Date: 2025-07-02 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00026225
MIGRATION
ACROSS MEDITERRANEAN INTO EUROPE
RAND ESSAY: Migrant Crisis in the Mediterranean: What You Need to Know about massive refugee flows across the Mediterranean from Africa to Europe
ACROSS MEDITERRANEAN INTO EUROPE
RAND ESSAY: Migrant Crisis in the Mediterranean: What You Need to Know about massive refugee flows across the Mediterranean from Africa to Europe
Refugees, who were rescued in international waters off the Libyan coast, are transferred from one boat to another, December 2016 ... Photo by Laurin Schmid/AP Photo
Original article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_Yemen
Peter Burgess COMMENTARY
I am 84 years old. About 40 years ago I did several months of consulting work for the UN in connection with ICARA ... the International Commission for Assistance to Refugees in Africa. The UN was concerned with the emerging refugee crisis in various parts of Africa and wanted to take steps to mitigate the problem.
One of my ICARA assignments was in connection with the flow of refugees from Mozambique into Malawi because of the civil war in Mozambique that was causing massive disruption almost everywhere in the country. Malawi did not have substantial spare resources to support a large flow of refugees into the country, and international financial assistance was urgent. When our small team of UNDP and UNHCR staff started to do the essential planning work and mobilizing refugee assistance resources in August of 1989 it was projected that there would be some 300,000 refugees needing support in Malawi before the end of the year. A month later it was clear that it would be more like 1 million that would come to Malawi over the next few months ... and that is what happened. It should be noted that the support costs per refugee were tiny compared to the costs that seem to be in play in Europe and in North America for anything to do with refugees ... and it should also be noted that the 'overhead costs' in Europe and North America are astronomical compared what would be the norm and reasonable in most other parts of the world. This cost problem is not unique to refugees ... it applies to almost anything done 'officially' within most governments in Europe and North America!
My own first experience with the assistance methodology of UNHCR ... the United Nations High Commission for Refugees ... was in the early 1980s near a town called Yei in the Equatoria Region of Sudan (now in South Sudan) ... UNHCR was hosting several hundred thousands of refugees from the turmoil and killings in Uganda. The UNHCR helped enable the settlement of this wave of refugees in an area of South Sudan where the adult refugees could engaged in productive agriculture. The refugee needs were very basic ... water, food, shelter, simple agricultural tools, access to land to grow food and seeds. UNHCR collaborated with the local government authorities to make all of these items accessible to the refugees ... and supplied food and shelter for a single crop season. With the harvest, the food problem was solved and surplus food was turned into cash in all sorts of local markets.
By a huge coincidence it turned out that my relatively new wife, a Jamaican who had studied at Oxford knew a fellow student at Oxford who had come from this part of South Sudan ... specifically Dunstan Wye. After Oxford, Dunstan had joined the World Bank and was well known in this part of Sudan. As a friend of a friend of a friend, the administrator of the City of Yei allowed me access to some fascinating financial records for the City. Yei was the main urban center of the area where the refugees were being hosted. It was spectacular to see the positive impact that the refugees with a combination of local support and support from UNHCR had had on the local economy month by month over a period of around 2 years since the refugees had first come from Uganda leeing Idi Amin. The municipal accounting records were meticulous (... obviously manual at this time) and showed very clearly how economic success had been achieved when the assistance priorities made sense and were not driven by misguided bureaucratic mandates!
While most World Bank and UN projects have a focus on the availability and use of money, the focus of UNHCR has a priority on people and their essential urgent needs. While the World Bank, the UN and most other development agencies will take months and years to plan a project, UNHCR knows what it has to do and will act as soon as a problem is identified. The accounting effort goes into accounting for what has been done and the resources used after an urgent problem has been addressed and stabilised. There is rather little excess paperwork and study and meetings before essential work gets done ... and very little loss of accountability.
Peter Burgess
May 2, 2017 (Accessed February 2024)
The countries bordering the Mediterranean Sea—from Algeria to Egypt in North Africa; from Israel to Syria in the Levant; and Turkey, Greece, and Italy in Europe—are facing unprecedented stress. A former lieutenant with the Italian Navy is now a RAND Europe researcher, working to help others appreciate the scope of the crisis in the Mediterranean.
The boat has become a symbol of the crisis in the Mediterranean: a creaky fishing boat, maybe, or a sagging rubber raft, crowded with refugees seeking a better life on a new shore.
It's a powerful symbol, a marker for the thousands of men, women, and children who have died in recent years taking that risk. But it's only one part of a crisis that now stretches across the Sahara Desert, through the lawless towns of North Africa, deep into organized crime rings in Europe.
Border patrols can't stop it. Rescue missions can't solve it. The problems facing the region, an ongoing RAND initiative shows, reach far deeper than Western governments have been willing to acknowledge. And that means fixing them will require reaching deeper still.
“It came from the frustration of seeing how oversimplified the problem was being presented,” said Giacomo Persi Paoli, a researcher with RAND Europe who led the project. “The problems are so deeply interconnected that we can't solve them with this firefighting approach, putting out one fire at a time.”
