Auszüge aus einem Kommentar von Kenan Malik in The Guardian

Central to the EU’s strategy over the past decade has been the outsourcing of immigration control, paying countries from Libya to Sudan, from Niger to Turkey, to deter potential migrants to Europe. In this process a new form of imperialism is emerging, whereby rich nations, in the name of protecting their borders from migrants, trample all over the borders of poorer neighbours.

Niger, on the southern edge of the Sahara, is now, in the words of one European ambassador, “the southern border of Europe”. Whereas immigration controls are usually about stopping people entering a country illegally, the new imperialism requires African nations to prevent people leaving their territory if they might be coming to Europe. It’s the 21st century’s version of the Berlin Wall slung across the African continent. […]

What is really being outsourced, as Mali’s former presidential candidate Aminata Traoré observes, is “violence and instability”. Europe has turned migrants into commodities to be haggled over in a brutal new marketplace. It presents its policies as “a response to criminality”, a recent report on EU strategy notes, but in reality it is “fuelling predatory and criminal behaviour by generating perverse incentives in ‘partner’ countries”.

The EU does not particularly care who its “partners” are, so long as they willing to stop migrants reaching the Mediterranean. Sudan’s former president, Omar al-Bashir, overthrown in a military coup this year, has been indicted by the international criminal court for war crimes in Darfur. His regime was part of the “Khartoum process”, an EU initiative to cut off the migrant route from the Horn of Africa. One of the most effective instruments in policing migrants is Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitaries. Until 2013 they were known as the Janjaweed, a vicious militia that pursued almost genocidal violence in Darfur. Earlier this year, the RSF was responsible for massacres against anti-government protesters in Khartoum. It also plies its trade on behalf of the EU.

Nor does the EU particularly worry about whom its “partners” lock up, so long as they lock up potential migrants to Europe. In the Sahel, 80% of migration is not to Europe but is regional, involving people who for decades have moved around an area in which borders are naturally porous. Militias and security forces don’t care to sift through different kinds of migrants, so all become targets for the new kidnap and detention industry. The result is the disruption of traditional trade routes, growing economic instability and rising discontent – feeding the desire for migration.

The EU turns a blind eye to the treatment of detainees, too.

The Guardian | 30.11.2019

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