The Complex Business of Kindness

Over the weekend, I went to a conference on immigration, organised here in Budapest by the Matthias Corvinus Collegium. The organisers of the conference had brought together an enormous number of interesting speakers, and I found much of what I listened to extremely thought provoking.

While, at first glance, it seems obvious to anyone who professes to be a Christian that the people streaming into Europe from the various hellholes of the world deserve our sympathy and generosity, I realised, over the course of a number of talks, that, as so often, things are much more complex than at first they seem and that, when we think we are doing good by others, we are often creating dreadful situations and aiding and abetting appalling people to ply a ghastly trade.

I recorded a few talks and, as there does not yet seem to be any sign of the video-ed conference proceedings appearing on the Matthias Corvinus Collegium website, I have decided to transcribe what I have, so that other people can share in some of what was said.

In today's post, I am putting my transcription - (probably including several inaccurate place names and names of tribes, as the speaker dealt in territory that was very unfamiliar to me) - of a talk by Dr Saul Kelly, who is a Reader in the Defence Studies Department of King's College, London.

In his talk, Dr Kelly explained how the new migrant flow that is arriving in Europe from Africa is in many ways a replication of the slave trading that Europe made such intense efforts to end in the nineteenth century. After considering the thesis that Dr Kelly advances, it is hard to look at the refugee influx to Europe from the simplistic perspective of thinking that all should be allowed in as that is the only decent thing to do.

Even before listening to Dr Kelly, I must admit that I had begun to feel concerned about whether we were doing the right thing by not enforcing our borders strictly. Various incidents had led me to wonder about this. The most recent was a couple of weeks ago, in a Vietnamese restaurant in Kinsgland Road, London, when I noticed a young person being horribly bullied by the boss of the restaurant. When the boss wasn't looking, I asked the person being bullied where they came from and they answered, "Eritrea". They spoke very little English and seemed very frightened and I wondered whether, by not being stricter about stopping illegal migration, we may not in fact be encouraging people to misguidedly make dangerous journeys away from everything and everyone they know, only to find, if they survive the journey, that, unskilled and unable to speak the local language well, they must endure terrible circumstances in the new home they have sought.

Anyway here is my transcription of the talk that Dr Kelly gave. Its content only increased my fears about the whole complicated business, which I believe really is one of the major questions facing us today. If it is too long, at least take a look at the parts I have highlighted in bold; I think they get across to the reader the major concerns that he raises:

"In the autumn of 2004, I was on an expedition to the Gil Kabeer (?)  in the extreme southwest of Egypt, hard up against the borders of Sudan and Libya. We were looking for new rock-art sites, but we were also on the trail of a rather famous Hungarian explorer, who some of you may have heard of - Lászlo Almássy, who in 1942 took a German commando expedition across the Libyan desert to the Nile, to deliver a couple of spies on behalf of Rommel, from behind British lines.

During the course of our hunt for rock-art and Almássy, we came across a shallow, unmarked grave on the edge of a WWII air strip. We wanted to know who the person was who was buried in such an isolated spot, far from habitation. We talked to our Bedouin guides about this and we were told, with a shrug of the shoulders, that it was probably someone from the south – from Eritrea or Somalia – someone who didn't make it to the Mediterranean coast across the great wastes of the Libyan desert.

Fifteen years ago, when I was on this expedition, the Libyans were still patrolling their frontiers with Egypt and the Sudan, looking for these elicit caravans run by people smugglers across the Libyan desert, as I discovered when we were stopped in Sudanese territory by a Libyan patrol – because the Sudanese government, as I learnt later from their director of desert surveys, was not aware at this time that migrant smugglers were using this route through what was the northwest corner of Sudan into Egypt and Libya. And the Egyptian army were reluctant to leave their comfortable billet in the western oases in Egypt to actually patrol the tri-border area around Jabal Uweinat. This is classic bandit country, where there is no rule of law, except through the barrel of a gun. This is where smugglers coming from the Sudan rest up and hide out on their way north to the Mediterranean shore, skirting great sand seas on their way. 

