A month after hundreds of African and Middle Eastern migrants bound for Italy drowned when their boat capsized in the Mediterranean Sea, the 28 countries of the European Union have finally agreed to deploy naval forces in response to the crisis on their southern flank. Yet the plan being discussed isn't aimed at preventing more lives from being lost at sea, nor will it do anything to change the desperate conditions in the migrants' home countries that are causing them to flee. The E.U.'s leaders still don't seem to grasp that the mass exodus of refugees could continue for years and that the challenges it presents can't be met with short-term fixes.
The strategy proposed by E.U. foreign and defense ministers last week calls for a three-pronged operation aimed at seizing vessels carrying migrants to Europe in international waters, repatriating the passengers to their countries of origin, then destroying the boats so they can't be used again — thus disrupting the business model of the human smugglers who organize the voyages. It's a relatively straightforward approach, but it suffers from one major problem: It almost certainly won't stem the flood of migrants attempting to reach Europe.
The smugglers won't be deterred by the prospect of losing their boats. For every vessel seized and destroyed by E.U. warships, the traffickers are likely to have two or three more being built at workshops along the coasts of Libya and Somalia. The profits from the trade are such that replacing lost boats is a tiny part of their costs of doing business. Smugglers don't risk their own lives aboard the rickety vessels they dispatch onto the open sea; they make the passengers themselves, with minimal training, navigate the crossing — and pay extra for the privilege. If a boat leaks, breaks down or sinks the smugglers have already made their money.
The E.U. plan must still be approved by the leaders of its member states, and probably by the U.N. Security Council as well if it turns out European ships have to enter the territorial waters of countries bordering the Mediterranean. There's been talk of E.U. military forces landing along the coastlines of Libya and other countries to destroy the smugglers' boats before they leave port or to attack the workshops where vessels are built. But that would require permission from authorities in those nations, many of whose central governments have collapsed and no longer control the areas where the smugglers are operating.
Libya, for example, has become the main staging area for migrants attempting to reach Europe, with a million people from across the region gathered there awaiting passage by boat. Yet the country has had no real central government since Libyan dictator Moammar Kadafi was toppled from power — with U.S. and European help — in 2011. The country has descended into chaos with effectively two competing governments, one in the west and one in the eastern part of the country. Which one would the E.U. negotiate with to get approval for operations inside Libya's territorial waters or against the smugglers' coastal enclaves? And would the U.N. endorse such operations even if the nominal authorities refused to cooperate?
The uncertainties surrounding the E.U. plan come amid a spike in migration to Europe driven by the rise of Islamic extremism in an arc of conflict stretching from Nigeria and Mali to Somalia and Syria. The cost has been enormous: More than 1,800 migrants died between January and April of this year, about 17 times as many as perished during the same period last year. There's no disputing the Mediterranean has become the site of a humanitarian disaster. But the E.U.'s response is essentially a police action to intercept and disrupt the smugglers' networks, not to save the lives of their desperate victims.
What is needed is a comprehensive strategy that addresses the abominable conditions that force people to flee their homelands and that offers them temporary safe haven in the E.U. until they can be safely repatriated. Last year some 436,000 applied for asylum in E.U. countries, whose leaders are still dithering over how to apportion each country's fair share of responsibility for the refugees.
The increasingly conservative political climate in the E.U. has made politicians wary of being overwhelmed by an influx of migrants. But Europe's leaders must recognize that the refugees will keep coming as long as civil war, violent religious extremism and poverty in their home countries make the risks of the voyage seem worth it. That is the long-term problem Europe faces and it won't be solved by intercepting a few — or even a few hundred — overloaded vessels at sea.