dodgy EU-Turkey deal we have two Letters and a Statement; now for the Afghanistan deal there is to be a “Declaration” – yet again by-passing formal law-making and parliamentary scrutiny. Yet again the Council demonstrates its contempt for the rule of law.’ 11
Since the deal was signed, the situation has deteriorated further. According to the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), a record number of non-combatants, nearly 11,500, were killed or wounded in 2016 (3,500 killed and 8,000 wounded), with one-third of the casualties children. 12 But since December, Germany has carried out at least two collective deportations to Kabul, on charter flights, involving sixty Afghan nationals – of some 11,900 who have been told they will have to leave the country. More charter flights are planned. But while Chancellor Angela Merkel, under pressure from the Right, demands faster deportations, six German state governments – Berlin, Schleswig-Holstein, Bremen, Lower Saxony, Thuringia and Rhineland-Palatinate – have suspended expulsions to Afghanistan. 13 In February 2017, thousands protested at the deportation of Afghans in thirteen cities across the country. 14
Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) across Europe have reflected the anger shown on the streets in Germany. The EU-Afghanistan deal was the subject of an open letter of protest to the European Parliament, signed in October 2016 by twenty-six international and European NGOs, including Save the Children, Doctors of the World, Amnesty International, PICUM, the International Federation of Human Rights, the European Network against Racism and the European Council on Refugees and Exiles. The NGOs’ protest particularly focused on the way the Council of Ministers bypassed parliament, preventing debate and allowing it to ignore concerns about the dangers facing returnees. 15
The Afghanistan deal is about return of refused asylum seekers. It commits the Afghan government to take back its own nationals. It is one of eighteen ‘non-standard arrangements’ for readmission and returns which the EU has made since 2008 – eight of which were agreed in 2016. These supplement the seventeen formal readmission agreements (EURAs) made from 2000 onwards with countries including Sri Lanka, Russia and Pakistan. Additionally, the EU-ACP Partnership Agreement, the Cotonou agreement of 2000, revised in 2010, commits EU member states and seventy-nine African, Caribbean and Pacific states to readmission of their nationals.
Member states meanwhile have signed bilateral return agreements with dozens of countries: most of Africa, including Somalia, Ethiopia, Morocco, Jordan, Egypt, Libya, Mauritania, Mali and Nigeria; Asian countries including Sri Lanka, China and Vietnam; and Russia, Syria, Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan. 16 These may be in the form of police co-operation agreements, memoranda of understanding, administrative arrangements or clauses in trading agreements with countries of origin or transit. Most commit the poorer partner to readmitting its own nationals; some oblige it to take back other nationals who have transited through its territory en route to Europe.
But the EU-Afghanistan deal was the first to stipulate return of citizens whose country is in the grip of an intensifying war.
Turkey
Another crucial deal, which also bypassed the European parliament, was signed with Turkey in March 2016 to stop migrants from other countries making their way to Europe through Turkey. Turkey shares its southern border with Syria, its northern border with Greece and Bulgaria, and Greek islands including Lesbos, Samos, Chios and Kos dot its western coastline. There are over two million Syrian refugees in Turkey. They are marginalised, impoverished and at constant risk of arbitrary detention and deportation, which is why so many have tried to get to Europe.
In 2015, 885,000 people, the vast majority Syrian, arrived in the EU via the eastern Mediterranean route from Turkey – a seventeen-fold increase from the previous year. 17 Most came in smugglers’ small boats across the Aegean to the Greek islands. Most wanted to get to northern Europe, and the Greek authorities did not stop them. In 2015, three-quarters of a million people took the Western Balkans route from Greece through the non-EU states of Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) and Serbia, and back into the EU at the Serbia-Hungary border, or through Croatia and Slovenia, and then through Austria to Germany and beyond to Scandinavia.
