Obama and Europe's Libyan debacle still creating a refugee problem

Defense News:
An outbreak of fierce fighting in Libya between militias has revealed how Europe’s best efforts to stop hundreds of thousands of migrants sailing from Libya to Europe can unravel in the lawless country.

Recent clashes in Sabratha, a coastal town west of Tripoli, claimed 40 lives as rival militias — which all profess loyalty to Libya’s UN-backed government — fired rockets at each other in the town center, damaging hospitals and schools.

One likely reason behind the battle was resentment over money, following widespread reports that one of the militias had been paid millions of euros by Italy to stop its lucrative business of loading African migrants into dinghies and sending them to Italy — which lies north across the Mediterranean.

“It was like throwing breadcrumbs to fish in a fountain — whatever the Italians did was a reason for the escalation,” said Mattia Toaldo, a senior analyst at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

“The militias were fighting for control of Sabratha, because that control is crucial to getting something from the Italians,” he added.

Some 108,000 migrants, many from sub-Saharan Africa, have sailed from Libya this year, after 181,000 made the journey last year, earning a fortune for brutal traffickers who bring the migrants up through the Sahara desert and lock them in detention camps while they wait for a boat. The business has flourished since the demise of Libyan strongman Col. Muammar Ghedaffi in 2011, which left the country rudderless and contested by two rival governments, one in the capital Tripoli which has UN-backing, and a rival in Tobruk, which is allied with a military leader Gen. Khalifa Haftar.

The flow of migrants has helped spur a rise of anti-migrant sentiment in Europe and aided the rise of populist parties. Finding a solution has been hampered by conflicting foreign political intervention, with Russia, France, Egypt and the UAE backing Gen. Haftar against Tripoli’s UN-backed leader Fayez al-Serraj, who is supported by Italy.
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There is more.

This is what happens when you try to buy your way out of a bad situation by funding warlords rather than using military operations to seize control of an area.   The piece does not answer why people in sub-Saharan Africa are fleeing, but I suspect they are mainly economic refugees looking to get on the dole in Europe. 

By creating the instability in Libya, Obama, Clinton and the Europeans who support the overthrow of the Libyan government created a much bigger crisis for Europe.

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