He speaks from experience.
A Man with a Mission
It was dusk when the boat first appeared as a blip on the radar screen off the coast of Libya. On board the Italian naval frigate where Persi Paoli was a lieutenant, an emergency buzzer clanged as the captain ordered all hands on deck.
Persi Paoli could see hundreds of arms waving and reaching for help as the old wooden fishing boat came into view, rolling on the waves. He and his shipmates saved 400 lives that night, the first of what would be half a dozen rescue missions in which he participated. He remembers just hoping the little boat would stay afloat long enough as the waves pounded against its ragged hull.
“You could really tell that without you, these people wouldn't have seen the light of the next day,” he says now. “We were desperately looking for these people, because we knew they were out there—women, kids—and they needed help.”
More than 5,000 people died trying to cross the Mediterranean last year, the deadliest on record. They came from the shelled neighborhoods of Syria, the desperate villages of Eritrea and Gambia. Somalia lost so many people to the sea that a warning began to make the rounds of Twitter there: #DhimashoHaGadan, or “Don't Buy Death.”
That's what people see on the nightly news: the bodies washed ashore, the crowded migrant camps, the boats. But Persi Paoli, who left the Italian Navy in late 2013 and joined RAND as a research leader specializing in national security, wanted to widen the lens. He called the project the Mediterranean Foresight Forum.
Follow the Money
The researchers traced the roots of the crisis back to the shattered promise of the Arab Spring and the cratered cities of Syria and Libya, but also to European capitals too divided to act. They mapped the smuggling routes that now crisscross Africa and the Middle East, and then followed the money—billions of dollars every year—to criminal networks flourishing in North Africa and Southern Europe.
They showed that what may have once been many individual threats to the stability of the region have now merged, creating a cycle of unrest that feeds back on itself. In Libya alone, for example, the same black markets that provide fake passports and flimsy boats to migrants can also deliver hashish to European drug dealers and shoulder-fired missiles to Syrian fighters.
Poverty in West Africa, unrest in North Africa, and the terrorist threat of ISIS can no longer be treated as unrelated challenges.
The grinding poverty of West Africa, the unrest of North Africa, and the terrorist threat of ISIS can no longer be treated as unrelated challenges, the researchers concluded. Those problems now all seem “to literally spill into the Mediterranean Sea,” they wrote, threatening the security and stability of the two continents that share its shores. The future of Europe has become inextricably linked by sea to the future of the Middle East and North Africa.
“All of these pieces get reported on, but nobody really weaves them together,” says Michael McNerney, a senior researcher at RAND, where he serves as associate director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center. “We need to look at the big picture, because if these problems continue to destabilize Europe and the region, that could be devastating for U.S. interests.”
“The crisis is getting worse,” he added. “But there is no one stepping up, offering resources or saying, 'We need to radically reconsider what we're doing.'”
IMAGE Arrows show the flow of drugs, weapons, and people across the Mediterranean region The flow of drugs, weapons, and people across the Mediterranean region has become a feedback loop of instability.
The Immediate Need for a Long-Term Strategy
The United States, Europe, and NATO need to begin sharing intelligence in a way they have not managed since the migrant crisis began. They need to put more ships into the Mediterranean, more security agents at the border. But they also need to take an active role—through trade deals, for example—in stabilizing countries like Tunisia before they get pulled into the exodus.
The response from Europe and the United States has so far been too little, and too late. “What should have been rapid, robust engagement has often been more of a cautious voyage of discovery,” the researchers wrote in one of a series of recent reports. They suggested a “diplomatic surge” as a practical first step, to bring the nations of Europe, the United States, and NATO together to hammer out a single, unified strategy to address the crisis.
The response from Europe and the United States has been too little, too late.
From across the Atlantic, the security and stability of the Mediterranean region might seem like a European problem, they noted. But what happens there—from Syria to Egypt to the beaches of Libya—has a direct impact on the security and interests of the United States. That should add some urgency to Department of Defense planning.
“The scale of the problem is unprecedented,” Persi Paoli said. “You can't think of solving it just by managing the immediate crisis. It's long term. But if you don't start doing something, you won't get any closer. In ten years, we'll still be talking about the need for a long-term strategy.”
In Search of Safety and Stability
It's been a few years since he was out there, scanning the horizon for the next boat. The enormity of what he saw still comes to him in unexpected moments: the people reaching from the water, the refugees huddled on deck. It was a reminder, as he worked on the Mediterranean Foresight Forum, of the stakes involved: not just the safety and stability of two continents, but the lives of hundreds of thousands of people who have made the journey, and thousands more who have yet to start.
“When my daughter was born and I held her in my arms, that's when it really hit me,” he said. “There were pregnant women on those boats that we rescued. There were small children. They were people that, because of us, at least had a chance.
“Somewhere in North Africa or Syria, there are parents who are having to go through that, just to give their children that chance.” — Doug Irving
Research in the Public Interest
Funding for these RAND Ventures was made possible by the independent research and development provisions of RAND's contracts for the operation of its U.S. Department of Defense federally funded research and development centers.