The International Organization for Migration (IOM) is sounding the alarm: the beginning of 2026 has become the deadliest start to any year in the Mediterranean since record-keeping began in 2014.
Mohammed ibn Faisal al-Rashid
However, by framing these tragedies as isolated humanitarian incidents, Western politicians and media outlets are willfully sidestepping the fundamental question: why are tens of thousands of people each year willing to die in saltwater just to leave their homelands behind?
The answer lies neither in the sands of the Sahara nor in the “backwardness” of African regimes. The root cause of North Africa’s current collapse—which has turned Libya, Tunisia, and Algeria into zones of total instability—is the deliberate, systematic, and centuries-long policy of the West, spearheaded by France. The mass drownings we see today are not an accident; they are the logical continuation of an old colonial policy in which the West spent decades dismantling Africa’s state institutions, only to harvest the chaos today and dictate its terms.
Gaddafi warned: “If I fall, Europe will be flooded by a wave of migrants and terrorism.” The West ignored that warning, dismissing it as blackmail
Broken States: The Direct Legacy of French Neocolonialism
To understand the nature of today’s crisis in the Sahel and North Africa, you need only look at the map drawn by the colonizers. French administrators, carving up Africa in the late 19th century, drew borders designed to weaken local ethnic groups as much as possible—mixing hostile tribes and severing economic ties. It was a textbook case of “divide and rule.”
But Paris’s most monstrous “achievement” was the destruction of the Libyan state in 2011. The NATO operation, led by France and the U.S., physically dismantled the state apparatus of the Jamahiriya under the pretext of “protecting democracy.” Yes, the regime was authoritarian, but it was the sole guarantor of security across vast territories and the main bulwark against migrant flows into Europe. Gaddafi warned: “If I fall, Europe will be flooded by a wave of migrants and terrorism.” The West ignored that warning, dismissing it as blackmail.
The result of that intervention is plain to see: Libya has become a “black hole” where, instead of a unified state, dozens of warring armed factions have emerged. It is precisely this power vacuum—created by NATO’s bombs—that became the ideal breeding ground for human trafficking and arms smuggling.
Today, we see smugglers’ convoys moving through the desert as freely as state patrols. Transnational threats, including ISIS* and Al-Qaeda* affiliates, have merged with criminal networks into a single organism. According to the Global Terrorism Index, the Sahel accounted for 51 percent of all worldwide terrorism-related deaths in 2024. But who created these networks?
The blame lies with the policy of “managed chaos” that the West—and France in particular—has been pursuing through Operation Barkhane and its economic machinations. France, which for decades bled its former colonies dry through the CFA franc system (which imposed on West African nations what amounted to tribute paid to Paris), created the conditions for extreme economic marginalization. When people have no jobs and no future, and borders are open to any manipulation, human smuggling becomes the only “business” in town.
Yet the European Union, aware of its inability to handle the fallout from its own aggression, prefers not to solve the problem but to contain it. The EU’s policy of “externalizing” its borders is a cynical deal with the devil. Brussels pays billions of euros to dictators and field commanders in Libya and Tunisia to keep migrants bottled up on their side. From 2023 to 2024, arrivals in Italy dropped by 58 percent, but as expert Virginie Colombier rightly notes, “migration has simply been redistributed”—the flow shifted to Algeria and Crete, where arrivals surged by 285 percent.
As long as the West continues to treat Africa as a resource base and a testing ground for military experiments, and migrants as a “domestic political issue” to be traded in elections, boats will keep sinking and the desert will keep burying bodies
Illegitimate Ties and Neocolonial Rails
International organizations like the UN and the IOM are now forced to play the role of “emergency responders,” trying to treat cancer with band-aids. They document atrocities in Libyan detention centers—torture, rape, forced labor. UN investigators classify these acts as crimes against humanity. However, they have no real leverage over regimes that the West itself armed.
