It was clear to all last October what the disbanding of Italy’s “Mare Nostrum” search and rescue mission meant. Perhaps EU leaders were able to delude themselves that the consequences were not going to be quite as lethal as Sunday’s appalling sinking off the Libyan coast – up to 900 dead. But every capital from Helsinki to Athens knew that hundreds of hapless migrants would pay with their lives for the EU’s refusal to replace Mare Nostrum with an operation of equivalent scale. Instead we got an EU mission, “Triton”, with a smaller budget and a far narrower remit.
Yesterday EU foreign ministers were again faced with the same choices: to take collective responsibility for the ongoing tragedy or turn a blind eye. There can be no more excuses. Sunday will happen again and again – yesterday 23 more died. And the morally dubious excuse that the existence of rescue ships is an incentive to migrants to make the journey has been given the lie by the reality of 21,000 successfully landing in Italy this year – at a cost of 1,500 dead. They will come anyway, on any boat, no matter how flimsy.
Federica Mogherini, the EU's foreign policy chief, yesterday rightly demanded immediate action: "With this latest tragedy . . . the EU has no more excuses, the member states have no more excuses. The main issue here is to build a common sense of European responsibility, knowing that there is no easy solution."
Italy, under domestic political and economic pressure, had suspended the operation that was costing some €7 million a month. It had become fed up with other EU states’ notional support for the idea of “burden sharing”. Only Germany and Sweden, for instance, have taken significant numbers of Syrian refugees – more than 120,000 have arrived in Europe since 2011.
It is not going to be easy. Immigration is a toxic issue in just about every EU state. In the UK the issue is central in the election. Elsewhere far-right groups like France’s Front National pose imminent threats in looming elections. What chance then that a brave politician will step forward and give a home to thousands of refugee Africans? But it must be done, and that means Dublin too. Some opening of the door is needed to ease the pressure on the illegal routes and an effective rescue mission similar to Mare Nostrum.
Even more difficult will be the longer term challenge for the EU to address the push factors driving the flow – the wars in countries from Libya to Syria, Iraq, the Central African Republic, Mali and South Sudan that feed the desperation of millions to flee. That means economic and probably peacekeeping military assistance to stabilise states like Libya, a prerequisite for any attempt to take on the violent people traffickers who thrive on the chaos.
But doing nothing is not an option.