Their elicit task of people smuggling was made much easier in 2011 with the collapse of the Gaddafi regime in Libya. After that event, the Libyans gave up all pretence of policing their borders. The consequence was an unimpeded flow of migrants, mainly from Eritrea and Somalia, into Libya. And this has been mirrored by a more westerly stream of migrants coming up from West Africa, mainly Nigeria, through the Fezzan, which is the south western province of Libya, on their way to the Mediterranean.

So what we have been witnessing in recent years is the mass migration of people from failed or failing states to Europe. This is aided and abetted by criminal syndicates, expatriate networks, corrupt officials, militias and tribal leaders, who all benefit financially from this trade in people – and in fact the Libyans call them abid, which means slave.

For, make no mistake, we are looking at a revival of the slave trade, something we thought had been finally put down by the European powers in North Africa a century ago. Then it was the Ottoman empire that had an insatiable appetite for African slaves; now it is the European Union, whose leaders seek a new workforce to support and replace its ageing population.  It is one of the great ironies of history that the western liberal conscience that drove the campaign for the abolition of the slave trade should now not only condone but positively encourage the revival of that trade, as I shall detail in this paper.

So what is the problem? We need to identify it, and I think some comparative statistics are useful here. At a conservative estimate it is calculated that between the seventh and the 20th centuries about six to seven million African slaves - men, women and children - were delivered alive across the Sahara to North Africa. This amounts to an average annual rate of some 5,000 people, of whom about 1,500 to 1,700 were taken to Egypt or shipped across the Mediterranean, the rest becoming domestic slaves in North Africa, which of course was under the Ottoman Empire at this time.

Compare those statistics to some from the International Organisation for Migration which says that, between 2014 and 2018, 600,000 migrants landed in Italy, 90 per cent of them coming from the Libyan shore, only six per cent from Egypt. As we know, there were also some 3,000 recorded deaths on the central Mediterranean route during this time.In a nine-month period, from January to September 2015, a quarter of the 128,619 people recorded by Frontex, the EU border agency, as having landed in Italy were identified as being from Eritrea. They amounted to more than 30,000 Eritreans - and their numbers were more than double those of the second largest national group, those from Nigeria. This is remarkable, given that Eritreans represent only some four per cent of the region's population.

So why is this exodus from this small state on the Red Sea happening? Well, to put it in a neat phrase, it is due to young Eritreans dodging the draft. In a desperate attempt to deal with a deteriorating internal security situation in Eritrea,the regime in Asmara has sought to dragoon more young people into the armed forces, and many of them have voted with their feet and fled Eritrea to Europe. They have been helped by organised crime groups, whose kingpins are based in Sudan, Libya and Italy, and, before 2013, by a consortium of Rashidi (?) smugglers operating across the border between Sudan and Eritrea, along with, later on, Egyptian Bedouin gangs, colluding with Eritrean kingpin gang masters to smuggle tens of thousands of migrants along the arms-smuggling route to the north of Sinai and the borders of Israel. This was only stopped in 2013 when the Israelis built a 330-kilometre long security fence along the frontier with Egypt. Once this Sinai route had been cut off, the smugglers focused on the Libyan route, and there was put in place a network of transporters, financial facilitators and warehouses, like the old slave barracoons on the West African coast, existing essentially to serve this trade route in people.

In 2015 the majority of Eritreans were smuggled in vehicles through the Sudan to Libya, via the triborder area around Jabal Uweinat. They avoid Kufra, across the border in Libya, and this is because the Toubou and Zawiya tribes are fighting each other. These traditional enemies and rivals having gone to war over the revival of the slave trade and who can make the most money out of it.

