Libya Lacks Plan To Prevent More Migrants Crossing To Europe: EU Officials
Local Editor
Libya's UN-backed government has no clear plan to help prevent more migrants reaching Europe's shores this summer, European Union officials said Thursday, citing confused requests for equipment to patrol its shores.
Libya's newly trained coastguards lack a strategy on where to deploy or how to detect and intercept smugglers, officials told Reuters, basing their analysis on two documents prepared for EU defense ministers meeting in Malta, the route to Italy on which thousands of people drowned last year.
The confidential EU assessment contrasts with the upbeat message the bloc has promoted after training 93 Libyan coastguards since late last year to tackle smugglers as the bloc scales back its plans to go into Libya's territorial waters.
The European Union said it cannot go into Libyan waters without a United Nations Security Council mandate, which the EU says Russia is unlikely to provide because of grievances over the West's 2011 air campaign that helped oust Muammar Gadhafi.
"Our objective is not to be in the territorial waters of Libya. Our objective is that in the territorial waters of Libya, the work is done by the Libyans," the European Union's top diplomat Federica Mogherini said, arriving to chair the meeting of defense ministers to discuss the EU strategy.
The European Union, which has five ships patrolling international waters near Libya, eventually aims to have 500 Libyans trained to catch people and arms traffickers off the shores of the North African country.
To help Libya, where the fragile government of Fayez al-Seraj has only a partial hold on the vast desert country, the European Union asked Tripoli to send its requests for equipment, in addition to the 10 patrol boats Italy is sending to the country.
Still divided between rival factions after the civil war that ended Gadhafi's rule, Libya's instability has thwarted EU efforts to repeat a contentious migration deal with Turkey to halt migrants moving to Germany via Greece.
Source: News Agencies, Edited by website team
