Libyan Slave Markets Create Diplomatic Storm In Africa, UN Security Council To Meet

Anti-slavery protests continued across various world capitals this week, especially in countries across Africa, after earlier protests in France got violent when police used tear gas and other riot control tactics on a crowed of more than one thousand outside of the Libyan embassy in Paris. The protests are in response to last week"s widespread reports of slave markets operating in various cities across Libya, and look to continue as according to Reuters a major rally is set to take place in London later this week. 

Meanwhile France on Wednesday called an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council over the revelations, with President Macron referencing recent footage proving the existence of a slave trade network in Libya as "scandalous" and "unacceptable".

According to a CNN investigation, which included video footage of one slave auction in progress, migrant African workers are being sold for as little as $400 in at least nine different Libyan cities, though it"s believed the network of slave auctions extends more broadly, including to locations under the UN-backed Government of National Accord based in Tripoli. 

A migrant looks out of a barred door at a detention centre in Gharyan, Libya, Oct. 12, 2017. Hundreds more like him are being kept in smuggler-owned Libyan warehouses, where they are sometimes beaten, ransomed or sold into slavery. Image source: Reuters via CBC Radio

Other investigations by international rights groups such as the UN International Organization for Migration (IOM) have further found that many migrants trying to reach Europe from Libya are routinely "detained, tortured, and even killed." This also no doubt includes large numbers of internal refugees from Libya"s recent "summer of mass displacement" due to dozens of militias as well as multiple regional governments vying for territory and power. Libya has recently been described by the European Council On Foreign Relations as "one country, three governments."

According to Deutsche Welle (DW), anger is spreading in Africa, with multiple governments demanding action as protests swell. DW reports:

Politicians in Africa have expressed their outrage at the scandal – especially in West Africa where most African migrants originate. President of Niger Mahamadou Issoufou felt particularly revolted by the reports, summoning the Libyan ambassador to Niger and demanding the International Court of Justice investigate Libya for trading slaves.

And the African Union is also likely set to demand concrete action, though the Tripoli government in Libya is nowhere near in control of the entire country (and itself could be complicit), which is largely run by competing militias:

Meanwhile the foreign minister of Burkina Faso, Alpha Barry, told the press that he had also summoned the Libyan ambassador to the capital Ouagadougou for consultations. The issue has since been added to the agenda of next week"s African Union meeting in Ivory Coast, to take place on November 29 and 30.

Migrants swept up in the slave trade before reaching the Mediterranean coast are describing Libya as "hell" and express fear of being caught by roving militias, and it appears that even children may be part of the slave trafficking. DW continues:  

The issue has made waves in the Ivory Coast itself — 155 Ivorian refugees, including 89 women and underage migrants, were returned from Libya to the Ivory Coast earlier this week as part of a reintegration initiative launched by the European Union. Representatives of the Ivorian government, however, said that the health of those migrants returned from Libya was in a "deplorable state."

Current headlines and stories highlighting the continued outrage of Libya"s slave auctions, however, neglect to mention that the country has been a "failed state" since its "liberation" through the US-led NATO campaign to topple Muammar Gaddafi. At the end of last summer, the United Nation"s World Food Program (WFP) found that 1.3 million people are in need of emergency aid due to perpetual "conflict, insecurity, political instability and a collapsing economy." 

Meanwhile, the fact that Libya has become a key European migration embarkation point for all of Africa coupled with its being a failed state and enduring war zone, ensures that the the humanitarian crisis will only continue to grow. Though global outrage over the latest revelations of slave markets and xenophobia in Libya continues, media coverage remains myopic in its assessment of the true depth of Libya"s problems and their causes. 

WATCH: Africans being sold like animals in Arab countries. Slavery for blacks is still happening in 2017. #HumanTrafficking pic.twitter.com/DaNw4AR3rx

— Phil Mphela (@PhilMphela) November 15, 2017

Though CNN"s footage and accompanying report which lately sparked renewed public interest in Libya is shocking, such practices have been quietly documented for years, and clear warnings were issued starting in early 2011 that Libya"s black as well as migrant population would be the first to fall victim at the hands of the Islamist Libyan rebels that NATO"s war empowered. From the outset critics of Western intervention in Libya loudly sounded the alarm of a genocide against black Libyans in progress committed by the very rebels the US, UK, France, and Gulf allies were arming - a fact so well-known that then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was personally briefed and warned on the matter.