To stop them, Hungary started building border walls on its Serbian and Croatian borders, and Macedonia, Croatia and Slovenia followed suit. By mid-2016, the Western Balkans route was closed off with walls and fences guarded by troops armed with tear gas and sometimes live ammunition, police with dogs and truncheons – to all of which EU officials have turned a blind eye. Northern member states including Germany, Austria, Sweden and France also imposed emergency border controls, with the Council’s approval. The border closures have not stopped increasingly desperate refugees from trying to cross, with sometimes fatal results – but the closures have left many thousands stranded in Greece. The Council had acknowledged the ‘frontline’ position of Greece by pledging in September 2015 to relocate 160,000 refugees from there (and from Italy, Europe’s other ‘frontline’ state) around the EU, but the process has been pitifully slow; as of February 2017, only 12,000 had been relocated. 18
For the EU, closure of the eastern Mediterranean route to Greece was a top priority, and Turkey was ideally placed to do it. In exchange for a pledge to loosen visa restrictions on Turkish nationals and to reopen stalled accession talks for Turkey to join the EU, and €3 billion for assistance with refugees, Turkey agreed to implement strong border controls to prevent the arrival of Syrians, and to take all migrants intercepted in its waters as well as those returned from Greece. The EU agreed to take one Syrian refugee for each one returned from Greece.
In the process, Turkey was declared a ‘safe third country’ for refugees, despite failing to meet the criteria for such a designation in the EU’s own Asylum Procedures Directive, not least by virtue of its geographical reservation to the 1951 Refugee Convention which means that no non-European refugees are officially recognised. The only positive element in the deal was the insistence that Turkey open its job market to Syrian refugees. The promised resettlement of Syrians in the EU was as unrealistic as the ‘relocation’ scheme before it.
The effects in Greece
Between January and July 2016, Turkish coastguards stopped over 33,000 refugees, mainly Syrian, trying to leaving Turkey for Greece. 19 The numbers crossing the Aegean to the Greek islands dropped dramatically – from over 150,000 in the first three months of 2016 to under 22,000 in the rest of the year. 20 Meanwhile, the first 200 deportations under the EU-Turkey deal, from Chios in early April 2016, were ‘rushed, chaotic and violated human rights’, according to Human Rights Watch; the authorities deported at least thirteen people who had indicated that they wanted to claim asylum, in breach of EU assurances; did not inform people they were going to be deported, did not tell them where they were being taken, and did not allow some of them to take personal possessions. 21 The returns process ground to a halt as Greek officials and appeal tribunals decided the issue of whether Turkey was safe on a case-by-case basis, ruling in most cases that it was not.
A backlog quickly built up of tens of thousands of people waiting in appalling conditions in the Greek camps of Lesbos, Chios and Samos, prey to malnutrition, disease, attacks by fascist thugs, searing heat in summer and freezing conditions in winter. The camps had been set up as ‘hotspots’ for refugee screening to determine their eligibility for the relocation process, but with the EU-Turkey deal, they – along with around fifty more migrant reception centres around Greece – were transformed into places of detention for possible deportation to Turkey. 22
Those able to cross to mainland Greece joined the tens of thousands more stuck in limbo following the closure of the Balkans routes.
According to research from the Institute of Race Relations, at least thirteen avoidable migrant deaths took place in the nine months from April 2016 to January 2017 in Greece, seven in January alone: of hypothermia, or from carbon monoxide poisoning or in explosions caused by faulty gas cylinders brought in to heat flimsy tents in sub-zero temperatures. 23 The EU’s aid department, Echo, the Greek authorities and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), to whom funding has gone for refugee reception, all blame each other for the appalling conditions in the camps, which house over 40,000 people – problems include lack of running water, heating, toilets, often no food, no access to medical treatment – and once again, as at the start of the Greek refugee crisis in 2015, it is the small, unfunded volunteer groups who have stepped in to provide emergency assistance. 24
Protests at the shameful situation in Greece – and in Serbia and the FYROM, where refugees cluster in makeshift camps at the borders, have not been confined to human rights groups and citizens; in January 2017, some MEPs called on the EU and national authorities to provide emergency aid to help migrants and refugees to cope with freezing temperatures and snow, asking how many people had to die of cold on European soil before the EU responded. ‘This is the collapse of our asylum policies, those of relocation, family reunification, and respect for the right to life’, claimed leftist MEP Barbara Spinelli.
