African experts react to call for EU-led migrant rescue mission
An EU-led search and recuse mission in the Mediterranean promoted by the European Parliament would tackle the consequences of the migrant problem, but not its causes, African experts have told RT.
Earlier this week, MEPs adopted a resolution urging a coordinated EU-wide effort that would see member states and the bloc’s border agency Frontex providing “sufficient capacity in terms of vessels, equipment and personnel” in order to save people from the Middle East and Africa trying to reach Europe by boat.
The move followed one of worst ever tragedies to occur on the Mediterranean migrant route, which saw more than 300 people dying after an overcrowded fishing trawler sank off the coast of Greece in mid-June.
If implemented, an EU-led rescue mission might actually cause an increase in migrant flows to Europe as people would believe that it was safer to make a sea crossing, Malian political analyst Sidylamine Bagayoko warned.
The European Parliament can come up with various resolutions, but individual EU states “separately… have their own politics of rescuing migrants,” he said.
“Sometimes they just want to leave the migrants by themselves because they’ll see that if there’s more and more deaths this will discourage the migrants to follow the route to go to Europe,” the analyst explained.
What the European Parliament proposes is a “good idea,” Nigerian human rights activist Usman Ayuo said. However, he added that the EU would need help in order for the rescue mission to succeed. “It has to be [implemented] in collaboration with the governments [of countries] where the migrants are from,” Ayuo said.
According to Bagayoko, the causes of the migration are poverty, climate issues, and conflicts in the poorer countries. If the EU focused on helping those nations to solve their problems, then their residents “would not have to flee to Europe and would not have to die in the Mediterranean Sea,” he argued.
