The migrants photographed here were being loaded on to a cargo plane in Kufra, located in southeastern Libya. Credit: Rebecca Murray/IPS

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 3 2015 (IPS)

The military conflicts and political instability driving hundreds of thousands of refugees into Europe were triggered largely by U.S. and Western military interventions for regime change – specifically in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria (a regime change in-the-making).

The United States was provided with strong military support by countries such as Germany, Britain, France, Italy and Spain, while the no-fly zone to oust Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi was led by France and the UK in 2011 and aided by Belgium, Denmark, Norway and Canada, among others.

“[European leaders] stay silent about the military intervention and regime change in which Europeans were major actors, interventions that have torn the refugees’ homelands apart and resulted in civil war and state collapse.” -- James A. Paul, former executive director of the New York-based Global Policy Forum
Last week, an unnamed official of a former Eastern European country, now an integral part of the 28-nation European Union (EU), was constrained to ask: “Why should we provide homes for these refugees when we didn’t invade their countries?”

This reaction could have come from any of the former Soviet bloc countries, including Hungary, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, the Czech Republic, Slovakia or Latvia – all of them now members of the EU, which has an open-door policy for transiting migrants and refugees.

The United States was directly involved in regime change in Afghanistan (in 2001) and Iraq (in 2003) – and has been providing support for the ouster of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad battling a civil war now in its fifth year.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who says he is “horrified and heartbroken” at the loss of lives of refugees and migrants in the Mediterranean and Europe, points out that a large majority of people “undertaking these arduous and dangerous journeys are refugees fleeing from places such as Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.”

James A. Paul, former executive director of the New York-based Global Policy Forum, told IPS the term “regime change refugees” is an excellent way to change the empty conversation about the refugee crisis.

Obviously, there are many causes, but “regime change” helps focus on a crucial part of the picture, he added.

Official discourse in Europe frames the civil wars and economic turmoil in terms of fanaticism, corruption, dictatorship, economic failures and other causes for which they have no responsibility, Paul said.

“They stay silent about the military intervention and regime change in which Europeans were major actors, interventions that have torn the refugees’ homelands apart and resulted in civil war and state collapse.”

The origins of the refugees make the case clearly: Libya, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan are major sources, he pointed out.

Also many refugees come from the Balkans where the wars of the 1990s, again involving European complicity, shredded those societies and led to the present economic and social collapse, he noted.

Vijay Prashad, professor of international studies at Trinity College, Connecticut, and the George and Martha Kellner Chair in South Asian History, told IPS the 1951 U.N. Refugee Convention was dated.

He said the Covenant “was written up for the time of the Cold War – when those who were fleeing the so-called Unfree World were to be welcomed to the Free World”.

He said many Third World states refused this covenant because of the horrid ideology behind it.

“We need a new Covenant,” he said, one that specifically takes into consideration economic refugees (driven by the International Monetary Fund) and political (war) refugees.

At the same time, he said, the international community should also recognize “climate change refugees, regime change refugees and NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement] refugees.”

The 1951 Convention guarantees refugee status if one “has a well-founded fear of persecution because of his/her race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion.”

Asked about the Eastern European reaction, Prashad said: “I agree entirely. But of course one didn’t hear such a sentiment from Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan and others – who also welcomed refugees in large numbers. Why say, ‘Why should we take [them]?’ Why not say, ‘Why are they [Western Europe and the U.S.] not doing more?’” he asked.

While Western European countries are complaining about the hundreds of thousands of refugees flooding their shores, the numbers are relatively insignificant compared to the 3.5 million Syrian refugees hosted by Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon – none of which invaded any of the countries from where most of the refugees are originating.

Paul told IPS the huge flow of refugees into Europe has created a political crisis in many recipient countries, especially Germany, where neo-Nazi thugs battle police almost daily, while fire-bombings of refugee housing have alarmed the political establishment.

The public have been horrified by refugees drowning in the Mediterranean, deaths in trucks and railway tunnels, thousands of children and families caught on the open seas, facing border fences and mobilized security forces.

Religious leaders call for tolerance, while EU politicians wring their hands and wonder how they can solve the issue with new rules and more money, Paul said.

“But the refugee flow is increasing rapidly, with no end in sight.  Fences cannot contain the desperate multitudes.”

He said a few billion euros in economic assistance to the countries of origin, recently proposed by the Germans, are unlikely to buy away the problem.

“Only a clear understanding of the origins of the crisis can lead to an answer, but European leaders do not want to touch this hot wire and expose their own culpability.”

Paul said some European leaders, the French in particular, are arguing in favour of military intervention in these troubled lands on their periphery as a way of doing something.

Overthrowing Assad appears to be popular among the policy classes in Paris, who choose to ignore how counter-productive their overthrow of Libyan leader Gaddafi was a short time ago, or how counter-productive has been their clandestine support in Syria for the Islamist rebels, he declared.

Paul also said “the aggressive nationalist beast in the rich country establishments is not ready to learn the lesson, or to beware the “blowback” from future interventions.”

“This is why we need to look closely at the ‘regime change’ angle and to mobilize the public understanding that this was a crisis that was largely ‘Made in Europe’ – with the active connivance of Washington, of course,” he declared.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

U.S policymakers indulge in a variety of child’s play called collapsism. They close their eyes when they want a particularly despised adversary to go away. And poof! Kim Jong Eun’s North Korea eventually disappears. Raul Castro’s Cuba eventually vanishes.

Except that they haven’t.Washington is locked in a foreign policy drama that only Samuel Becket could have written: a lot of waiting and nothing much happening.

Of course, the United States doesn’t simply ignore North Korea and Cuba. Both countries have been under stringent economic sanctions and a tight military cordon practically since their creation. But attempts at military rollback like the Bay of Pigs fiasco are history. Today, other than tightening the screws from time to time, Washington has largely been content with a waiting game.