Crackdowns ignored
The rush to secure the EU’s south-eastern flank against refugees is purely pragmatic, an almost reflex response seen as necessary to appease home-grown populist anti-immigrant movements. Older legal niceties such as respect for human rights no longer seem to have purchase. For eighteen months, the EU’s partner in the Turkey deal, President Tayyip Erdoğan, had been openly brutal towards perceived opponents. Large parts of the Kurdish cities of Diyarbakir and Cizre were turned into ruins and flattened by Turkish armed forces. As Patrick Cockburn observed, 25 this war on Erdoğan’s own people failed to provoke an international outcry or even attract the attention of western media that express outrage when similar methods are used by the Syrian army. And since the attempted 2016 coup, more than 110,000 people have been sacked or suspended from their jobs, 37,000 have been arrested, including hundreds of journalists and editors, all critical newspapers closed down and nearly 400 organisations suspended, and senior military officers have sought asylum in European countries. Amnesty International has reported credible claims of torture of detainees, including throttling, beatings, burns and rape.
Under the original EU-Turkey agreement, the UNHCR was to monitor the treatment of those returned from Greece. But that is in fact increasingly difficult to do. Information on the whereabouts of returnees is not always passed on, and the promised unhindered access to Turkish holding centres has not materialised. A quarter of its requests for access to the Duziki reception centre were denied, and five days’ notice of visits has to be given. It had been unable to interview a significant proportion of returnees. 26
The agreement with Turkey came in for a huge amount of criticism by human rights groups. Some took protest further: in Spain, the United Left party brought a case to the country’s supreme court, arguing that the government of Mariano Rajoy was participating in a criminal conspiracy by its participation in the agreement, whose provisions on the forced return of persons in need of international protection, the party argued, contravened the Spanish penal code and international law. 27
But neither the criticism and protests, nor the lack of clarity on the treatment of returnees, nor the ongoing repression and human rights violations in Turkey, have threatened the existence of the deal. In January 2017, in response to a complaint by Spanish NGOs, the EU Ombudsman ruled that the EC ought to have conducted a human rights assessment before entering into the agreement, and that it should deal with the human rights implications in all its progress reports. 28 Concerns about human rights violations have led to a (non-binding) vote in the European Parliament urging a freeze on EU membership talks because of the Turkish government’s ‘disproportionate repressive measures’ – but the vote did not urge an end to the deal on migration. Ironically, it is the Turkish government which is threatening to tear up the migration deal if its demands for visa-free travel and progress towards accession to the EU are not met – or if Greece continues to refuse the extradition of a number of Turkish army officers who fled there and claimed asylum shortly after the abortive coup.
Libya and Tunisia
Libya
Historically, one of the main migrant routes to Europe has been from Libya and across the central Mediterranean to Italy – a bargaining chip for Libya’s former leader Colonel Gaddafi who, in August 2010, threatened that he would ‘turn Europe black’ by allowing sub-Saharan African migrants to pass freely through Libya to get to Europe, unless he was given €5 billion a year. Two months later, a deal was done: Gaddafi got EU financial support to the tune of €50 million over three years, and a network of thirty detention centres sprang up in Libya for migrants.
The EU’s attempts to control migration through Libya had to be put on hold during the civil war. But now, its Border Assistance Mission (EUBAM), set up to reinforce the southern border against migrants (as well as to protect oil installations) is being reactivated. The EU’s Mediterranean naval force, EUNAVFOR Med, is training the Libyan coastguard (notorious for its armed attacks on rescue ships, leading to the deaths of twenty-five migrants in one incident) 29 to combat human smuggling. According to Andrej Hunko, 30 it is planning to extend its own ‘stop and search’ operations from the international waters near Libya to pursue boats into Libyan territorial water, in joint EU-Libyan operations.
At the EU’s Malta summit on 3 February 2017, a €200 million plan to finance migration projects in North Africa, the ‘Malta Declaration’, was adopted, to ‘stem illegal flows’ and ‘combat transit and smuggling activities’. A bilateral accord had been signed the previous day between Libya’s UN-backed Government of National Accord and Italy (on whose shores 181,000 migrants arrived from Libya, smuggled on small boats, in 2016). Between them, the two documents cover not only funding, equipping and training the Libyan coastguard, but also strengthening the country’s southern borders, setting up ‘safe’ refugee camps (funded by the EU but Libyan-run) for processing of asylum claims and, through the International Organization for Migration (IOM), ‘voluntary’ repatriations from Libya to countries of origin in Africa.
This goes further than just stopping migrants and refugees from crossing the Mediterranean, into the territory of offshore asylum processing, an aspiration of EU asylum policy for decades.
