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Migrants rescued in the Mediterranean north of Libya. The number risking the sea crossing climbed to a record 181,000 in 2016, up from 154,000 the previous year. Photograph: Olmo Calvo/AP

The European commission has rejected proposals to offer Libya a deal similar to the EUs agreement with Turkey on migration, revealing divisions over how to respond to the record death toll in the central Mediterranean.

The EU foreign policy chief, Federica Mogherini, outlined her opposition to the suggestions as she set out plans to boost EU training for the Libyan coastguard, arguing that the situations were completely different.

The commissions stance is a setback for the Maltese prime minister, Joseph Muscat, whose island state took over the rotating presidency of the EU on 1 January, with the goal of healing Europes divisions on migration.

Malta is preparing to welcome EU leaders, including Theresa May, to a summit next week aimed at taking urgent action to reduce deadly sea crossings from north Africa to Italy. Speaking in the European parliament last week, Muscat warned that unless the essence of the Turkey deal is replicated in the central Mediterranean, Europe will face a major migration crisis.

EU leaders struck a grand bargain with Turkey in March 2016, which offered money for Syrian refugees and visa-free travel for Turkish citizens in exchange for a crackdown on people smugglers operating from the country. EU officials believe the deal has been the main factor behind the dramatic reduction in arrivals to Greece. Fewer than 50 people a day have arrived on Greek shores in recent weeks, compared with 1,900 a day one year ago.

In contrast, the number of people risking the sea crossing across the central Mediterranean to Italy has continued to rise, climbing to a record 181,000 arrivals in 2016, up from 154,000 the previous year. More than 90% of those migrants embark from Libya. The death toll has also hit a new record: more than 5,000 people lost their lives in the Mediterranean in 2016.

Commission officials are, however, wary of making a Turkish-style economic bargain with Libya, highlighting the instability and conflict that has plagued the country since the overthrow of dictator Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.

Turkey and Libya also have very different ties to the EU. The EU has been pursuing increasingly fruitless membership talks with Turkey for more than a decade, but Brussels wants to play peacemaker in Libya, where civil war is at risk of reigniting.

Migrants travelling to Europe via Turkey tend to be Syrians, Afghans and Iraqis fleeing war, whereas those arriving from Libya are more often leaving repressive regimes, instability and poverty across north and sub-Saharan Africa.

Mogherini, a former Italian foreign minister, said: The two situations are completely different, the two countries, the migrants are completely different, the composition of the [migrant] flow is completely different, the measures are completely different, there is no comparison that can be done.

She announced 200m (170m) in EU funding aimed at stopping migration across the central Mediterranean between the EU and Libya. This includes 3.2m to expand the EUs training programme for the Libyan coastguard.

Some of the money will be used to step up a programme of voluntary returns to help people stranded in Libya return to their country of origin. Up to 1 million migrants live in Libya, drawn from neighbouring Egypt, Niger and Sudan, and sometimes as far away as Syria and Bangladesh, according to the International Organisation for Migration. The commission wants to expand an IOM programme to return migrants from Libya to their home countries.

At the EU summit in Valletta EU leaders will be asked to consider whether the EUs anti-smuggling naval unit, Operation Sophia, should patrol Libyan territorial waters.

The latest plans were unveiled as the commission announced a three-month extension of temporary border controls in continental Europes border-free travel zone. The Schengen zone covers 26 countries, including non-EU Switzerland and Norway, but not the UK.

Austria, Germany, Denmark, Sweden and Norway were given the green light to maintain border checks, which were hastily introduced as large numbers of refugees and migrants arrived in Europe in 2015.

Dimitris Avramopoulos, the European commissioner for migration, described the controls as exceptional measures for an exceptional situation and said he hoped to return to a border-free zone in continental Europe as soon as possible. Under EU law temporary border controls can be reinstated for a maximum of two years.

Link:
Migration: EU rejects proposals for Turkey-style deal for Libya - The Guardian

An oil refinery in Zawia, Libya. A moratorium on foreign investment in the industry is to end. Photograph: Ismail Zetouni/Reuters

The international community has lost moral authority in Libya and can best help the country by acting to end oil smuggling and providing investment to boost production, the chairman of the Libyan National Oil Corporation, Mustafa Sanalla, has said.

Sanalla is the most respected technocrat in a country riven by militias, political deadlock and corruption ever since Muammar Gaddafi was toppled with the help of western forces in 2011. He told the Guardian on Wednesday: We can use oil to unify the country.

Libya has had a self-imposed moratorium on foreign investment in its oil industry since 2011, which Sanalla has announced is to end.

A restoration of oil production is widely seen as the only way for the debt-ridden Libyan economy to recover. Sanalla has become increasingly outspoken at the failure of the Libyan politicians to reach agreement on the terms of a unity government.

The Tripoli-based, and UN-backed, Government of National Accord led by Fayez al-Sarraj has been at loggerheads with General Khalifa Haftar, the head of the so-called Libyan National Army (LNA), who supports a parallel authority based in eastern Libya. More than a year of talks have produced no compromise.

Sanalla claimed millions of dollars in proceeds from oil smuggling are now partly in the hands of terrorist groups as he urged the new administration of Donald Trump to engage with Libya. He warned the groups would try to use the cash to plan further attacks on Europe, as well as funding illegal migration across the Mediterranean.

He said smuggling was taking place by sea and by land through Tunisia and might account for as much as 40% of the countrys consumption.

There is a connection between the smuggling, migration and terrorism. The volume of money the smugglers are now gathering is hundreds of millions of dollars. With this, they can make terrorist attacks on Europe. Its a well-organised, systematic, criminal machine. We need international help to bring it to an end, Sanalla said.

Sanalla said it was possible to boost Libyan oil production to 1.2m barrels a day by the end of the year, but this might require foreign private investment and extra resources from the Libyan central bank to repair the damaged oil fields and ports.

Oil production today stands at 715,000 barrels a day, the highest level in three years. Before the 2011 revolution it was 1.6m, but then blockades saw production fall as low as 200,000, putting the countrys finances into freefall.

The blockades were lifted last year with the help of Haftar and his LNA, but Sanalla said the international community had lost credibility when the UN special envoy, Martin Kobler, showed support for the Petroleum Facilities Guard (PFG), which had imposed them.

The attempt by the international community to cultivate the PFG as a counterweight to the LNA was a very serious error of judgment. It had nowhere near the 27,800 soldiers it claimed. Most of the names on its books were ghosts that the PFGs corrupt leadership used to claim salaries and billeting, Sanalla said.

The PFG was and to some extent still is a criminal organisation that used blockades as a means of extortion and smuggling as a way to raise revenue. Those blockades cost us $130bn (103bn) in lost exports. How anybody could see this outfit as a constructive partner in rebuilding Libya, I cannot imagine.

He said a public meeting in July 2016 between Kobler and Ibrahim Jadhran, the head of the PFG, was for many Libyans a defining moment in their perceptions of the international communitys intentions.

I will be very frank. It has cost the international community its credibility in Libya. And it will take consistent, well thought-out action that is clearly in Libyas interests for the international community to recover its goodwill and moral authority.

Haftar now controls all the major oil export routes but has agreed that the revenue goes to the central bank in Tripoli.

Sanalla said a security solution would be to bring the salaries of the PFG under the control of the oil corporation.

Sanalla said: We are now at a critical juncture. It is possible the countrys political leaders may come together to reach a political bargain. Equally, the road ahead may lead to all-out civil war. The situation is that uncertain.

Sanalla, due to speak at a Foreign Office-backed Libyan investment conference on Thursday, said studies showed that the Libyan oil industry needed investment of between $100bn and $120bn, but it was struggling to get even operating costs from the Tripoli government.

Expressing his frustration at the politicians collective failure to reach agreement, he insisted: I cannot keep waiting for a legitimate Libyan government to be elected. We are on the edge of an abyss and if we do nothing the state disintegrates. The integrity of the [National Oil Corporation] is the best guarantee we have that Libya will be preserved as a unitary state.

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Libyan oil chief: investment could help west recover lost moral authority - The Guardian

Libya Herald

Libyan passport holders to be prevented from going to US Libya Herald Libyans will face a visa suspension preventing them from entering the US when, as expected, the new President Donald Trump signs an executive order today that prohibits visas being issued to nationals from a number of Middle Eastern and North African ... and more »

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Libyan passport holders to be prevented from going to US - Libya Herald

Daily Mail

Libyan East-Based Army Routs Militants From Part of Benghazi New York Times The official speaks for the armed forces that answer to the internationally recognized parliament based in eastern Libya. Ali al-Mosmari says troops swept into the militants' stronghold in the city's western district of Ganfouda on Wednesday, after ... Libyan forces claim control of long-besieged Benghazi districtReuters Jihadists lose ground around Libya's second cityDaily Mail Libya: Libyan National Army Announces Breakthrough In Key Benghazi DistrictSTRATFOR Africa Intelligence (subscription) -Libya Herald all 11 news articles »

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Libyan East-Based Army Routs Militants From Part of Benghazi - New York Times

The federal government on Tuesday in Abuja said it is set to evacuate another set of Nigerian immigrants from Libya in February.

This was disclosed by Bandele Onimode, who is the deputy director for search and rescue at the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA), when he led a delegation from NEMA to visit Abike Dabiri-Erewa, senior special assistant to the president on foreign affairs and Diaspora.

The delegation had come to shed light on the efforts of the agency in rescue operations in Libya and other countries of the world and what the federal government has been doing to secure the lives of Diaspora Nigerians trapped on transit.

According to him, the federal government has been doing a lot to help Nigerian citizens wherever they are having problems not just in Libya alone.

It is a well known fact that Nigerians do cross the desert to Europe through Niger Republic, Mali, and Sudan and in the process some are tired, stranded and trapped, he said, adding that our Nigerian missions abroad never leave them alone they always come to their rescue, as I am talking to you there are still some of them that are stranded in Niger and we are working on that.

He said the federal government had already evacuated about 1000 voluntary returnees from Libya between 2015 and 2016.

The NEMA boss added that 325 returnees were evacuated in May 2015, while 669 returnees were evacuated four times in 2016.

He explained that 175, 160, 172, 162 returnees were evacuated from Libya, in August, October, and December 2016 respectively.

According to him, most of the returnees were from Delta and Edo, ranges between the ages of 16 and 22, there are cases of infants being accompanied by their mothers.

He said that there were also cases of injured that were evacuated and returned to the country, adding that such people were properly profiled by the Nigerian Immigration service.

He said that the agency was working with other sister agencies which include the DSS, the police, FAAN, and NAPTIP to sort out the cases of victim of trafficking.

He explained that the International office on Migration (IOM ), in conjunction with Libya, always helped in sorting out of the returnees.

They are different from deportees, they are organized and willing returnees that are kept by IOM before being returned in collaboration with the Federal Government to the country, he Onimode further stressed.

He said that the agency was going to set up an assessment team to ensure that Nigerians that are set to be arrested in those countries are sorted and brought back to home.

Dabiri-Erewa called on Nigerians especially parents to warn their children and wards against embarking on illegal migration through Libya and the desert to the UK.

The issue of migration through Libya, Morocco is very dangerous for now and we advise Nigerians to desist from such dangerous adventure, because a lot of times a lot of these black migrants are dumped into the sea, she asserted.

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FG sets February deadline to evacuate immigrants from Libya - BusinessDay