Sea Control - Humanity at Sea and Naval Responses: The Migration and Refugee Crisis in the Mediterranean

Episode Date: February 3, 2020

In this episode, Dr. John Shewood, US Navy Historian at the Naval History and Heritage Command, joins Dr. Ruxandra Bosilca, CIMSEC`s Social Media Coordinator, to examine the EU and NATO response to the raging migration and refugee crisis in the Mediterranean.

You're listening to Seacontrol, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Aloha, shipmates, and welcome aboard Seacontrol. My name is Oksandra Bosilka. I'm the social media coordinator of CIMSEC, and today we're discussing the migration and refugee crisis in the Mediterranean. My guest here is Dr. John Sherwell, a historian at the Naval History and Heritage Command, the official historical agency of the U.S. Navy.

He holds a Ph.D. in history from the George Washington University and has authored six books, as well as a large number of articles and book reviews. Hi, John. It's a great pleasure. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for having me on your show, Roxandra. So could you perhaps tell us a bit more about your current research work? Yes.

There are two projects that sort of feed into the current research that I'm doing now. One is a book that I have written on the United States Navy and Libya that focuses heavily on what happened in 2011, so Operation Odyssey Dawn and Unified Protector. unfortunately that manuscript is still uh in declassification and so while i am waiting for that to be declassified i thought i would write a another book on humanitarian operations involving the u.s navy the u.s coast guard and the marine and the u.s marine corps And in doing that research, I found that the current operations involving European Coast Guards and navies in the Mediterranean with respect to the migration crisis very much fits in with the general focus of that book. So I thought I would like to include a chapter on that subject in the book, and to enable myself to do that research, I applied for a Fulbright-Schuman Award.

And Fulbright-Schuman is a strategic alliance between the U.S. Fulbright Commission or commissions and the European Union. And what it does is each side funds a piece of that fellowship with the idea that Europeans will come to the U.S. and study U.S. topics and Americans will come to Europe and study European topics. One of the stipulations of that grant is that a person spend at least half of it in two different member states of the European Union. And I chose Germany and also Greece. Germany, my host institution, was the Institute for Security Policy at Kiel University. And my reasoning there was that I wanted to focus on a northern European country heavily involved in the migration crisis. Germany fit that bill. And Kiel is a major base for the German Navy.

einsatz one of the einsatz flotillas and my reasoning for choosing greece was because it's on the front line uh front lines of the current migration crisis and my host institution there was the honic national defense college in athens and i spent uh approximately one some one academic semester in Europe interviewing various officials from European navies and Coast Guards I interviewed 42 officers in total plus a number of mariners working for NGOs mostly from the German NGO CI but I also interviewed someone from Sea Watch which is also which is also heavily German but does a lot of work in the Mediterranean. So that's my background. As a maritime scholar myself, I think your work

is fascinating. And of course, congratulations on the Fulbright Human Fellowship. I know it's very competitive. So before we dive in here, I was wondering if you could please tell us more about who are the migrants and where are they coming from? Okay. Right now, approximately seven and a half percent of the European Union's population are migrants, first generation migrants. And recently, many of those migrants are coming by sea. in 2015 that was the peak year you had a million migrants coming by sea to europe and about 800 000 of those migrants came from the eastern mad through through greece as the as the route and about 200 000 uh from the central mediterranean which is from libya and the rest mainly coming up from Morocco into Spain.

And of this group, there are two types of immigrants. There are migrants and refugees. And migrants are defined by the European Union in Frontex as being people in search of economic opportunity. Refugees are those escaping from war. And the numbers that I have, I have 2017 numbers for migrants. And the number one country is Syria. Number two, Nigeria. Number three, Ivory Coast. Number four, Guinea. Number five, Morocco. And interestingly enough, for refugees, the top state is again, Syria. And for 2018, there were about 6.7 million refugees fleeing from Syria. Afghanistan was next at 2.7 million, South Sudan at 2.3 million, Myanmar 1.1 million, and Somalia 0.9 million.