Protests and diplomatic action is likely to merely take aim at the Western backed Libyan Government of National Accord (GNA) based in Tripoli, and not at the very authors of the "new" post-Gaddafi Libya who put the Tripoli government into power in the first place (France is among those responsible for creating Libya"s current chaos). And while Obama himself has actually voiced some minimal and too little too late "regret" over his decision to go bomb the Gaddafi government out of existence using the pretext of "humanitarian intervention" - calling it his "worst mistake" - Hillary has consistently defended her role as one of the architects of the war as Obama"s secretary of state. 

But even a 2015 article in The Atlantic placed appropriate blame with the following description:

Using contested intelligence, a powerful adviser urges a president to wage a war of choice against a dictator; makes a bellicose joke when he is killed; declares the operation a success; fails to plan for a power vacuum; and watches Islamists gain power. That describes Dick Cheney and the Iraq War—and Hillary Clinton and the war in Libya.

And yet years later, as such war crimes against both African migrants and black Libyans continue to be exhaustively documented, Hillary still says that she has no regrets. Though her beloved Libyan rebels, legitimized and empowered through broad support from the West, are now among the very militias hosting slave auctions, she"s never so much as hinted that regime change in Libya left the country and much of the region in shambles.  Instead, she simply chose to conclude her role in the tragic story of Libya with her crazed and gleeful declaration of "we came, we saw, he died."

Concerning Obama, despite his general Libya mea culpa, the Nobel Peace Prize winning "humanitarian" minded architect of the 2011 US-NATO intervention (and ultimate author of Libya"s current hell) continues to pen his presidential memoir in the midst of an epic retirement tour of yachts, golf courses, and hidden celebrity islands.

Meanwhile, Libya still burns out of control, and America"s first black president, though surely able to command immense influence even from retirement, remains silent on the resurrection of a barbaric slave trade which didn"t exist in modern Libya prior to his own intervention there.

The FT Defends Soros Against Conspiracy-Theory-Peddling Propagandists

For a new generation of nationalists (by which they clearly imply tin-foil-hat wearing, nazi-sympathizing, probably-drug-taking, conspiracy-theory-loving wonks), The FT"s Gideon Rachman explains - for those not willing to think for themselves, or follow the money, that the billionaire investor has become the perfect villain...

George Soros, the billionaire investor and philanthropist, has had a busy year.

Since the beginning of 2017, he has faked a chemical attack in Syria, funded anti-Trump marches in Washington, come up with the “Soros plan” to flood Hungary with refugees, forced a change of government in Macedonia, undermined the Israeli prime minister and got several key White House aides sacked.

Not bad for a man of 87.

All of the above are, of course, conspiracy theories. But the fact that they have surfaced this year — and all feature the name of Mr Soros — is not just a curiosity. It says something important and worrying about global politics.

In the 1990s, Mr Soros was in tune with the spirit of the age, as he used the billions he had made in finance to support the transition to democracy in post-communist Europe and elsewhere. But now the global political climate has changed and liberal ideas are in retreat. For a new generation of nationalists — from the US to Russia and Hungary — Mr Soros has become the perfect villain. He is an internationalist in an age of nationalism. He is a supporter of individual rights, not group rights. He is the 29th-richest man in the world, according to the Forbes rich list. And he is also Jewish, so is easily cast in the role of the shadowy and manipulative international financier, once reserved for the Rothschilds.

One of the nastier bits of anti-Soros propaganda this year explicitly linked him to the old slurs against the Rothschilds. When America First nationalists became worried that HR McMaster, national security adviser to President Donald Trump, was purging their allies in the White House, they set up a website called “McMaster leaks” which featured a cartoon of Mr McMaster being manipulated by puppetmasters labelled “Soros” and “Rothschilds”.

