The European Union’s new Pact on Migration and Asylum entered into force on June 12, and Brussels is already treating it as a bureaucratic achievement. It is, instead, a mechanism for subsidizing Libya’s permanent civil war.

The logic runs as follows. European migration externalization requires a partner capable of intercepting boats before they reach EU waters. In Libya, that means identifying a credible interlocutor, an entity with enough coastline authority to absorb EU funds and perform migration control on Brussels’s behalf. The problem is that no single Libyan actor controls the coast. There are militias in Zawiya that profit from smuggling, the Government of National Unity (GNU) in Tripoli that holds nominal authority over western Libya, and the Libyan National Army (LNA) under Khalifa Haftar that dominates the east. The EU’s demand for a migration partner does not simplify this picture. It complicates it by placing a cash prize on the table for whichever faction can most convincingly perform sovereignty.

This is not a hypothetical. The EU’s previous externalization arrangements with Libyan actors, formalized through the 2017 Malta Declaration and subsequent Italy-Libya memorandums, channeled hundreds of millions of euros toward the Libyan Coast Guard, an entity with documented ties to the same smuggling networks it was nominally paid to........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)