The Libyan conflict is set to get worse before it improves. Libya has been in a state of crisis since 2011. There was a moment of hope at the start of this year that the two sides in the civil war might be edging towards a political solution. Last month, their respective international backers – Russia and Turkey – briefly agreed to a ceasefire pending a peace conference in Berlin, where they agreed that foreign interference in the conflict should end.
Scarcely had they lifted their pens from the agreement when fighting broke out again between forces loyal to Fayez al Sarraj, the UN-backed prime minister in Tripoli, and those commanded by the self-styled Marshal Khalifa Haftar, who controls the East of the country. As ever in the Middle East, discord excited the ambitions of strongmen.
Haftar has been trying to take Tripoli since April last year, and has come close. But Sarraj is confident he can hold the line, boasting: “Haftar hasn’t managed to enter central Tripoli after all this time… he won’t manage it now.”
Haftar’s forces are backed by President Vladimir Putin who has sent him the Wagner Brigade, an army of Russian mercenaries. Sarraj’s new-found optimism, meanwhile, is thanks to the impact of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s recent support. Turkish military advisers, anti-aircraft weapons, armoured vehicles and 2,000 Syrian mercenaries, coordinated by the Turks, have put paid for now to Haftar’s designs on Tripoli.
Although this makes a military dictatorship under Haftar less likely, it also opens a new and inevitably bloody chapter in Libya’s civil war. Since Haftar has also taken control of oil infrastructure and blockaded exports, starving the Tripoli government of its main source of cash, life has been getting harder.
There are risks to the rest of the world too. Libya has a 1,770-kilometre-long coastline on the Mediterranean, from which thousands of migrants have begun the perilous journey to Europe. Moreover, like the war in Syria, the conflict has also been a boon for Islamic State terrorists.
The threats from the south, on Malta’s doorstep, are immense. Western engagement has been chaotic. America officially backs Sarraj’s government, but US President Donald Trump has openly praised Haftar.
The approach of European powers with links to Libya has been no more coherent. Italy backs Sarraj in line with the EU’s official position.
But France is quietly sympathetic to Haftar in the hope that he can stabilise the country through brute force.
The real fear now is that the Libyan civil war (together with Turkey’s threat in Syria to open the refugee floodgates into Europe from Idlib) will propel a second surge of desperate boatloads of refugees into southern and eastern Europe.
The deepening humanitarian crisis could leave Libya’s ill-equipped and fractious coastguard rapidly overwhelmed by migrants attempting to escape across the Mediterranean. Its 42 boats can only patrol a fraction of the country’s coastline, much of which is in the hands of the rebels.
The EU’s de facto foreign ministry (the external action service) has secretly warned that the number of refugees seeking to make their way to Europe by sea will increase significantly if the situation continues to deteriorate. It believes that the Libyan authorities would be all but powerless to stop a resurgence in the mass people-smuggling that made the Mediterranean the world’s deadliest border.
Time is of the essence. The government must go into overdrive... Malta needs to prepare for the worst
Libya is effectively the gateway to Europe for many migrants from Africa and the Middle East on account of the proximity to Maltese and Italian waters and the relative ease with which people traffickers operate amid the chaos of the civil war.
Malta should take action at two levels. First, it must press Brussels to bring back European naval patrols and arms embargo inspections in the southern Mediterranean under Operation Sofia, which was effectively abolished last spring. This option will be strongly resisted by some member states, which regard the project as helping people-smugglers and providing a “ticket to Europe” for African migrants.
The visit last week of Ylva Johansson, the European commissioner for home affairs, did not inspire confidence that Europe was any closer to a plan on how to handle the impending migration crisis. Although she seemed to accept the need for “legislative elements” to build a common European asylum system, she admitted that “what remains to be defined is the form which solidarity between member states will take”… “ideally each member state would see the collective value in contributing to that system”.
The lack of political will among craven EU leaders is palpable and lies at the heart of the problem.
Second, it follows that Malta’s minister for home affairs and national security must draw up comprehensive contingency plans to handle a fresh surge of hundreds of refugees on the assumption that the laborious process of implementing the common European asylum system, to which Johansson referred, will not quickly grind into action, if at all. Preparation to open additional temporary accommodation centres to house the immigrants and the administration and manpower oversight to run them must be set in hand.
Time is of the essence. The government must go into overdrive, both on the diplomatic front and in drawing up practical contingency arrangements. It is no good hoping the problem will go away.
The deteriorating situation in Libya and the lesson of the last decade of migration flows in the Mediterranean is that it will not. Malta needs to prepare for the worst.