In 1989, one of the beneficiaries of a Soros scholarship to study at Oxford was a young Hungarian activist named Viktor Orban. Today, the same Mr Orban is prime minister of Hungary and demonises his one-time benefactor. The Hungarian leader has made denunciation of an alleged “Soros plan” to flood Hungary with Muslims central to his re-election campaign. There is no such plan. What is true is that Mr Soros is a generous backer of refugee charities and has also supported the EU’s plan to resettle Syrian refugees across the bloc, including in Hungary. That was excuse enough for Mr Orban to plaster the country with posters featuring a grinning Mr Soros, and urging: “Don’t let Soros have the last laugh.”

The demonisation of Mr Soros in Hungary, where he was born, is not an isolated case. In the past year, he has been denounced by political leaders in Macedonia, Poland, Romania and Turkey, all of whom claim he is plotting against them.

The paranoid right in America also churns out anti-Soros material. As long ago as 2007, Mr Soros was denounced on Fox News as the “Dr Evil of the whole world of leftwing foundations”. The origins of Soros-hatred in the US may date back to his opposition to the Iraq war. His support of liberal causes in the US, as well as of international institutions such as the UN, has kept the farright pot boiling.

There is clearly an echo-chamber element to the anti-Soros campaigns around the world, as far-right groups pick up on the same conspiracy theories.

But some strongman leaders have more concrete reasons to fear Mr Soros’s Open Society Foundation, which funds civil society organisations that promote education, a free press, minority rights and anti-corruption initiatives. In 2015, Vladimir Putin’s government chucked the Open Society Foundation out of Russia since it was no longer willing to tolerate the latter’s support for organisations such as Memorial, which promoted research into the Soviet terror.

Mr Soros’s activities have even made him a target in Israel. The obvious anti-Semitism in many of the anti-Soros campaigns around the world evidently matters less to the Netanyahu government than Mr Soros’s support for Palestinian rights and other causes unpopular on the Israeli right.

There is also a personal element in prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s anti-Soros ire. As an anti-corruption probe has got closer and closer to Israel’s first family, so they have lashed out against Mr Soros. Yair Netanyahu, the prime minister’s son, complained recently that the “Fund for the Destruction of Israel, funded by Soros and the European Union, is threatening me”. He even republished a cartoon of Mr Soros dangling the world in front of a reptilian creature, the kind of image that his father would routinely denounce as anti-Semitic if it had been published by another source.

Conspiracy theorists have an explanation for everything. So the fact that the FT should publish a column defending Mr Soros will simply be taken as further evidence of his nefarious influence. For the record, I have had precisely two conversations with Mr Soros. On both occasions, we were on the same public panel at seminars organised by the European Council on Foreign Relations, a think-tank that he partially funds.

We have never had a private conversation and I certainly would not claim him as a friend. But I have no hesitation in applauding his philanthropy.

The fact that it even needs to be defended says something sad about the times we are living in.

*  *  *

So there you have it - The FT defending Soros is proof that conspiracy theorists are crazy and preempts the conspiracy theories about The FT being part of the same group.

Of course, "this message was approved" by none other than George Soros himself...

The increase in conspiracy theories reflects deeper, worrying trends about politics around the world. https://t.co/LJcMevCdcs

— George Soros (@georgesoros) September 30, 2017

But then again , he would, wouldn"t he...

"What Did They Expect?" Turkey Pivots From NATO, Signs Russia Missile Deal

Confirming, and sending the clearest sign of his previously discussed pivot toward Russia and away from NATO and the West, on Tuesday President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced that Turkey had signed a deal to purchase a Russian surface-to-air missile system, and paid the first installment. The deal cements Turkey"s recent rapprochement with Russia, despite differences over the war in Syria, the downing of a Russian fighter jet over Turkey in late 2015 and the assassination of a Russian ambassador earlier this year, and comes as Turkey’s ties with the United States and European Union have become strained to the point of breaking.

Although the missile purchase from Russia was made public several months ago, Erdogan’s announcement was the first confirmation that Turkey had transferred money to pay for the S-400 missile system.

“Signatures have been made for the purchase of S-400s from Russia,” Erdogan said in comments published in several newspapers on Tuesday. “A deposit has also been paid as far as I know.”

