Editor’s note: Before his speech at Georgia Tech, former CNN International journalist Ralitsa Vassileva interviewed EU Ambassador David O’Sullivan for Global Atlanta about the pressing issue of African migrants. Listen here.
The Arab awakening, originally a “moment of hope and opportunity,” has “gone sour and created a period of unprecedented instability” that has sent waves of illegal refugees streaming across the Mediterranean toward Europe, said David O’Sullivan, ambassador of the European Union to the United States.
Speaking to Georgia Tech students at the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs, Mr. O’Sullivan delivered a laundry list of political and economic challenges the EU and the U.S. must address, including most immediately, the horrific scenes of hundreds of Africans fleeing to Europe and drowning, a large percentage of whom are leaving from Libya where the “rule of law has broken down.”
“Immigration is a politically sensitive issue domestically and with Europe’s aging population, we do need immigrants,” the ambassador said.
However, the instability is presenting an immigration challenge for European nations, especially Italy, which has dealt with the brunt of the influx. In the last weeks, a shipwreck off the Italian coast killed hundreds of fleeing migrants who were put on ships by smugglers.
“These civil wars, particularly in Libya, have brought the latest event where — well we don’t know exactly, maybe 900 persons — drowned in the Mediterranean. We need an urgent response to not only rescue as many people as possible but capture the traffickers, possibly by military force,” Mr. O’Sullivan said.
The ambassador put the blame squarely on the traffickers for their ruthless exploitation of people’s misery who are seeking a better life in Europe. The traffickers are pushing them out to sea and essentially telling them, “‘Go in that direction and see what happens.’”
In a meeting with European leaders on Wednesday, while Mr. O’Sullivan was in Atlanta, Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi called for a possible U.N.-backed military intervention to strike at the smugglers’ staging grounds, along with measures to double patrols and improve communication across the EU to share the burden of asylum seekers.
“Italy can’t handle it alone, and Europe must accept that there will be asylum seekers as well as illegal immigrants. We need to have a greater willingness to offer refuge and asylum but also be willing to send those illegal immigrants back home. We can’t have an open gate policy; we can’t absorb the numbers,” Mr. O’Sullivan said.
He doesn’t see a political solution soon in these countries facing civil wars, such as Yemen and Libya, or those facing Islamic militant groups such as ISIS. The Syrian civil war is perhaps the largest human challenge in living memory, he said.
“If you can’t fix the problem politically, then sometimes you just have to let it work itself out,” he said. “Of course, you can’t intervene in every civil war but you can’t try to make sure that there is no genocide or ethnic cleansing. You might try to get a political dialogue among the parties but other than that I don’t know if one can succeed in stopping the violence. Sometimes the only solution is to let them fight it out and then deal with the resulting consequences.”
In an interview earlier in the day, he told Global Atlanta that a “comprehensive approach” is needed that can address the political and economic conditions driving migration, especially in Libya.
“We need a political breakthrough in order to be better able to address the security issue,” he said.
Of course, immigration was just one problem Mr. O’Sullivan addressed in a 35-minute speech that also covered EU-U.S. collaboration on combating Iran’s nuclear program, negotiating the proposed Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, addressing climate change and more.
He was clear that the transatlantic partners stand allied in their position on Russia, where president Vladimir Putin has “torn up the rule book of the European security architecture that was put in place after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. I never thought I’d live to see the annexation of part of a European country by another European country. He added that the world is going to have to learn how to deal with a “new Russia.”
So far, sanctions haven’t had the desired effect of bringing Mr. Putin back to the table, but they will remain in place until the U.S. and EU have full faith in Russia’s commitment to sign the Minsk Protocol. “The jury is still out.”
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