Now, for the European Union, the countries of greatest concern are Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq. And the country that has been hit hardest by the migration crisis is a country that is partially within Europe but is not part of the European Union, and that is Turkey. And Turkey has right now between 3 and 4 million refugees living within its borders. So that, in a nutshell, is what the European Union and its neighbor Turkey is confronting right now. Would you please describe the situation in the Central and Eastern Mediterranean? Okay. There's been a lot of focus on the Central Mediterranean. But the first major EU operation with regard to migration was in 2006 when joint operation Poseidon began in the eastern Mediterranean, or Aegean Sea. And this involved border surveillance of the sea.

um in 2011 poseidon was widened to include crete in 2013 sort of the focus shifts to the central mediterranean when italy launches something called operation mare nostrum which was designed to save the lives of people fleeing from or refugees and migrants fleeing from libya during that year Italian naval and coast guard ships rescued over 150,000 migrants. Italy also became quickly overwhelmed, and they asked the European Union in that year to assist, and that is when something called Operation Triton was established, and that was a Frontex operation designed to replace Mare Nostrum, and approximately 15 nations participated in Operation Triton, including naval vessels, which is quite interesting.

Then in 2015, what happened is that over 2,000 people, migrants, perished in the central Mediterranean, five boats in total, with one killing over 800 people. And the European Union just couldn't stand for this kind of loss of life. It was an emergency. And that was what led to the creation of Operation Sophia, which was designed to be initially a naval operation focused on helping Frontex rescue some of these migrants that were coming across. cross the Central Med. At the same time, in the Eastern Med, this activity also picked up. During that year, 2015, as I mentioned, over 800,000 refugees crossed from mainly Turkish waters into Greece.

so those those two operations um well three so poseidon in the eastern med triton in central med and then sofia and then later uh nato also became involved in the eastern med with something called operation sea guardian sea guardian is actually a much bigger operation that includes the It's actually one task unit of Operation Sea Guardian, which is commanded by a German Commodore, and it includes a frigate from Germany and several naval ships from Turkey and also Greece. And what they do is they augment the Frontex and Hellenic Coast Guard and the Hellenic Navy in providing border surveillance in that eastern Mediterranean area. So there's also an additional Frontex operation called Minerva, which covers the border of Spain and Morocco. So those are your basic migratory sectors that the European, or maritime sectors that the European Union is currently concerned with. Why do you think that both Coast Guards and navies were involved?

And how would you describe these operations as search and rescue missions, or perhaps national security missions, or border security missions? That's probably the heart of the complexity of these operations. On the one hand, all countries, all maritime vessels have a legal obligation under the UN Law of the Sea, Article 98, and also SOLAS, which is Safety of Life at Sea. that's that's chapter five of the convention for the safety of life at sea and what these laws essentially mean is that if you come upon mariners in distress or if a rescuing coordination center such as the one in rome or the one in athens says hey you need to rescue these migrants by law you have to do it uh there have been u.s navy off there's a u.s navy officer who was court-martialing in the early 90s for um well he gave migrants water food and a compass

and he thought that they could make it to the philippines but some of them didn't make it and he was court-martialed for not actually taking those people on board uh this involved the warship Dubuque. And I've actually interviewed the commander. His name is Alexander Balian. So because of this law, everybody out there has to be involved in search and rescue. But for example, Frontex, search and rescue is not the mission of the Frontex units out there. The mission of Frontex is to augment the border security, increase the border security of states on Europe's outer borders. And they do this in a number of ways, one of which is to provide assets. And these assets right now are coming from member states like Germany, Finland, Spain, Italy, and various others.

They also provide information and intelligence to states on the outer edge of the European border, and they provide training, and they also assist in returning migrants. So after migrants have applied for asylum, their asylum has been rejected, they've had their chances to appeal, Frontex will charter aircraft to move them back to where they need to go. So that's what Frontex does. And then SOFIA is a multifaceted operation. It started off as primarily a SAR operation, but it morphed into a lot more than that. It is involved in disrupting the business model of human trafficking. It is involved in countering arms smuggling. It is involved in countering oil smuggling.

It is involved in building the capacity of the Libyan Coast Guard. It is involved in counterterrorism. It is involved in maritime security. It is involved in deterrence. So it plays many, many roles. At least while it was in full swing up until 2018, where an issue over disembarkation led to the withdrawal of warships from that operation. Now it's only maritime patrol aircraft. And then NATO, which is yet another entity involved. NATO is involved primarily because of the Aegean dispute between Turkey and Greece over sea and airspace in the eastern Aegean.