As the NYT writes, "the purchase of the missile system flies in the face of cooperation within the NATO alliance, which Turkey has belonged to since the early 1950s. NATO does not ban purchases of military hardware from manufacturers outside the American-led alliance, but it does discourage members from buying equipment not compatible with that used by other members."

According to reports in the Russian media, Turkey is to get four batteries of S-400 launchers complete with targeting radar and control posts. Some aspects of the deal are reportedly to be finalized, but Russian officials said the contract furthers Russia’s geostrategic interests.

* * *

Predictably, the Pentagon promptly reiterated its concerns over the deal, which it said undermines inter-operability of weapons systems among NATO allies. “We have relayed our concerns to Turkish officials regarding the potential purchase of the S-400. A NATO inter-operable missile defense system remains the best option to defend Turkey from the full range of threats in its region," spokesman Johnny Michael said in a statement.

A NATO official in Brussels where the alliance is headquartered, said that no NATO member currently operates the Russian missile system and that the alliance had not been informed about the details of the purchase by Turkey. “What matters for NATO is that the equipment allies acquire is able to operate together,” the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity as required by alliance procedures. “Interoperability of allied armed forces is essential to NATO for the conduct of our operations.”

However, on Wednesday Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan slammed the critics of Turkey’s deal with Russia, saying Ankara had no intention of waiting for the protection of its NATO allies.

“They have gone crazy because we made a deal for S-400s,” Erdogan said Wednesday in a speech to the ruling AKP mayors in Ankara, as cited by Hurriyet.

“What do you expect? Should we wait for you? We take care of ourselves in every security point. We are taking precautions and we will continue to do so,” the Turkish leader said.

Erdogan criticized the reluctance of US and Israel to authorize supply of combat drones to Turkey as another example of how Turkish security was sidelined by its allies.

“When they did give [drones], their repair and maintenance put us in a difficult position. Now [Turkey] has come to a point where it can produce its own unmanned, armed air vehicles. And now they are uncomfortable with that,” Erdogan added.

Erdogan also dismissed issues of interoperability, brand loyalties or the geopolitical optics of such a sale. “Nobody has the right to discuss the Turkish republic’s independence principles or independent decisions about its defense industry,” the daily newspaper Hurriyet reported him as saying.

“We make the decisions about our own independence ourselves,” he said. “We are obliged to take safety and security measures in order to defend our country.”

As the NYT adds, Erdogan’s announcement — made to Turkish journalists aboard his presidential jet as he returned from Kazakhstan — appeared timed as a response to two judicial cases announced last week in the United States. One is against his presidential bodyguards, who are charged with assaulting protesters when Mr. Erdogan visited Washington this year. The other is against a group of Turks, including a former minister, accused of breaking United States sanctions against Iran. Erdogan has angrily criticized both cases.

* * *

The S-400 SAM is designed to detect, track and then destroy aircraft, drones or missiles. It’s Russia’s most advanced integrated air defense system, and can hit targets as far as 250 miles away. Russia has also agreed to sell them to China and India, both nations who are masters at reverse engineering.  Most concerning for NATO, however is that the systems delivered to Turkey would not have a friend-or-foe identification system, which means they could be deployed against any threat without restriction.

Turkey has been weighing options for acquiring long-range SAMs for years. In 2013, Ankara surprised other NATO members by announcing that it was going to purchase the FD-2000 system from China, sparking criticism from Washington. Defense observers speculated that Turkey played the China card to put pressure on its allies and get better terms for buying a NATO-compatible SAM system, such as the US-made Patriot PAC-3. The Chinese deal stalled and was eventually scrapped, with Turkey reportedly unhappy over Beijing’s reluctance to hand over the technology behind the advanced system. Last year Ankara announced that it was in talks with Russia over a potential purchase of the S-400.

Turkey has other reasons for the missile purchase. It needs to cultivate good relations with Russia, and it also needs to build its own military defense, said Asli Aydintasbas, a fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. “Turkey wants the deal,” she said, “and Russia is only too happy to drive a wedge into the NATO alliance.”

While NATO’s collective defense should have been sufficient for Turkey - NATO deployed Patriot missiles there during a rise of tensions with Syria in the past - Erdogan lost trust in the West since last year’s failed "coup attempt", which he slammed repeatedly as a Western plot to oust him, and appears determined to secure his own defense.

