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Climate change raises the stakes in Libya’s crisis

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Libya has been in crisis for ten years, and with each passing year, the stakes for the West grow higher. Besides the humanitarian tragedy that has ravaged the country and its people, the stakes in the battle for Libya’s future are higher than is usually assumed. Pundits often raise the threat that the deployment of Russian missiles to Libya would pose, both to NATO and the European Union. Libya’s close proximity to the shores of Italy and Greece and dominating position at the heart of the Mediterranean make it a valuable strategic prize for the power that can exercise influence over it. Yet Libya’s position at the heart of the Mediterranean comes with another concern, which will grow over the course of coming years, writes Jay Mens.

Whoever controls Libya will exercise a significant degree of control over flows of refugees and migrants from the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa. European officials have already expressed concern about this, and through joint naval operations the Union has moved to try and stem the tide of illegal migration into the Union. Those making their way through Libya include refugees fleeing violence in Afghanistan and Syria, refugees fleeing war in Syria, some of Libya’s over 270,000 internally displaced persons, and increasing numbers of migrants from sub-Saharan Africa, moving northwards in search of better lives. The experience of refugees fleeing conflict is a human tragedy, and migrants searching for better lives is a fact of human history. Yet beyond these human stories, the wider phenomenon of mass migration is being transformed into a weapon by those who hope to harm Europe or to hold it hostage.

The use of mass migration as a geopolitical tool has a long history. Recent research by the political scientist Kelly Greenhill suggests there have been 56 such instances in the last seventy years alone. In 1972, Idi Amin expelled the entire Asian population of Uganda, including 80,000 British passport-holders, as a punishment for Britain’s withdrawal of aid and assistance. In 1994, Fidel Castro’s Cuba threatened the United States with waves of migrants in the wake of massive civil unrest. In 2011, none other than Libya’s late dictator Muammar Gadhaffi threatened the European Union, warning that if it kept supporting protesters, “Europe will be facing a human flood from North Africa”. In 2016, the Turkish government threatened to allow the nearly four million Syrian refugees residing in Turkey to the European Union if the EU did not pay it. When the dispute erupted, Turkey allowed, and in some cases forced migrants into Eastern Europe, exacerbating already-high tensions within the Union on the thorny question of immigration. Libya is the next hotspot for these debates.

Libya’s proximity to Europe makes it a key hotspot for migrants. Its shores are an estimated 16 hours by boat from the islands of Lampedusa and Crete, and roughly a day from the Greek mainland. For this region, Libya has become a major node for migration from across the Middle East, North Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa. From West Africa, one route passes through in Agadez in Niger, going northward to the oasis of Sabha in Libya's Fezzan. Another proceeds from in Gao in Mali, into Algeria past Tamranasset into Libya. From East Africa, Khartoum in Sudan is the central meeting point, heading into Libya from its south-East. As of March 2020, Libya hosted an estimated 635,000 migrants from across the Middle East and Africa, in addition to nearly 50,000 refugees of its own.

Today, Libya is split into roughly two parts. Libya’s problem is not a power vacuum, but the control of the country by powers subordinate to foreign interests seeking leverage over Europe. Since March, Libya has been ruled by a tenuous Government of National Unity, which on paper, has reunited its disparate East and West. Yet it is struggling to act as a government and certainly lacks any monopoly of force over most of the country. To the East, the Libyan National Army remains the main driving force and across the country, tribal and ethnic militias continue to act with impunity. Moreover, Libya is still home to a significant contingent of foreign troops and mercenaries. Among many others, the two most powerful foreign actors in Libya’s East and West-- Russia and Turkey respectively-- continue to dominate on the ground. Neither party seems willing to back down, meaning that the country will remain at an impasse; or, that it will continue its seemingly inexorable shuffle towards partition. Neither outcome is desirable.

Both Russia and Turkey have threatened the EU with waves of migration. If Libya remains at an impasse, they can continue to use Libya, a key node for Middle Eastern and African migration, as a spigot, keeping their fingers on the union’s most sensitive pressure point. This concern will only grow in magnitude as the populations of the Middle East and Africa grow at rates far exceeding the rest of the world. Climate change is creating more incentives for mass migration. Drought, wildfires, famines, water shortages, and diminishing amounts of arable land are becoming endemic problems in both Africa and the Middle East. Paired with political instability and weak governance, northward migration is set to become not just an annual event, but a constant and growing pressure to the unity and future of the European Union. If Russia and Turkey have effective or shared control in Libya, there is no doubt that they will use this fact-- and use Libya-- to threaten and undermine the European Union. This need not be the case.

Libya’s political crisis stems from the absence of a social contract that can unify the country, equally distribute resources, and provide a model of governance that transcends the provincial needs and caters to a national constituency. Libyan unity, and the resolution of Libya’s crisis, is very much a European interest. To date, efforts to provide Libya with a constitution that can provide it with a social contract have been postponed. This postpones the reconstruction of a unified Libyan state, capable of enacting its own policy and partnering with the EU on key issues such as migration. The EU must urgently support efforts to draft a Libyan constitution that supports this outcome. This does not require a military or political intervention but playing to Europe’s natural aptitude for all things legal.

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Ideas already abound for Libya’s future constitution may already look. Brussels should be a forum for discussing them, and its legal talents should devote time and attention to working out a constitutional solution that can solve Libya’s problems. By ensuring that Libya can remain unified and independent of the burden of foreign pressure, Europe would be acting in the long-term interest of its unity and independence. As the only actor for which the independence and unity of Libya is truly tied to its own, it has a responsibility and an enormous incentive to act.

Jay Mens is executive director of the Middle East and North Africa Forum, a think tank based at the University of Cambridge, and a research analyst for Greenmantle, a macroeconomic advisory firm.

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