It was much more amenable to Turkey to have a naval operation run by NATO, which is an organization it's a member of and a stakeholder of, than have the EU NABFOR MEDS mandate expanded to the eastern Mediterranean. NATO allows, gives Turkey a full seat at the table, and that's very, very important in terms of deconfliction of that space. And with NATO, one of the interesting things is that it's been agreed upon between Greece, Turkey, and NATO that NATO will only operate in two sectors of the Eastern Med, the northern sectors, and that all the southern sectors will be Coast Guard only. And that's, again, related to this Aegean dispute. Do you think that EU and NATO have had a successful cooperation in the Mediterranean? I think that the relationship between, from everything I've heard from all the people I've interviewed, the relationship between the EU NAV4MED and NATO and Frontex and NATO is beyond outstanding. First of all, the flagship, the NATO flagship in the Eastern Med has representatives from the EU and from Frontex on board so that information sharing can be done. One of the advantages of NATO is that NATO has an extremely robust intelligence arm, and NATO can feed that intelligence or release certain parts of that intelligence package to both the UNF or MED and also Frontex.

Frontex. And that's particularly important, believe it or not, in the central MED, where it's a very dangerous operating environment for EU Coast Guards. And to give you an idea of just how dangerous it is, I was talking to a member of Sea Watch last week. I interviewed him, and he was ordered by the Rome Maritime Rescue and Coordination Center to pick up some refugees. He was the RIB commander. He he's a very he's a trained mariner, went to Merchant Marine School, very, very skilled guy. And he was fired upon by an unmarked vessel off the coast of Libya. So for force protection reasons, it's very important to have NATO involved, very important to have that intelligence, not only to protect the NGOs, but to protect EU forces, Coast Guards right now, and of course, any naval units if they ever return. What are the best platforms for managing the crisis? Well, the Mediterranean is 2.5 million square kilometers, and it has everything from open ocean environments to what we would call riverine environments. And, for example, in Samos, where it's only about 1.6 kilometers from the Turkish coast, you obviously don't need a frigate.

There, a coastal patrol boat from the Coast Guard will work perfectly well. But in the central MED, where you can have much, much worse sea states than larger vessels, so what the Coast Guard calls offshore patrol vessels. Germany is beginning to deploy a new type of OPV called the Potsdam-Klass, which is, I would say, a perfect type of a vessel for the central Mediterranean. It has a flight deck, it could accommodate many, many migrants, it's very seaworthy, it can be armed with weaponry, it has the latest and greatest of sensors on that vessel. And warships, such as frigates, can also be extremely useful, and I'll give you an example of that. A frigate obviously can carry a lot of people, so it can pick up many, many migrants, over 100 migrants if need be, and sometimes many more than that. But frigates have a sensor suite that can be very useful in these operations.

One, thermal imagery cameras mean that a frigate can be very far removed from the coast but still see migrant activity on the shore, whether that's in Turkey or Libya, and alert coast guards before those people even leave the beach. So that's one piece. The other piece is naval ships have the ability to intercept all sorts of communications. They have the ability to jam communications. And if you're talking about disrupting the business model of human trafficking or gathering intelligence or gathering evidence, evidence is a bit tricky when you're talking about navies because they don't have law enforcement powers. But if there's a Frontex official on board collecting evidence using a Navy sensor, that might be a possibility. But the sensor suites are highly, highly useful in these situations. And then finally, the weaponry. If things go sour, as they did for my friend in Sea Watch a couple of months ago, the Navy naval ships, at least a limited presence, can back up the Coast Guard if need be.

And I'll tell you the types of vessels that shouldn't be involved. The European Union shouldn't be relying solely on merchant vessels, as they are right now in Central Med, and NGOs to pick up migrants. Merchant vessels, because it's very expensive to have a cargo ship or container ship, have to stop and pick up migrants and deliver them somewhere. And that upsets their schedules. And that costs a lot of money, and that will hurt the European economy. As far as NGOs, NGOs are very good at SAR. They have that training. They have that capability. They carry doctors, nurses, emergency medical technicians, so they can handle the medical piece. What they can't do is handle the law enforcement piece.

We are talking about a border, and if bad actors, whether they be human traffickers or arm smugglers or criminals, they have no means of dealing with those people once they are on ship, and it can be very dangerous. A German Coast Guard officer demonstrated to me in Neustadt how dangerous one person can be with a knife, and they've experienced that in the German Coast Guard. Fortunately, none of the NGOs have been affected, but if just one person comes on board with a knife, not even a gun, it could be very problematic. You mentioned earlier the very important role of NGOs in conducting search and rescue operations. What is their relationship with the EU and NATO security forces? Right now, they don't have much of a relationship. Italy had asked the NGOs to sign a memorandum of understanding that would allow NGOs to carry Italian law enforcement. NGOs didn't like that idea.