Furthermore, the transfer of technology from Russia is attractive to Turkey: Erdogan has spoken also of his frustration at having requests to the United States for drones turned down, and of his satisfaction that Turkey developed its own.

Notably, Erdogan’s announcement of the deal with Russia came after Germany said that it was suspending all major arms exports to Turkey because of the deteriorating human rights situation in the country and the increasingly strained ties. “We have put on hold all big requests that Turkey sent to us, and these are really not a few,” the German foreign minister, Sigmar Gabriel, said during a panel discussion in Berlin on Monday, according to Reuters.

While the purchase of Russian missiles will take cooperation between the two nations to a new level, but is not the first time that Turkey has bought military equipment from Russia. It turned to Moscow in the early 1990s to buy military helicopters and armored personnel carriers. Last year, Russia and Turkey reached an agreement to revive a suspended natural-gas pipeline project.

Meanwhile, as the US military-industrial complex has flourished in recent months following a spike in deals with Saudi Arabia, South Korea and other nations courtesy of rising geopolitical tensions, Russia has remained largely squeezed out of the arms market in Western and Eastern Europe, even in countries that once bought nearly all their weapons from the Soviet Union, has looked for years to NATO’S eastern flank as a promising market and the alliance’s weakest link. It has also sold weapons to Greece, another NATO member and to Cyprus, which is not a member of NATO but houses British military bases and effectively serves as an outpost of the alliance.

Meanwhile, as Turkey"s suspicions toward the West have grown, relations with Russia warmed, driven by the personal relationship between Erdogan and Vladimir Putin. Erdogan has expressed personal admiration for Putin, to the consternation of many European and American leaders, if not President Trump. Erdogan has also shown a preference for the Russian model, with its sense of restoring a lost empire, returning Turkey to a more independent place in the world and rejecting Western democracy.

At the same time, the fact that Turkey belongs to NATO has only increased Mr. Putin’s desire to forge strong relations with Mr. Erdogan despite their differences over the conflict in Syria.

“Mr. Putin and myself are determined on this issue,” Erdogan told journalists about the missile deal.

Libya's Oil King Won't Be Stopped By OPEC

Authored by Tsvetana Paraskova via OilPrice.com,

Conflict-torn Libya, divided between rival factions in the east and the west, recently reached 1 million bpd of crude oil output - for the first time since 2013.

The oil production recovery has put in the spotlight the chairman of Libya’s National Oil Corporation (NOC), Mustafa Sanalla, whom analysts see as a central figure in the oil sector, wearing the hats of both a diplomat and an oil minister. It will be Sanalla who will lead Libya’s delegation at the upcoming meeting of the Joint OPEC-Non-OPEC Ministerial Monitoring Committee (JMMC) in Russia, at which he will argue his country’s position and share production plans for the immediate future.  

And the monitoring committee will be eager to find out how much Libya’s plans could further offset the cartel and friends’ production cuts, from which the African nation is—for now at least—exempt.

Winning exemption at the time of the November OPEC deal wasn’t difficult for Libya, whose production was at the mercy of the civil strife and port blockades that plagued Libya over the past few years.

Libya’s production averaged 390,000 bpd throughout 2016 and 404,000 bpd in 2015, according to OPEC’s secondary sources. In the fourth quarter last year, output increased slightly to an average of 574,000 bpd.

Since then, the lifting of port seizures and blockades and the June interim deal with Germany’s Wintershall to immediately resume production in concession areas and related fields, which unblocked 160,000 bpd worth of output—has helped Libya to nearly double production.

The recovery of Libya and Nigeria’s crude oil production in the past two months has rekindled fears that rising supply from those two exempt African producers is offsetting a large part of the reductions and is depressing crude oil prices, alongside rising U.S. shale output.

Libya’s oil production recovery is the primary goal of NOC’s chairman Sanalla, who said in an opinion piece in the New York Times in June, referring to the country’s internal power struggles:  

“Between 2013 and last September, these blockaded nearly all of Libya’s main oil ports and tried to leverage that chokehold into ransom money and political power. That cost the country over $120 billion in lost revenues and most of its financial reserves.”