The plan does not, apparently, envisage the shutting down of the migrant detention centres, now supplemented by unofficial prisons run by the smuggling networks, for whom migrants represent a lucrative source of revenue. These centres are hotbeds of corruption and endemic anti-black racism, where allegations of torture, sexual abuse and forced labour are rife. 31 There may be a hope that these centres will be driven out of business by the ‘safe’ camps envisaged by the proposals – but the EU’s record in funding and supervising camps in Europe offers a dismal precedent. And since neither the EU’s nor Italy’s plan offers legal routes for migrants fleeing war, religious conflict or climate change-related famine, it is hard to see how the smugglers’ hold will diminish. 32
An EU internal report, the EUBAM initial mapping report, published in February 2017, candidly sets out some of the difficulties. Confirming that torture, slavery, forced prostitution, trafficking of migrants for organs have all been reported in the migrant detention centres, it explains that the EU’s main priority areas – ‘border security, counter-terrorism, organised crime and migration, as well as the wider law enforcement area and the criminal justice chain’ – are ‘driven by individual actors instead of legitimate state institutions’. ‘Due to the absence of a functioning national Government’, it observes, ‘genuine and legitimate state structures are difficult to identify’. 33
The EU’s outsourcing of migration controls to the war-torn, violent failed state of Libya was widely condemned. Seventy national and international NGOs wrote an open letter to EU heads of state and leaders, arguing that it would expose people to ill-treatment and arbitrary detention. 34 UNHCR and the IOM, in a joint statement, denounced the ‘deplorable conditions for migrants and refugees in Libya’ and said Libya could not be considered a safe country for refugees and asylum seekers, or one where extra-territorial asylum processing could take place. The UN’s human rights agency, Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), also expressed concern that the deal would break a fundamental principle of international law by pushing people back to where their rights were violated. British charity Save the Children said sending asylum seekers, including children, back to what had been described as a ‘living hell’ was not a solution. 35 The Italian Association for Juridical Studies on Immigration (ASGI) pointed out that Libya is ‘under the constant blackmail of violent and armed militias’, and the plans betrayed ‘basic rule of law principles … [and] de facto violate the principle of non-refoulement, as they require third countries to forcibly block the passage of people in clear need of international protection’. 36
Libyan local authorities, too, opposed the plan, and its practicability was also in question given that when the deal was announced, Libya was so dangerous that UNHCR had no staff there, relying on hiring local people, while IOM’s Libya mission chief lived in Tunisia. 37 Even Germany’s foreign minister and vice-chancellor Dagmar Gabriel was sceptical about Italy’s ability to return people there, while as the EU’s Foreign Affairs Council acknowledged, the country is undergoing a humanitarian crisis of its own, with 1.3 million of its people needing emergency assistance.
But the EU’s determination to shore up Libya as a gatekeeper has taken on extra urgency since numbers coming to Europe via the central Mediterranean from North Africa – and specifically Libya – began rising, partly in response to the closure of the eastern Mediterranean route through Turkey after the EU-Turkey agreement. Libya’s government is unable to control the country’s long coastline, and the 181,000 crossings to Italy by boat in 2016 were a record. Libya is the point where migrant routes from East (e.g., Eritrea) and West Africa (e.g., Nigeria, Guinea) converge.
Many of these sub-Saharan migrants and refugees would have taken the eastern and western Mediterranean routes (the much shorter sea journeys from Turkey to Greece and from Morocco to Spain) before they were closed (in the case of the western Mediterranean, by aggressive naval policing by the EU’s border guard, Frontex). The figures confirm what is already well known – that attempts to suppress migration simply push people into adopting more difficult and dangerous routes. The IOM’s confirmed death toll in the Mediterranean for 2016 was 5,083, far higher than the 3,777 recorded for 2015, despite the far smaller numbers crossing overall. 38
Tunisia
The Tunisian government, too, is under enormous pressure to sign a co-operation agreement with Italy on migration, committing it to take back migrants and refugees intercepted by the Italian coastguard, in exchange for assistance in countering terrorism, which has badly affected tourism. The deal, which the Belgian and German governments are pressing for, would define Tunisia as a ‘safe’ country to return asylum seekers to without considering their claims – despite the complete lack of asylum legislation, expertise or reception capacity in the country. Thirty European NGOs have signed a joint statement saying that such a deal would contribute to the destruction of the right to asylum in Europe.
