Libya migration: Trafficking in folly

The EU is trusting those benefiting from human smuggling and trafficking through Libya to stop it. Unsurprisingly, the result is shaky and unsustainable, writes Anrike Visser.

Anrike Visser is a senior illicit finance policy snalyst at The Sentry, an investigative organisation seeking to disable multinational predatory networks that benefit from violent conflict, repression, and kleptocracy.

Last year was the busiest and deadliest year for illegal crossings on the Mediterranean Sea. And then, briefly, in the first half of 2024, the numbers dropped.

European governments, many in political upheaval over immigration, seemed to breathe a sigh of relief. But what they don’t see is the scale of irregular and inhumane migration about to crash again on Europe’s shores.

There are 725,000 migrants and refugees on Libyan soil, a number that keeps growing. People of every age—many of them burdened by trauma, many the survivors of ethnic cleansing campaigns in Darfur—will face more danger crossing the sea to seek a safe haven in the European Union.

Out of fear, in a debacle of transactionalism and wishful thinking, the capitals of Europe have been attempting to buy off transit countries with lucrative deals to wall off this escape route. Italy, Malta, Germany, and the European Commission have all received promises from Libya to stem the tide.

The problem is that those who wield power in Libya—the government in Tripoli and General Khalifa Haftar’s breakaway regime that rules in the east—in fact benefit from the business of human smuggling, both directly and indirectly.  

Libya’s two main factions have played the game brilliantly. Each regime has made repeated gestures toward curbing human smuggling. Each time, after a brief recess, they opened the floodgates once more to extract extra millions from a panicked Europe—more than €700 million from EU institutions alone.

As a bonus, while cashing in from the EU, they continue to enjoy political support and the financial benefits of the trade by collaborating with the militias and networks responsible for human smuggling.

Haftar’s son himself heads the Tariq Ben Zeyad brigade, which smuggles migrants and bribes local authorities to look the other way, while the Western Libyan Coast Guard turns over migrants to smugglers and demands ransom from families.

The combination of illicit revenue streams and, even more significantly, increased political capital and leverage over its European neighbors further entrenches and accelerates Libya’s “kleptocratic boom”: a surge of corruption and organized crime at the highest levels of power all across the country.

The Libyan regimes in the east and west are essentially in a competition to exploit every major profit center—oil, gold, procurement, and arms—wringing wealth out of the country as the economy spirals and people suffer and die at mass scale.

In July, in the yellow sand of the vast desert at the Libya-Tunisia border, another mass grave was found, filled with the bodies of migrants and refugees. This is horror, and the horror is business as usual: 90% of the irregular migrants arriving in Europe have been the human commodities of a massive smuggling trade.

Even now, European policymakers continue to visit Tripoli and Benghazi to propose and pay for new schemes to cut off migration. None of these deals will work, because the negotiating partners in Libya are intending for them to fail—their survival depends on the financial benefits and political support of the Libyan smugglers.

In short, the EU is trapped in magical thinking, closing their eyes and crossing their fingers for an impossible outcome.

Make no mistake, the recent dip in migration is a pause before the storm. Europe’s transactional support for corrupt and kleptocratic regimes feeds instability in Libya and undermines government institutions, enhancing the conditions beneficial for criminal enterprise.

Libya’s skilled operators are positioned to once again unleash new flows of migrants, risking a scale of crisis not seen since 2016. Reopening their floodgates into Europe tees up the “coercive migration” strategy we’ve seen again and again, as Libya’s leaders hold Europe hostage for even more funding, support, and demands for political legitimacy.

Adding to the folly, as Europe underwrites their rule, Libya’s leaders are playing yet another double game—Russia now uses Libya to evade sanctions and smuggle fuel into Europe.

The uncomfortable truth is that the current migration agreements are inhumane, wasteful of EU taxpayers’ money, and strategically counterproductive.

The EU should impose significant consequences on those responsible for human smuggling and the inhumane treatment of migrants. This includes comprehensive targeted network sanctions on the individuals, companies, airlines, and enablers involved in the smuggling.

Until Europe looks squarely at the fundamentally criminal operations disguised as governance in Libya, this abusive, corrupt cycle will never end. The kleptocracies of Libya will only become more entrenched and enriched, “aided and abetted” by the EU.

Mistreated and broken human beings will continue to be sold, swapped, and smuggled across the sea by the hundreds of thousands, a cascading tragedy that the wilful blindness of current policy won’t make go away.