And so very few actually signed that MOU. But right now, they're still operating in the central med. And that's because there aren't enough assets there right now with just the Coast Guard. The NGOs don't have any relationship with navies, for example. They don't have a relationship with NATO. They don't have a relationship with UNF or MED. I believe it would be useful for NGOs to perhaps have some meetings with these groups, especially Frontex, in the future. interviewing both sides i believe these two groups could easily communicate with one another

and get along better but it takes communication and both sides are quite sensitive about what the other side is doing and i think there's a lot of common ground has their work interfered somehow with the role of navies there well the big argument that it's mainly frontex people but also navy people levy against the ngos is that they're somehow facilitating human trafficking that they're providing a taxi service for the traffickers so all the traffickers need to do let's take libya for an example is okay there's a sea watch ship uh offshore just beyond the 12 mile mark we're only going to give you enough gas for your rubber raft to get to that sea watch vessel and we're not even going to give you a phone we're just going to say hey just aim your

boat to that vessel and go and then the sea watch people are going to take you uh to europe and Some officials have even intimated to me that NGOs are actively cooperating with human traffickers, in other words, communicating with them in some way while the people are on the beach. So someone in Libya will say, hey, we're going to send someone from Misrata out to beyond the 12-mile mark. Can you meet us there? I talked to a policymaker in Brussels, and he said he's never seen such evidence. So I don't know for a fact what is going on. But this whole notion that the NGOs are providing a ferry service for migrants, well, that same argument has been made against the Coast Guards and also the navies.

And that's the reason, one of the reasons why navies are no longer operating in the central Mediterranean. It's very hard with the rules that exist right now for navies not to become, or Coast Guards, not to become involved in search and rescue. Frontex will not push people back. There are no pushbacks. another rule that i that i should mention there are two other rules one is the dublin rule and that is wherever a a migrant first disembarks in europe whatever country that country has to process that person's asylum claim so that puts a heavy onus on two countries italy and greece and of those countries especially greece i was i visited samos island and it's a very small island and the migrant population there now is is is 10 or 12 times the population of the citizens on on samos they are trapped the migrants are trapped on that

Island, although some will be moved eventually to the mainland. But for now, they're trapped. And what that's doing for Samos is it's scaring away tourists. And tourism is the main piece of the Samos economy. I was talking to a restaurateur in Samos, and she complained that no one comes, you know, no one eats meals there. And sure enough, I had a meal at lunch, and it was just me and two NGOs eating lunch there. The third issue is the non-refoulement principle. And that's the principle that Europe can't take migrants or refugees off the high seas and return them to a place where they might be in danger. So a European Coast Guard or naval vessel can't transfer migrants seized in the Gulf of Sirte, can't transfer them back to Libya, for example.

And that's yet a third legal problem. On the other hand, NGOs have heavily criticized the military approach taken by the UN and NATO. In the end, is there a military or broader security solution to the crisis, or does it really come down to a political problem it's it's absolutely a political problem but i want to step back and just say i have interviewed numerous coast guard and navy officers engaged in rescues and i was absolutely amazed at the respect that these officers and their crews accorded to the migrants. Human rights policies were absolutely followed to the letter of the law. There were

things that, for example, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection people do all the time that the European Frontex would not do with regard to migrants. I mean, one thing regularly our people do is put illegal migrants in restraints, whereas in Europe, that's very, very rare. The other issue is all the migrants that are intercepted and taken to either Greece or Italy are allowed to petition for asylum or to migrate to Europe. And they are given, they are allowed to stay throughout multiple appeals processes and that can that can take up to two years and europe houses and feeds these people during that process so i do think i i think those those criticisms are unfair with regard to navies and coast guards i don't see any evidence

whatsoever that navies and coast guards are violating human rights. I would say the only questionable area right now is that Europe is involved in capacity building with the Libyan Coast Guard. I've heard some very bad things about the Libyan Coast Guard, not only from NGOs, but from military. The idea of Europe allowing the Libyan Coast Guard and helping the Libyan Coast Guard intercept migrants before they reach international waters and bringing them back to Libya, well, that could be problematic. Although you could also argue that if Europe just stands back, doesn't inform the Libyan Coast Guard, and these people put to sea and then drown, which often happens, then they're also doing a disservice to the migrants.