Sub-Saharan Africa
Niger
The EU’s attempts to stop immigration do not stop in North Africa: its tentacles penetrate deep into the continent, in the guise of Agendas for Migration, Action Plans on Migration and Mobility, Strategies for Security and Development, Migration Partnership Frameworks and the like. Since the early 2000s the continent has become increasingly enmeshed in the EU’s migration control strategies, which have become increasingly urgent at the same time as their basic premises are shown to be fundamentally flawed.
The June–December 2016 progress report on Niger in the context of the Migration Partnership Framework 39 boasted that the Nigerien authorities were co-operating strongly on the Short-Term Action Plan on Illegal Migration, traffickers had been arrested and the flow of irregular migrants transiting the country had been reduced. The report did not mention the discovery in mid-June of the bodies of thirty-four migrants, including twenty children and nine women, who were found near the border with Algeria, abandoned by smugglers in searing heat.
The week before, twenty Somalis had died of suffocation in a truck in Zambia. The IOM’s Missing Migrants Project recorded 1,402 confirmed deaths of migrants in Africa in 2016 – from exposure, dehydration, suffocation, or from violence at the hands of smugglers, bandits, militias or even border guards. 40 A February 2017 report 41 referred to thirty-eight deaths of migrants in the desert in the previous few weeks, as the intensive policing of the main routes from Niger towards Libya and Algeria forced migrants to use less travelled routes through the desert, and to travel at night. As IOM acknowledged, the deaths it knows about are only a fraction of the total death toll. How many of these deaths can be laid at Europe’s door? As respect for human rights, and human life, in EU partnership deals with African countries gives way to the absolute priority of stopping migration from Africa, ‘by any means necessary’ becomes the order of the day. And as the border controls go up, so does the price of transit, and those who can’t pay are abandoned to their fate.
Sudan, Eritrea and the Khartoum Process
The EU has apparently no compunction about who it deals with when it comes to ‘controlling numbers’; its partners in Africa include leaders accused of war crimes and genocide. An EU programme of co-operation revealed in May 2016 involves funding the pariah regimes in Sudan and Eritrea to ‘better manage migration in the Horn of Africa’. For Sudan, this has meant a grant of €40 million under the EU’s Emergency Trust Fund for Africa (EUTF, set up at the Valletta summit of November 2015 with €2 billion, to address the migration ‘crisis’ in the Sahel and the Horn of Africa). 42 The money is for enhancing immigration controls along Sudan’s southern border, and the construction of two detention centres, and comes on top of a €100 million aid package, also under the EUTF, to ‘address the root causes of irregular migration and forced displacement’ in Darfur and other areas of Sudan. 43
As the UN’s news service pointed out, it was the Sudanese army, under President Omar al Bashir, which forced the displacement of 2.6 million people in Darfur, for which Bashir is charged with genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity in the International Criminal Court (ICC). 44 Amnesty International alleges that Bashir’s methods have included using chemical weapons against his own people, in attacks on Darfur as recently as April 2016. Whether or not this particular allegation is true (and all access to the region is denied, including to UN peacekeepers and humanitarian groups, making evidence-gathering difficult), the root causes of forced displacement in the country are not hard to find.
The reason for the EU deal is clear. Sudan is a transit country for refugees from countries such as Eritrea, and it is their progress through the country that the EU wants to block. South Sudan, a country riven by a three-year-old ethnic civil war which has produced at least a million refugees, and according to the UN is on the brink of genocide, is also ‘eligible for assistance’ under the EUTF.
In fact partnership deals and plans, ostensibly to help countries combat human trafficking and smuggling, prevent citizens leaving some of the most repressive and conflict-ridden states in Africa. Eritrea’s president Isaias Afawerki is under investigation at the ICC for crimes against humanity, and his regime of repression and fear, which relies on the systematic use of enslavement, forced disappearance, torture, rape and murder, has been such that in 2015 three-quarters of Eritrean asylum claims in EU member states were successful. 45 It is a criminal offence to leave the country without permission, and while many thousands have escaped, hundreds of citizens fleeing the country have allegedly been shot and killed by Eritrean security forces. But for EU leaders, as a UN official commented, ‘The political will is to solve the migration crisis by getting borders shut from the Eritrean side.’ 46 According to the New Statesman, European Commission officials warned that ‘under no circumstances’ should the public learn the detail of what was negotiated, because of the damage which it would cause to the EU’s reputation.
