After Mali… Libya

(BRUSSELS2) The EUTM Mali mission on track, let's move on to the next level of European strategy in the Sahel and North Africa: Libya. B2 has been talking about this "possible" CSDP mission in Libya for months. The deadline is approaching. The concept of crisis management (CMC) was adopted by the "27", on January 31, with the aim of speeding up the tempo. The first recruitments (about fifteen) have started. And a last evaluation mission goes back to the field, on March 14, to refine the Concept of Operation (Conops). This could be adopted at the end of April; in the same format as for the EUTM Mali mission, i.e. a "Conops +" detailed enough to allow the rest of the planning to take place more quickly. The launch decision as well as the budget could thus be approved at the end of May. And the start of the mission is scheduled for June. According to the information that has reached us, the need is strong: the border management system is poorly coordinated, the controllers poorly trained, and there is a lack of equipment...

Fight against immigration or stabilization

The mission, however, harbors a contradiction. For some Europeans, it is essential to ensure border control in order to stop immigration from Africa. This is to resume the projects started with the Gaddafi regime aimed at preventing the arrival of African immigrants crossing Libya. Clearly, we have a "frontex +" mission (from the name of the European border control agency. For the Libyan authorities, apparently according to the first evaluation missions of the EU, this is not Elsewhere, not so much the control of the coasts or airports, which seems essential to them, but more of the southern border.A point of view shared by anti-terrorist specialists, for whom it is important to avoid instability the passage of men or equipment to or from Mali, or even to Algeria. Strongly centered on the control of Libyan immigration to Europe, this imbalance will no doubt need to be corrected. There is indeed a great risk that the challenge of this mission either South-South migration flows or the risk of internal terrorism as much as North-South control.

Detailed analysis of the border management situation, of the different axes of the future mission and of the positions being recruited, available for subscribers to the Club