So it's a very complicated situation. Europe is doing as good of a job as anyone could do with the Libyan Coast Guard. They're taking these people to European training centers in various countries, Italy, Croatia, Albania as well. A bunch of different countries are trained. So they're not being trained in Libya. They're being trained in the EU. They're being taught international law. They're being taught humanitarian law, proper procedures, best practices.

The problem with Libya is that it doesn't have a strong central government. It is still in the midst of a civil war. And the Coast Guard is caught in the middle of this. And you have the official Libyan Navy Coast Guard. The Coast Guard is part of the Libyan Navy. And then you have militia groups that have their own maritime assets. And it's sometimes these militia groups that are involved in stopping migrants, sometimes to rob them because migrants are often carrying money. But sometimes they also take them back to shore, sometimes for purposes of human trafficking and sometimes just to rescue them.

So it's, again, very complex. How has the EU security establishment changed as a result of the migration and refugee crisis? For Frontex, this crisis has been an absolute game changer. Recently, earlier this fall, Frontex is going to have the authority to develop a 10,000-person EU border and Coast Guard organization. And 5,000 of that 10,000 number will be direct hires as border guards and Coast Guard officers. So they will, in essence, wear the Frontex uniform and be paid for by Frontex. The other 5,000 are going to be detailed from member states for long or medium duration time periods. So between anywhere from six months to two years.

And that's going to have a huge impact on obviously the border situation with Europe, but also this whole notion of European solidarity, because now you're going to have people from different countries working closely together. And when I was at Samos, I was very heartened to see police and Coast Guard from different nations, EU nations, sitting around and chatting and having a meal together. And it's not just the social context, although, as one German said, I now take vacations with some of the guys I met, you know, while serving with the Finnish Coast Guard. But it's not just these, you know, the friendships, but it's the information exchange and the exchange of best practices. One Frontex official from the public affairs office was

telling me that there was a case of a northern european border control official who saw a passport and it looked perfectly good but the person was nervous so she picked up her cell phone and sent a whatsapp to her friend in the italian border agency and sent a picture of that of that passport and her friend over in italy said yeah we just found out about this a few days ago but there's a if you look you'll see this little imperfection here that's a fake so a lot of information gets exchanged and everybody gets better at their job these people are are passionate about what they do and as one german coast guard officer said to me it's it was the first time in his career as a member of the border police and also the Coast Guard

that he felt a true sense of European solidarity working on this mission. And navies are a little different. I'll turn to the navy picture. Navies are very accustomed to working with each other, and that goes back to NATO and the Cold War. So it's not that big of a shift for navies that are accustomed to working for each other in a NATO maritime group to then in turn work for EUNAV4MED. What I think EUNAV4MED does is it strengthens the idea of a collective and common European security structure outside of NATO. And so, in essence, it's building Europe's naval capacity and defense capacity, and that's very, very important, given the challenges confronted today, and given the limited resources of the member states individually.

Collectively, they're strong. Individually, many are quite weak. In your conclusion, how do you think the migration and refugee crisis could be tackled more effectively? Well, I think it's a political problem, and it involves ungoverned spaces in North Africa, or Africa in general, the Middle East, Central Asia, and even as far as Asia. And unfortunately, neither the U.S. nor Europe combined have the power to solve a lot of these crises. But from a sort of more of a tactical level, one thing that one issue that I feel needs to be resolved is the Operation Sophia issue and the disembarkation issue and the Dublin rule. If the double rule could be changed so that refugees are more equitably distributed throughout the European Union, and so the burden doesn't just fall really on two member states, if it's spread evenly across the European Union, then there wouldn't be such a problem. You could take these refugees, bring them to Lampedusa, fly them to whatever member state, whoever's turn it is to take migrants, and they could be processed there in those courts and paid for there. So I think that would be a big step forward. It would take a lot of heat off of Italy, take a lot of heat off of Greece. It would allow the gray holes to return to the central Mediterranean, where I think they're very much needed because of the horrible security situation there.

and I think everybody in the long term would be much better off but of course that's a political problem and it's a problem really for the European Council Dr. Sherwood, thank you once again for joining us where else can we find you online and what's next for you professionally? You can find me online on LinkedIn

and also I will be giving a talk in Washington on the 15th of April at the National Museum of the U.S. Navy on this subject. Anyone who wants to attend can attend. And my next step professionally is I have to write the book. I've done the research, but now the hard part. So it will take me some time to do that. But in the meantime, I hope to engage in speaking and writing shorter pieces about this crisis and about humanitarian operations in general. Thank you once again.