er presented itself as a major tamer of the refugee crisis. However, the former Italian interior minister Matteo Salvini actually owed the declining numbers of refugees, which he sold as his successes, to the previous social democratic government. That had namely various agreements closed in Libya, which meant that fewer boats with migrants left there.
However, Salvini largely ignored the important transit country of Libya during his one-year term, which contributed to a devastating loss of influence by Italy in the strategically important region. Since September 2019, Salvini and his Lega party have been no longer part of the government.
There is war in Libya, and Russia and that Turkey are going to fill the vacuum, that Italy has left in recent years. While the eyes of the world public are now focused on the conflicts between the United States and Iran, this conflict is disappearing in the region, which is no less relevant for Europe: the war in Libya threatens to escalate these days. With immediate consequences for the Europeans.
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Its outcome will have a direct impact on Europe’s interests in migration and energy policy. Furthermore, the latest developments in the conflict, such as a misguided domestic policy in Italy and the EU’s failure to pursue a foreign policy with a common voice, are helping Europe to lose its influence in the important country to other major powers.
Since the fall of dictator Muammar al-Gaddafi in 2011, a civil war has been smoldering in the oil-rich country, in which the elected and internationally recognized unity government under Prime Minister Fajez al-Sarradsch and General Chalifa Haftar are facing each other. However, the power struggle is not just about national interests, rather a proxy war is taking place in which major international powers negotiate their supremacy in the region.
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Source: Infographic WELT / Paul Daniel
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In April the conflict reached one new escalation level, when Haftar, on whose side Russian mercenaries are said to be fighting, launched an offensive on Tripoli controlled by Sarradsch. At the beginning of this year, Sarradsch finally received additional military support from Turkey, which in turn secured the right to areas in the Mediterranean where rich natural gas deposits are suspected.
On Wednesday now underpinned the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Russian President Vladimir Putin asserted their right to supremacy in the region by calling on the warring parties in Libya to adhere to a weeklong ceasefire starting on Sunday – which both warring parties also agreed to. However, minutes after its entry into force on the night of Sunday, they accused each other of violations of the ceasefire.Both sides said they would continue to commit to the ceasefire.
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Libya – a torn country with an uncertain future
Libya has not come to rest since the civil war in 2011. The UN-supported state is led by Prime Minister as-Sarradsch. But General Haftar’s militia wants to overthrow the controversial government.
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Source: WELT / Nicole Fuchs-Wiecha
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At the same time as the Russian-Turkish initiative, two attempts by European countries to calm the situation failed: First, Germany, Great Britain, France and Italy had their top meeting with the EU’s foreign minister Josep Borrell on the crisis in Libya on Tuesday due to the poor security situation in Tripoli had to relocate to Brussels and thus missed direct contact with the parties to the conflict.
An attempt at mediation by the Italians, who traditionally play an important role in Libya, where they were once colonial power, subsequently failed on Wednesday. Nothing is left of the once good relations that the former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi maintained with dictator Gaddafi to secure Italy’s economic interests in Libya.
In addition to the geographical proximity, the countries are currently linked by the presence of the Italian oil company Eni in Libya. In addition, Italy is currently represented in the country with the Miasit mission, which since January 2018 has been to support the Sarraj government in restoring peace in the country and the illegal migration to fight. There are currently around 250 soldiers and 130 vehicles, ships and planes of the Italian military in Libya.
The Italians have also been trying for months to find a diplomatic solution to the conflict. Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio traveled to the region repeatedly and tried to bring the two sides closer together. Since the attempts were unsuccessful, Prime Minister Guiseppe Conte announced that he would receive Sarradsch and Haftar in Rome one after the other to talk about a possible easing of the situation and a ceasefire.
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But due to a protocol error, the Italian received the aggressor Haftar first on Wednesday afternoon. When Sarradsch, on whose side Italy officially stands, found out, he ordered his pilot to turn around – and Rome’s efforts were wasted. A meeting of Conte with Sarradsch took place on Saturday, and on Monday the Italian prime minister wants to speak to the Turkish president Erdogan. Foreign minister Luigi Di Maio suggested in a newspaper interview on Sunday that he would send troops to Libya under a UN mandate and defuse the conflict through a tripartite meeting with Italy, Russia and Turkey. A solution is to be sought at a Libya conference in Berlin at the end of the month. Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio said they were preparing the meeting and hoped to get all the actors around the table there.
Italy’s failed attempt to mediate shows how much the country has recently moved away from Libya and, at the same time, has given up its role as an intermediary between the North African country and the European Union. Stupid diplomacy was added to strategic misjudgments when Rome did not even manage to receive the Libyan interlocutors in the correct order. Salvini ridiculed the government for this faux pas by saying that not even a kindergarten child would make such a mistake.
Neither Italy nor the EU can afford to lag behind in Libya. In addition to the energy policy interests of France and Italy, which receive important gas and oil supplies from the country, Libya also plays a key role in the refugee issue as a central transit country for migrants who want to reach Europe via the Mediterranean. According to data from the International Organization for Migration (IOM), more than 181,000 people came to Italy in this way in 2016.
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To make this moveTo stop, the then Italian Interior Minister Marco Minniti, who belongs to the social democratic Partito Democratico (PD), reached an agreement with officials in summer 2017 that supports the Libyan coast guard with equipment and money and in return ensures that no more refugees are cared for make their way to Europe across the sea.
However, the Italians also received a lot of criticism for the agreement because, on the one hand, they had to do business with armed militias in Libya and thus help legitimize these groups, as Claudia Gazzini from the Think Tank International Crisis Group in Brussels explains. On the other hand, the agreement only seems to solve the refugee problem because it merely stops migrants in Libya from being subjected to abuse and torture in refugee camps and prisons.
Nevertheless, the number of refugees arriving has undeniably decreased: while 119,000 people came to Italy via the Mediterranean in 2017, there were only 23,000 in 2018 and only around 11,500 last year. Salvini, head of the right-wing Lega party and Italy’s interior minister from June 2018 to September 2019, celebrated the declining numbers as his personal success.
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He led her to his strict migration policy back, which essentially consisted of closing the ports of the country to refugees in the media and combating the private lifeboats. But he obviously lost sight of the conflict within Libya: “When Salvini was Minister of the Interior, he acted as if he could solve the refugee question at sea,” says Gazzini. “At the same time, he failed to make a serious contribution to resolving the conflict within Libya.”
In an interview with the Italian newspaper “La Stampa”, Salvini’s predecessor Minniti indirectly accused the Lega politician of having gambled away Italy’s former central location in Libya due to his absence in Libya. Without mentioning Salvini by name, Minniti, who is now a normal member of the ruling PD, says that the main responsibility for the lost influence lies “with those who have used immigration as a domestic issue and a lever for a break within the EU. This has resulted in the isolation of our country and the fragility of its diplomatic initiatives. ”
Salvini ignored Libya
It is not surprising that Minniti Salvini is now vehemently criticizing the Libya question, says Gazzini: “The Libya question has always been used in Italy to pursue domestic politics.” Rather, she believes that a combination of politics and Minnitis Salvinis led to the loss of influence in Italy.
Even Minniti’s strategy of reaching agreements with armed militias had given them greater legitimacy and thus contributed to the destabilization of the country. Salvini’s ignorance of the conflict further worsened the situation. Now it is important that the EU speaks with one voice, because the individual countries alone do not have enough weight to bring about an improvement in the conflict – especially not when global players like Russia and Turkey defend their interests on the ground. “The less fragmented Europe is on this issue, the more it can achieve,” believes Gazzini.
