Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Antioch]

Getting rid of Ghaddafi was a mistake. The French couldn't leave his attempts at reducing their influence in Francophone West Africa alone though, so they knocked it all over. Now he's not around to stamp out the human traffickers, and we get the current situation.

They did this to themselves, really.

Ghaddafi got rid of himself in the first place. Half the country rebelled without NATO dropping a single bomb. Without intervention that civil war might very well still be going on.

The situation now is still bad of course.

[Pwnzerfaust]

That's... Definitely not certain. The Libyan Army had rallied and the rebels were making a sort of last-stand in the east of the country. I'm under the impression that the Western air strikes saved the rebellion.

[hector13]

Well, sending refugees to Libya just moves the problem somewhere else, to a country that won't be particularly happy about it. They'll want something in return for it, like Turkey did, and if they don't get it I can't imagine they're going to want to pay for keeping the refugees.

Libyan government-funded people smuggling into Europe, commence!

[Sheb]

Nah, but I guess you could make a deal where wannabe refugees are processed on Libyan soil in European-adminsitered camps and all boats are returned to Libya for processing there. That way you cut a large portion of the people smuggler's business, save 5-6000 lives a year from drowning in the Med and can actually only let legit refugees to Europe.

[hector13]

That hasn't worked so well in the Spanish exclaves in Morocco, hasn't there been a handful of mass rushes on the fences there in the past few months?

[ChairmanPoo]

Nah, but I guess you could make a deal where wannabe refugees are processed on Libyan soil in European-adminsitered camps and all boats are returned to Libya for processing there. That way you cut a large portion of the people smuggler's business, save 5-6000 lives a year from drowning in the Med and can actually only let legit refugees to Europe.

What's preventing them from trying again, though?

That hasn't worked so well in the Spanish exclaves in Morocco, hasn't there been a handful of mass rushes on the fences there in the past few months?

Over and over. This sudden panic about mass immigration? The south of Spain has been like that as far as I can remember. People actually brave the Atlantic in makeshift boats from as far as Mauritania. And the tide is not abating. Tbh that's one of the things that puzzles me the most of the refuggee crisis: it's not new at all and has been going on for decades in Southern Europe

By the way, afaik according to international law you can't just shove immigrants back across the border as they come in, nor can you repatriate them somewhere without said country's collaboration. One common tactic in internment centers is lying about your country of birth to muddle things up

[Sheb]

That hasn't worked so well in the Spanish exclaves in Morocco, hasn't there been a handful of mass rushes on the fences there in the past few months?

Yeah, those happens from time to time, but it's different: the Spanish exclaves are European soil, those camps wouldn't be. But yeah, those are the main illustration of how broken and retarded the EU asylum/migration policy is: we make it very hard and dangerous to enter Europe, but once people are in we're extremely generous if they're granted asylum and extremely bad at making them exit again. It's like a fucking sick game show.

What's preventing them from trying again, though?

Trying what? To cross the Med? They can, but frankly, if the end results is that migrants are once more put on real boat instead of being put on leaky zodiac that are only intended to make it to the rescue ship right outside of Libya territorial water, we'll at least be saving a large portions of them from drowning. It's again an exemple of the fucking travesty our approach is: more migrants are dying trying to cross the 20 km to the rescue ships than trying to cross the hundreds of km to Lampedusa several years ago.

Plus, we're getting pretty good at intercepting boats (although not good enough to prevent the 5000-6000 estimated death a year) and as long as they're in international water you could legally turn them back AFAIK.

[Pwnzerfaust]

Another thing I wish Europe would do, in addition to other measures, is to target the smugglers. Arrest or assassinate them. If Europe makes being a people smuggler extremely hazardous to one's health, it will reduce the number of smugglers, thereby driving up prices and reducing flow out of Libya.

[Sheb]

Another thing I wish Europe would do, in addition to other measures, is to target the smugglers. Arrest or assassinate them. If Europe makes being a people smuggler extremely hazardous to one's health, it will reduce the number of smugglers, thereby driving up prices and reducing flow out of Libya.

That's way easier said than down, unless you want to occupy Libya entirely.

[Pwnzerfaust]

How many thousands of ISIS members have the coalition killed so far? I'm sure if smugglers were treated like ISIS, they could put the fear of the gods into them.

[Sheb]

Do I really need to point out how it's far easier to identify an ISIS soldier from the air than to identify a smuggler?

[Pwnzerfaust]

Sure, but that's why you put people on the ground to find out who they are. They obviously need to be known by people in order to be useful, so you find out who they are, and then either use special forces to extract or eliminate them, or watch them until they are isolated from anyone else and drop a missile on their heads. Rinse and repeat until people are too scared to be smugglers.

[smjjames]

Well, as Sheb said, it's easier said than done. It's not like there are smuggler training camps or bases to target.

The most obvious way to deal with the smugglers is to make it nonprofitable to smuggle, but how do you go about that? Maybe you could treat them like people already treat Somali pirates? Except that they commonly just abandon the refugee ship and flee back to shore.

[redwallzyl]

Nothing could possibly go wrong with this more missiles plan.

[Sheb]

At that point why don't you invade the country and install a stable government? Because it's starting to sound easier.