Discarded shoes at a smuggler's shack on the beach near Zuwara, Libya. Mohamed Ben Khalifa /AP/Press Association. All rights reserved.Since the EU refugee deal with Turkey, European attention has begun to shift to Libya. With the end of winter, passages from Libya are on the rise again, and have already claimed several hundred victims in the past weeks.
In April, German Chancellor Angela Merkel suggested that the EU should work on reaching an agreement with Libya similar to the one with Turkey. Ahmed Maetig, a member of the Libyan Presidency Council formed in December 2015, recently declared in Rome that his government would be ready to commit to such a deal.
Maetig’s proposal immediately triggered indignant reactions in Libya, and didn’t appear to reflect the position of the council as a whole. In any case, European politicians would be wise to ignore it. Sending back migrants and refugees to a country in civil war is indefensible.