Even diplomatic engagement is often predicated on expectations of eventual collapse. For instance, when the Clinton administration negotiated the Agreed Framework with North Korea in 1994, it sold the agreement to Congress with the argument that the regime in Pyongyang wouldn’t be around by the time the United States finished building the two promised light-water nuclear reactors.

Kim Il Sung died, and so did his son, Kim Jong-Il. But the regime lives on. In Cuba, meanwhile, Fidel Castro stepped aside in favour of his brother Raul. But the regime lives on. And Washington is locked in a foreign policy drama that only Samuel Becket could have written: a lot of waiting and nothing much happening.

There’s no point, according to the prevailing wisdom among collapsists, to engage with North Korea or Cuba as long as the governments there are tottering on the edge. This was the argument also used with China in 1989 and with Iran during the Green movement uprising in 2009. Both those countries stabilised themselves through the time-honoured approach of repression.

John Feffer, Courtesy of FPIF.

Collapsism has largely given way to engagement with China. And after the recent election of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, tentative signs of U.S.-Iranian rapprochement have emerged.

North Korea and Cuba, however, remain the Teetering Twosome. In Pyongyang, the young leader Kim Jong Eun has defied early predictions that a Swiss education and a fondness for basketball could somehow combine to create a Gorbachev of the East. After a long-range missile test last year and a third nuclear test this year—not to mention his shake-up of the high-ranking military staff and his hardball negotiations with South Korea—Kim has signaled that for now he’s not Mr. Perestroika.

Pundits and policymakers have now concluded that, having declared itself a nuclear power, North Korea has given up on the strategy of trading its bomb-making capabilities for a golden ticket of entry into the international community. The Obama administration failed to advance the promising initiatives that had gained steam in the last years of the Bush administration.

Last year, on leap day, the United States and North Korea came to an agreement trading food aid for a moratorium on uranium enrichment and missile tests as well as a return of inspectors to the plutonium facility at Yongbyon. North Korea’s subsequent satellite launch scotched that deal. Pyongyang recently rejected a non-aggression pact that Secretary of State John Kerry offered in exchange for denuclearisation.

Engagement with North Korea is major political risk in Washington, and the Obama team certainly doesn’t want to expose its flank when it’s making headway with another adversary, Iran. So, what’s left? Waiting for collapse.

Or, to paraphrase a recent RAND report that is all the rage among Korea hands, preparing for collapse. For myriad reasons, from economic decline to increased flow of information into the country, the RAND report concludes that North Korea is again close to the edge.

Although the date of collapse remains frustratingly obscure, the United States and South Korea in particular should ramp up their contingency planning. This planning, as outlined in the report, boils down to: sending in ground forces at the first sign of instability, securing weapons of mass destruction, providing humanitarian aid to discourage out-migration, and putting down all signs of military resistance.

Making plans is an admirable exercise. No one wants to be caught with pants down if the Kim Jong Eun regime suddenly implodes. But by suggesting that collapse and intervention form the most likely future scenario—not if, but when—the RAND report implicitly recommends that the U.S. and South Korean governments should abandon diplomatic engagement that might lead to a peaceful and perhaps more gradual rapprochement on the Korean peninsula (a “far less likely outcome,” according to the report).

The furthest the report goes in the direction of diplomacy is to suggest that Washington and Seoul would be wise to sit down with Beijing to coordinate a division of responsibilities in the case of collapse.

Worse, by proposing to reshape policy in Washington and Seoul around an imminent collapse/intervention scenario that requires early action for its success, the RAND report encourages policymakers and intelligence services not only to seek out signs of instability in Pyongyang but encourage them as well.

“If a collapse really is likely at some point in the future,” author Bruce Bennett writes in the report, “actions to prepare for it are really more likely to accelerate a collapse rather than cause it.”

The situation with Cuba is slightly different. Instead of a nuclear programme to attract the attention of Washington, there is geographic proximity. The Obama administration made some moves toward an easing of the tight embargo on the island, for instance lifting some restrictions on travel and remittances and beginning negotiations on the resumption of direct mail service after 50 years. An earlier piece of legislation allowed states to negotiate agricultural export deals with Cuba, which has sent over 4.3 billion dollars  in food from 2001 through 2012.

Further attempts to chip away at the blockade, however, have come up against significant political resistance. Republican Party moderates once indicated a willingness to reconsider. As Richard Lugar said in 2009, “We must recognise the ineffectiveness of our current policy and deal with the Cuban regime in a way that enhances U.S. interests.” But Lugar got tea-partied out of the Senate, and Republican Party moderates are an endangered species.

The collapsists have not secured the kind of consensus in Washington that seems to exist around North Korea. They face U.S. business interests and Cuban-American entrepreneurs that want fewer trade restrictions with the island and a cross-section of the policymaking community that prefers the stable status quo to a risky collapse scenario.

Unlike North Korea, Cuba is close to home, so spillover effects of regime change like refugee flows can’t be blithely ignored. So, the Cuba hawks continue to wait and watch for Raul Castro’s economic reforms to peter out, for Venezuelan aid to dry up, and for the long-awaited collapse to happen.

North Korea and Cuba cannot be simply wished away. They have both survived economic squeeze and military punch. Yes, some day, things will change dramatically in Pyongyang and Havana. The questions are: how will they change and what can be done to ensure a minimum of suffering and a maximum of public participation? Sudden collapse, followed by outside military intervention, is not the best-case scenario in this regard.

We’ve been stuck in a Samuel Beckett play for some time. The last thing we want at this point is a Quentin Tarantino ending.

John Feffer is co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus.