'NATO listing African migrants as 'threat' consequence of Europe's outsourced border policy'

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At the end of June, at least 23 African migrants were killed by the Moroccan and Spanish forces while attempting to cross from Morocco into the Spanish enclave of Melilla. Footage, which went viral online, showed the two countries' border forces beating and standing over the migrants who were forced onto the ground.

In a press release, the Global Strategic Communications Council (GSCC) network condemned the incident and stated that, in order to avoid the question of why the migrants need to flee, "the Spanish government deployed the usual tactic of blaming smugglers – even though some refugees have contradicted this view".

The network said that Morocco only weaponises the issue of migration of other African nations "because it is tasked by Europe with carrying out border violence on its behalf." In an effort to maintain the perception that European countries and the EU are committed to human rights, the continent "outsources much of the violence necessary to maintain its border policies to non-EU countries – allowing it to avoid political blowback, and legal claims of abuse that may stop the system functioning."

Such a strategy, the GSCC said, has had "deadly consequences" and led to "large-scale abuses", referring to not only the Melilla massacre but also other atrocities committed over the years in the Mediterranean and Aegean Seas, in which European states have outsourced their border security to either companies or foreign states.

So when Spain hosted the recent NATO summit in its capital, Madrid, from 28-30 June, it came as little surprise that it pushed for the alliance to add migration from the south as one of the major threats facing the country – an appeal which the network condemned. "This was pushing at an open door – almost all recent defence strategies in the UK, EU and US are agreed on a militarised response to migration. NATO's new Strategic Concept now makes specific reference to migration and, for the first time, migration across the Sahel region, as a key threat."

The GSCC also predicted that the issue and NATO's listing would become even more serious in the projected event of future climate crises, which would result in climate migration and a huge influx of refugees from the developing world, including sub-Saharan Africa. In such a scenario, it stated, "policy becomes led and resources dominated by an already-bloated border and surveillance industry and war industry."

It stressed that "treating humanitarian emergencies like climate and migration as issues to be managed by force applies a set of tools that are both ill-equipped to the job and liable to worsen the situation, whilst carrying huge attendant implications for human rights and democratic accountability". The network added that such treatment also "saps resources from solutions that could genuinely help; safe routes, support for resettlement, large scale climate action and funding to third countries not to ramp up border violence but to build resilience."

Source: Middle East Monitor under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0