MORE than one million migrants are “in the pipeline” in Libya and hoping to reach European shores because the European Union has not done enough to tackle the crisis, a senior diplomat has said.
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Joseph Walker-Cousins, former head of the British Embassy in Benghazi, accused the EU of doing “too little, too late” in regards to the migrant crisis.
Giving evidence at the House of Lords’ EU External Affairs Sub-Committee, the diplomat said the officials should have been patrolling Libya’s land borders 1,400km to the south.
Juncker: Europe in bad shape with the migrant crisis
But instead, he claimed, they chose to deal with migrants only when they were a “stone’s throw from Europe”.
Ultimately, the breakdown of border control is down to the collapse of the functioning government in Libya, he remarked.
Now a senior fellow at the Institute for Statecraft think-tank, Mr Walker-Cousins was critical of the failure of Western governments, including Britain, for failing to offer "leadership" after prompting the collapse of the Gadaffi regime.
According to the Mail, Mr Walker-Cousins said: “Up to a million migrants, if not more, are in the pipeline. They will take a long time to work their way through that pipeline but it is well-established.”
The Foreign and Commonwealth Office said it was working to end the Libyan smugglers’ businesses, with 414 boats destroyed and 109 traffickers arrested.
Mr Walker-Cousins said he didn’t want to completely blame the EU for the crisis, but maintained there was a lack of care.
He added: “Then we can begin to restore border security along the land borders and achieve the desired results in terms of stemming the flow of migrants and prevent them putting themselves at the mercy of those gruesome, merciless traffickers.
“I don’t want to say there is a vacuum of ownership and leadership at the political level but that sort of engagement and that appetite to own what is going on in Libya does not seem to exist now in a way it did then.
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“No one really wants to own it – it is someone else’s mess.”
The diplomat’s remarks follow a fierce argument involving four EU leaders who claimed Brussels officials threatened to cut their aid funding if they refused to accept more asylum seekers.
