Mediterranean Migrant Murders: the Legacy of Obama-British Imperial Wars

According to Amnesty International, there are now some 57 million people who have been turned into refugees in the Middle East-North Africa region (MENA, in State Department-speak), “the largest refugee disaster since the Second World War.” Two analysis articles published by Russia’s Sputnik news service hammer at the catastrophe, and both point the finger at the Obama-British-EU wars in the region as responsible.

Pepe Escobar’s article, “How NATO Kills Africans in the Club Med,” attacks “humanitarian imperialism” under Obama as being responsible, especially the bloody overthrow of Qaddafi in Libya in 2011, but also the wars against Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. These imperial forces, Escobar writes, “are still on the loose, now killing—by proxy—across the waters of the Mediterranean after they destroyed a viable state—Libya, a secular Arab republic [and] installed a pervasive chaos trespassing a great deal of the Maghreb and Western Africa, and unleashed a massive humanitarian crisis.”

Finian Cunningham also points the finger at the wars in Libya, Iraq, Syria, and now Yemen for creating “the catastrophic and morally repugnant situation of the Mediterranean polluted by thousands of decaying corpses… Most of the people migrating to North Africa and thence to Europe are fleeing war and conflict, with a preponderance, according to the UN, of Syrians, Iraqis and Afghans.” Some 10 million Syrians, or half the population, “have been displaced and exiled as wandering refugees,” Cunningham writes. “What the European governments did in Libya, along with their American ally, is nothing short of a war crime,” and have made Libya into the “launchpad for millions of migrants being trafficked to Europe.”