So the smugglers make for the Tazirbu oasis which is north of Kufra on the track to Ajdabiya, which is country controlled by the Mugaba (?) tribe. From Ajdabiya, the Eritreans are conveyed north westwards to the Tripolitanean coast, from whence the lucky ones are dispatched by boat across the central Mediterranean to Italy. I say "the lucky ones" not because I think them lucky, but because the less fortunate suffer a worse fate, being incarcerated in makeshift warehouses or detention camps along the Tripolitanean coast.

At every point along this journey, these migrants are subject to depradations from smugglers and tribal militias, who proceed to extort more money from them. There have been plenty of horror stories of kidnap, rape and even abandonment of migrants in the desert, where they die of starvation and thirst. There have also been stories of ISIS militants, when they were based at Sirte on the Mediterranean coast, actually ambushing migrant convoys, separating Muslims from Christians and executing the latter. There have been reports - and some other speakers here have referred to this - of slave auctions being held in the large detention camps, called barracoons in Libya, near the coast. And the escalation of the conflict between the various militias from 2014, combined with a significant increase in the number of migrants coming through Libya, meant that the latter became a commodity that fuelled the war, further pulling apart the Libyan state, such as it is. 

 In effect, what we have witnessed in Libya is a revival of the old Saharan slave trade - and along some of the same routes. It is worth remembering that in the latter half of the nineteenth century it was the European powers that put pressure on the Ottoman empire to abolish the slave trade, and it was French expansion in the Sahara that forced the trade onto the Wadi(?)-Kufra-Benghazi route, which, under the supervision of the Sanusi(?) brotherhood and the deputations of the Zawiya tribe, was remote from prying European eyes. This is basically the route taken by slave traders today, and some of the very same tribes that were involved with the original slave trade are involved with today's trade - and are profiting from it. 

What is to be done to abolish this miserable trade, which threatens not only the countries of origin by robbing them of their young; but the transit countries, where it contributes to the breakdown of law and order; and the countries of destination in Europe, where it puts great strain on society? If some “experts” and Jean Claude Juncker are to be believed, the answer to illegal migration lies in legalising it. According to this line of argument, this will benefit both Europe, meeting labour shortages, and Africa, through the remittances being sent back to the countries of origin. The UN has given this approach their imprimatur in their Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regulated Migration, which was adopted at their Marrakech conference in December 2018. It is worth noting that the European Commission's attempt to have this approach written into the communique at the recent EU-Arab League summit in Sharm-el Sheikh was thwarted by Hungary. The latter does not accept the EU's position that migration is unavoidable because of the situation on the African continent.

And indeed, the EU, in this instance, seems to be contradicting the logic of its own emergency trust fund for Africa, which is intended to fight the root causes of irregular migration. Through large grants of money, the fund seeks to improve the situation in the countries of origin, so that people do not feel the need to migrate. But the EU has put equal emphasis on - and money into - stopping migrants along the way in Niger, Mali, Senegal, Libya and Ethiopia as into preventing their leaving the top countries of origin - namely Nigeria, Eritrea and Somalia - in the first place. While such aid can, according to the OECD, prevent an increase in the proportion of people who emigrate and possibly reduce numbers, this will only occur in the long-term; in the short-term, by slightly raising living standards, the aid can actually encourage migration, by making it affordable.

So what we can see here is that the EU has got itself into an awful tangle over migration and seeks an easy and defeatist way out. In doing so, it is effectively seeking to legitimise an abhorrent trade for its own perceived economic and social needs. But it is not consulting the people of Europe and of Africa on this, even though it is a matter that will affect their lives and the lives of later generations. This demonstrates a moral bankruptcy and an abdication of responsibility towards the peoples of two continents.

 The answer to migration does not lie in Europe; it lies in the countries of origin. By allowing corrupt regimes to survive - and even prosper - the EU and the UN have simply compounded the problem of state failure, a chief by-product of which is migration. Until the EU and the UN face up to their responsibilities in countries like Eritrea and Libya, which they should have done after 2011, the new slave trade in migration will continue.