EU gears up to take the fight to people smugglers

When pirates were terrorising vessels in the waters off Somalia, the EU laid aside its traditional reliance on "soft power" and reached for a military solution instead.

The result was Operation Atalanta, a naval campaign launched in 2008 in which ships from Spain, the UK, Italy and other EU member states intercepted pirate vessels in the Indian Ocean - and even destroyed them on Somali soil.

As the EU plots a response to a new crisis off the coast of Africa - a migration crisis that has resulted in an estimated 1,600 deaths in the Mediterranean since the beginning of the year - Atalanta is looming large.

Foreign ministers at an emergency meeting in Luxembourg this week to discuss the crisis concluded that the rare EU military operation "should inspire" the continent's attempt to bust people smuggling networks in Libya.

But the enthusiasm for such a muscular response, say diplomats and analysts, is also shadowed by a welter of doubts about its feasibility.

While the migration crisis has become urgent, a military response could be slow. It took four years before the first strikes were launched under Atalanta.

One obstacle is that any police or military operations in Libya would require a mandate from Libyan authorities or the UN - something that would hardly be assured.

"Judging by how angry the Russians and Chinese were about the elastic way that Nato interpreted the mandate for no fly zones, that kind of mandate will be hard to come by," said one diplomat.

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"You're a fool if you think that if you destroy one boat on a Libyan beach you have solved the problem," said Paolo Magri, executive vice-president of the Institute for the Study of International Politics in Milan. "This is an international criminal organisation and they will send a new one from Egypt. After all a new boat costs €100,000 but each voyage earns up to €800,000 for the traffickers," he says.

Further complicating matters is that intelligence on smuggling networks in Libya is scant. Traffickers themselves often take up smuggling of people and contraband as a second job at a time of economic distress. Even government officials are known to spend time off ferrying people and goods along various routes.

There is also the need to navigate Libya's complex political and tribal patchwork. European diplomats worry that deaths or injuries of traffickers at the hands of western forces could have unforeseen repercussions, possibly complicating ongoing western-backed peace talks aimed at ending Libya's 11-month civil war.

"Military action is a deterrent; it's not a substitute for a coherent and robust policy," said Anas el-Gomati, a researcher at the Sadeq Institute, a Libyan think-tank, who attended the foreign ministers' meeting in Luxembourg on Monday. "It will do nothing to stop the flow of migrants coming from sub-Saharan Africa and address the reasons as to why they choose to take a perilous route such as the western coast of Libya."

During that meeting, EU ministers also backed the idea of giving greater support to the bloc's Operation Triton, in which ships from a collection of EU member states patrol up to 30 miles from the Italian coast.

Some diplomats expressed optimism that this could allow Triton to evolve into more of a de facto "search and rescue" mission that would result in fewer migrant deaths. Technically, though, such missions can only be mounted by individual member states - not the EU.

As the EU deliberates, those on the ground in Libya worry about potentially introducing yet another armed element into a troubled country already torn apart by armed militias, rival armies with rival air forces, jihadi militants, smuggling networks and criminal gangs vying for control of territory and resources.

On Tuesday, a fresh horror emerged as jihadi militants in the eastern Libyan city of Derna executed eight members of a family who had confronted them and displayed their bodies for public viewing.

"There has to be some kind of action," said a Libyan diplomat. "Is it going to complicate things? Yes. But at the moment, I don't see any other way to stop the trafficking trade."

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