It’s no secret. Today, one of the vital urgencies for the countries of the European Union is to stop the waves of migration which are crashing more and more strongly on their coasts. And this European Union seems to have delegated to Giorgia Meloni’s Italy the responsibility of drawing up a migration pact between Europe and the countries of the Maghreb.
The objective of this pact, the extent and limits of which are being tested on the Tunisian example, is to encourage these countries through which these candidates for immigration pass or which are themselves exporters of immigrants to adopt a police policy which protects the external borders of Europe by their tireless struggles against the networks of trafficking and transport of illegal immigrants to the European “eldorado”.
Ironically, it was Giorgia Meloni, from the far right, who was responsible for developing this pact and this European strategy. Two main reasons qualified her for this. The first is that she was elected on a cutting-edge program to fight illegal immigration. The second is that the proximity to the Tunisian and Libyan gates means that Italy is bearing the full brunt of the onslaught of would-be immigrants, taking advantage of the economic and political crisis in Tunisia and the chronic security instability in Libya.
On the first point, Giorgia Meloni had to suffer the sarcasm of the French Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, who reproached her for doing tons as a candidate and for being powerless while in power.
Italian geography has therefore imposed the choice of Tunisia as a life-size laboratory for this pact on migration, probably intended to be duplicated with countries like Morocco or Algeria.
Moreover, the International Conference on Development and Migration, chaired by Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, saw the participation of many Mediterranean officials, including Moroccan Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita. The latter did not fail to underline that “Under the leadership of HM King Mohammed VI, Morocco has accumulated proven experience in the governance of migratory flows over more than two decades” and to specify that “Morocco does not treat the migration issue as a theoretical issue, but as a lived reality”.
In reality, the European Union through Italy behaves with Tunisia as Great Britain behaved with France to control migratory flows in the region of Calais and its maritime borders with the United Kingdom.
For Rome and therefore also for Brussels, it is a question of putting substantial economic aid on the table to convince the Tunisian authorities to invest themselves seriously in the fight against the networks which flood the European Union with refugees and prevent boats filled with candidates for immigration from setting sail in the Mediterranean to dock on European shores.
These boats have on several occasions caused political crises between European countries which refuse to welcome them so as not to have to manage this burden. France, for example, regularly invokes the European rule of the nearest port to force Italy to assume its responsibilities in this area. Recently, Giorgia Meloni began to show reluctance and a defiant posture provoking numerous psychodramas within the European Union itself.
Outsourcing the management of candidates for immigration to Europe to countries outside the European zone seems to be the new direct line of European migration policy. During the debate in the European authorities on these questions, some had even proposed the idea of setting up sorting centers in countries to process the files of candidates for the political and humanitarian refuge guaranteed by European laws.
This outsourcing strategy had already been tested in his mind with Tayeb Erdogan’s Turkey. In exchange for a sum in Euros which is counted by billions, Turkey agrees to play the police on the Greek borders of the European Union. The significant drop in immigrants entering through the Turkish gate shows that the Turkish president is fulfilling his mission relatively well, even if he occasionally uses the migration card to exercise blackmail that has become an integral part of his links with the European Union.
NGOs working on the phenomenon of migration in the Mediterranean are upwind against the migration strategy of Giorgia Meloni and Europe, accusing it of favoring security treatment and burying humanitarian concerns. Which makes this NGO, Sea Watch, say that “The Mediterranean is not just a cemetery, but a crime scene”.
This article is originally published on fnh.ma