Crackdowns on migrants and refugees by police immediately followed the Sudan and Eritrea deals. In Sudan, in May, at least 900 Eritreans were rounded up in Khartoum and forcibly deported back to Eritrea. According to reports, police picked up anyone looking Eritrean, tore up their residence cards and put them in prison as illegal immigrants or on trucks for immediate deportation. Only those with at least US$500 could go free, by bribing police. 47
But the deals cannot be seen in isolation. In East Africa, they are a product of the ‘Khartoum Process’, begun in Rome in 2014 between the EU, countries on the Horn of Africa (Somalia, Eritrea and Ethiopia), and transit countries (including Sudan and South Sudan, Tunisia, Kenya and Egypt). Its aim is to close the central Mediterranean route to Europe, by pushing border controls as far into Africa as possible through funding anti-smuggling and anti-trafficking strategies. The process has accelerated since the setting up of the EUTF, which made cash available to facilitate deals with African countries. 48
Disrupting routes and freedoms: West Africa and the Sahel
Attempts to control migration from West Africa are more longstanding. The Rabat Process (the Euro-African Dialogue on Migration and Development) was set up in 2006 to facilitate co-operation on migration issues with countries along the West Africa migratory route, and led to joint naval operations to stop boats crossing to the (Spanish) Canaries. As the smugglers abandoned the sea route for the Sahara, the EU’s attention focused on stopping overland migration. The May 2015 European Agenda on Migration, the November 2015 Migration Agenda for Africa and the June 2016 Migration Partnership Framework were key tools in the task, which involves significant funding for Sahel and West African states – particularly Niger, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Mali and Senegal – to ‘combat irregular migration’, through increased policing, crackdowns and checkpoints, detention centres, and all the technology of migration control, including residence permits and biometrics. 49
Much of sub-Saharan Africa is now caught up in the EU’s anti-migration initiative.
The EU, as shown above, is completely focused on controlling numbers of migrants/asylum seekers reaching Europe, whatever the financial cost and the cost in terms of human rights. But there is yet another implication, which is only now being recognised – the ramifications for the African continent’s ‘internal’ issues and conflicts.
The EU’s attempts to stop illegal migration from Africa disrupt millennia-old patterns of circular intra-African migration. A recent report from the Clingdael Netherlands Institute for International Relations 50 points out that of the migrants passing through the ‘transit hubs’ of Agadez in Niger and Gao in Mali, both targeted by the EU’s Sahel anti-migrant initiatives, only between a fifth and a third intended to travel on to Europe; the rest were looking for temporary work in Algeria and Libya. National borders in the Sahel region, as in many parts of Africa, are relatively recent colonial constructs cutting across tribes, clans and ethnic groups. This, together with climatic challenges, make circular migration across borders very common. The same routes are used by Nigerian trafficking networks, seasonal intra-African cross-border migrants, West African economic migrants and Syrian refugees. Ironically, it is the hardened anti-migration climate itself which might push migrants on to Europe.
The Dutch report also points out the serious risk that the EU’s initiatives will destabilise the region and create conflict between powerful armed groups and weak central governments. The smuggling networks are flexible, transnational and hugely wealthy and powerful, and have enabled armed groups and leaders to assume quasi-state authority in some areas, as well as hollowing out central state authority through large-scale, systematic corruption. The smuggling industry has also provided economic development through the provision of food, lodging and transport to the migrants. Targeting the smugglers without first offering genuine alternative means of economic development, or reinforcing central state capacity to control its territory and to provide justice and security, the authors say, is futile, counter-productive and positively dangerous. 51
The establishment of border guards and detention centres along borders violates the principle of freedom of movement for people among ECOWAS states (the Economic Community of West African States) in the cause of EU border controls. The effects of the loss of freedom of movement in West Africa are graphically portrayed in a joint statement by a number of African civil society organisations. ‘African civil society condemns the hunt for migrants on the continent’ described how Malian migrant Modu Boubou Coulibaly, working on a construction site in Nouakchott, Mauritania, died in hospital on 9 May 2016 after jumping from the third floor of a building he was working on, chased by Mauritanian police, and falling onto a metal fence, sustaining fatal injuries. The statement describes how the introduction of residence permits in Mauritania in 2012 has led to ‘migrant hunting’ by police, fear and humiliation for the migrants, mainly from Senegal and Mali, in a process which is spreading throughout Africa: The lure of European financial aid to fight against migration transforms the African political authorities into real persecutors of their brothers and sisters who are looking for work to live and feed their families. This could recall the time of slavery abolished there only two centuries [sic]. The European Union, at the expense of its humanist values, and shamelessly, in African countries outsources its security migration policy.