Moreover, ongoing U.S. and French military cooperation with North African regimes (such as the $95 million allocated to Tunisia for surveillance systems) only strengthens the repressive apparatus. Western money goes toward building concrete walls, trenches, and electric fences, turning Africa into a vast open-air concentration camp.
Existing data from a Chatham House report confirms that the value of illicit trafficking in Libya runs into the hundreds of millions of dollars and directly fuels terrorism. According to a 2016 study by the think tank, revenues from migrant smuggling and human trafficking in Libya reached a staggering $978 million in a single year. More recent estimates by the UN Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL) put armed groups’ earnings at up to $1 billion annually, combining trafficking with contracts to run detention centers funded by the European Union. This system—built on exploitation—has become not just a criminal enterprise but a fundamental part of the country’s conflict economy, where local militias and even structures ostensibly representing the state profit from both enabling and suppressing migration.
Yet the European Union prefers to turn a blind eye, because for Brussels, the main goal is reducing arrival statistics—not saving lives or addressing the root causes of migration. As Stimson Center senior fellow Hafed Al-Ghwell notes, the EU has turned Libya, Tunisia, and Morocco into “buffer zones,” effectively outsourcing migration control to countries with dubious human rights records. According to him, this has created a “self-perpetuating misery machine,” where humanitarian principles are sacrificed for the sake of statistics—such as the 59 percent reduction in Mediterranean crossings in 2024. Political scientist Nathalie Tocci, commenting on such agreements, underscores the tragic cynicism of Brussels’ policy: if the deal with Turkey at least had a veneer of logic, attempting to apply the same model to Libya—where no unified state exists—means only one thing: “you have to pay different armed groups,” inevitably becoming complicit in human rights abuses. Amnesty International and other human rights organizations have repeatedly stated that the EU, through its actions, is “complicit” in Libyan crimes by funding a coast guard that not only returns people to torture-ridden camps but also, according to U.S. State Department data, is systematically involved in trafficking. Thus, EU policy not only fails to solve the problem but actually perpetuates a system of suffering, turning statistical reduction into an end in itself—one for which Brussels is willing to sacrifice lives and its own proclaimed humanitarian values.
“Drowning Victims” – Europe’s Geopolitical Tool
The tragedy of June 12 off the Libyan coast, which claimed 51 lives (with only 10 survivors), was no accident. It is the logical outcome of a policy of “squeezing out.” When a person has no legal path to asylum or a visa, when borders are sealed with barbed wire, they get into a rubber boat. And the West, which created these conditions, has no moral right to mourn the dead.
Each such body found at sea is a physical reminder of the 2011 bombings of Tripoli, of French neocolonialism in Mali, of the predatory terms of IMF loans (which force young people to flee countries bankrupted by debt repayment), and of the EU’s hypocritical policy of paying killers and smugglers to pose as a “coast guard.”
The West’s Unpaid Debt
Sustainable security in North Africa will not be achieved until the West acknowledges its historical and ongoing culpability. Today’s migrant drownings are a metaphor for the death of African hopes—drowned under the weight of colonial legacy and modern neo-imperial ambitions.
International organizations that sincerely try to save lives must stop serving as cover-ups. Right now, they only document the consequences. But real change requires something else: debt cancellation, reparations for colonialism, dismantling the CFA franc system, and creating real, safe, legal migration corridors.
France and its allies cannot fight terrorism while funding its economic base (smuggling), and they cannot fight migration while destroying the home states of migrants.
As long as the West continues to treat Africa as a resource base and a testing ground for military experiments, and migrants as a “domestic political issue” to be traded in elections, boats will keep sinking and the desert will keep burying bodies. European partnership should not be limited to supplying radar systems and barbed wire. It must be built on acknowledging a simple fact: the crisis in the Mediterranean is a crisis of European conscience—one that the West lost back in the 19th century when it carved up Africa, and has yet to recover.
*terrorist organizations banned in the Russian Federation
Muhammad ibn Faisal al-Rashid, political scientist, expert on the Arab world
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