52
Those whose movement is to be stopped are generally described as ‘economic migrants’. But how, in today’s world of rapid climate change, famines, conflict, ethnic wars, foreign interference and regime change, can one neatly categorise the reasons why people are on the move? As Patrick Kingsley observed, one Nigerian state, Borno, has seen 1.4 million people displaced by the war against Boko Haram, which has forced 2.6 million people from their homes – more than the total of Syrians in Turkey. Hundreds of thousands of people are on the brink of starvation there. Kingsley describes how climate change, which has reduced Lake Chad to one-sixth of its former size, has destroyed the livelihoods and means of subsistence of many thousands, contributing to the consequent chaos which has nurtured groups like Boko Haram – and the pattern of climate change, development, conflict and flight is common throughout the global South, making a mockery of the distinction western leaders draw between deserving ‘refugees’ and undeserving ‘economic migrants’. 53
Bribery and blackmail replace human rights
There is no doubt that the agreements facilitate breaches of international law, including the refoulement of refugees to countries of persecution, prohibited by the 1951 Refugee Convention. But the EU’s 2016 Partnership Framework makes it absolutely clear that migration control, not human rights, is its number one priority, with ‘negative incentives’ for states which fail to co-operate in preventing movement of migrants from or through their territory, or to readmit those who get through. These ‘negative incentives’ could include withdrawal of EU co-operation or assistance, not just in the areas of development, aid and trade, but also in education, research, energy, climate change and agriculture: ‘no policy areas should be exempted from this approach … bringing maximum leverage to the discussion’, the document emphasises. 54
Under the rubric of ‘coherence between migration and development policy’, the long-term investment plan for Africa treats as a priority the development of biometric documents for nationals, to facilitate readmission. Such documents enable repressive states to operate much closer surveillance and control over their citizens, as well as facilitating collective expulsions from Europe.
The logic of bribing African states to take on the burden of external border control for the EU led directly, in Italian NGO ARCI’s opinion, to the Kenyan government’s threat to close Dadaab, the largest refugee camp in the world, housing over 340,000 mostly Somali refugees, in order to gain access to the funds. 55
The Partnership Framework pretends to bring prosperity to Africa. It claims that it will attract private investment to the tune of €60 billion, and that its development initiatives on the continent will remove the incentive for migration. Such claims have been made many times before, but they have lost any plausibility they may once have had, as the western models of development exacerbate inequality, devastate the environment, destroy traditional livelihoods and lead to more emigration.
The way millennia-old traditions of solidarity and free movement are being supplanted by the lure of European development funds has been angrily condemned by African civil society organisations. 56 And in June 2016, 124 European human rights and migrant support organisations also signed a joint statement, 57 condemning the EU’s use of trade and aid agreements to demand co-operation in the control of migration from partner states in Africa. The NGOs pointed out that Europe could not expect African states to host refugees if it was not prepared to take its fair share, and condemned the failure to open up safe legal pathways for migrants and refugees – through family reunification, educational programmes, visa liberalisation or any other measures. The European Parliament, meanwhile, has responded to its own marginalisation by passing resolutions opposing aid conditionality dependent on partner countries co-operating on readmission and return, and condemning the use of development funds for migration management rather than for their intended purpose of combating poverty. 58
What all the deals have in common is an utter ruthlessness in pursuit of the aim of stopping migration to Europe, combined with wilful blindness to the realities of repression and refusal to contemplate the human rights violations to which the agreements will inevitably and necessarily give rise. Deaths in the Mediterranean will again be blamed on the smugglers, and not the EU’s complete failure to provide legal, safe passage to refugees by lifting visa controls or carrier sanctions for those fleeing destitution, famine, repression or war. Other deaths – in the Sahara, in war zones, in the dungeons of repressive states, of those who could not complete their journey, or were unable to leave, or were sent back at the border, or arrested and deported in clampdowns – will remain invisible and unknown. That does not make them any less the responsibility of the EU and its member states.
Footnotes
Frances Webber, a former immigration barrister, is vice-chair of the Institute of Race Relations and writes on the law and politics of immigration, asylum and human rights.