Arguing that the country’s oil and gas resources should not be held hostage to power struggles and fractious politics, Sanalla noted:

“Caught between those rivals, we at the N.O.C. intend to remain neutral until there is a single legitimate government we can submit to.”

Geoff Porter, founder of the North Africa Risk Consulting, said in an interview with Bloomberg, commenting on Sanalla’s role in the Libyan oil sector:

"His job is to produce as much oil as possible while he can and I think that’s what he is going to continue to try to do.”

However, years of neglect and attacks on facilities have damaged the output capacity, and infrastructure needs investments if Libya were to return to producing 1.6 million bpd, its output level before the 2011 revolution that toppled Muammar Ghaddafi.

Libya may be close to its capacity, and possibly has a short-term “implicit” ceiling of just above 1 million bpd, Mattia Toaldo, senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, told Bloomberg.

So Libya could ‘cap’ not because OPEC asks it to, but because of infrastructure limitations.  

Unlike fellow exempt producer Nigeria—which has signaled that it could cap production when its production reaches a stable 1.8 million bpd—Libya has not specified any output level for a possible ceiling.  

Last week, Sanalla told Reuters in comments sent via email:

“Libya’s political, humanitarian and economic situation needs to be taken into account if we are going to talk about production caps.”

“Accurate information will remove uncertainty and help the market understand and respond to future supply levels,” NOC’s chairman noted.  

The OPEC/non-OPEC monitoring committee will receive the latest updates regarding Libya’s production and plans—and get more information about expected supply from the cartel—at the OPEC meeting this weekend. Despite the fact that the monitoring committee is only making recommendations to the larger group, it may consider whether further actions are needed in view of the latest supply figures and forecasts for the coming months.

Italy Threatens EU With "Nuclear Option": Give 200,000 Migrants EU Visas, Sending Them North

Two weeks after Italy reacted with anger to Austria"s deployment of troops and armored vehicles to the border between the two nations, while reactivating border controls at the Brenner Pass over concerns that Italy will be unable to handle the roughly 85,000 migrants and refugees who have entered the country so far in 2017, the Italian government has threatened to retaliate in way that assures an imminent migrant crisis as well as an escalation of tensions between the two EU nations.

According to The Times, an Italian minister and a senator have threatened to issue temporary EU visas to thousands of migrants in an effort to "resolve" Italy"s escalating migrant and refugee crisis, which would then allow the refugees to travel north. The move, which has been described as a "nuclear option," would allow the nearly 200,000 migrants currently stranded in Italy, to travel across Europe using a Brussels directive loophole.

Paolo Gentiloni, the prime minister, is livid that the rest of Europe has refused to take its fair share of migrants and that they have closed ports to rescue ships as the number of refugees attempting the treacherous crossing from Libya to the Continent has surged.

Italy previously called on its EU neighbors to help with the escalating humanitarian crisis but it has been disappointed by their complete lack of action. The face off prompted former Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi to shock the European liberal establishment, when last Friday he released excerpts from a new book in which he said that "we need to free ourselves from a sense of guilt. We do not have the moral duty to welcome into Italy people who are worse off than ourselves" adding that "we need to escape from our "do gooder" mentality."

Migrants disembark from the Medecins Sans Frontiers ship Vos Prudence after
being rescued at sea, at Salerno"s harbor, Italy, on Friday

Renzi also warned last Friday that Rome would look to curb funding to EU nations that had refused to offer help. "They are shutting their doors. We will block their funds," he said, sounding suspiciously like Turkey"s Erdogan who has so far prevented a new refugee crisis in Europe by gating some 2 million migrants inside Turkey"s borders.

One week later, not even Renzi"s dramatic reversal has prompted a reaction from the EU, leaving Italy in the same place as before, which as a reminder is that due to its geographic location, Italy has been one of the first entry points  for people fleeing from the south to reach Europe. More than 86,000 migrants have crossed the Mediterranean to Italy already this year, leaving the nation scrambling - and struggling - to cope with the huge increase of people fleeing north Africa.

Meanwhile, hundreds of asylum seekers are packed into overcrowded centers - dubbed "human warehouses" by locals  - scattered across small villages throughout the country.  Mattia Toaldo, a senior analyst at the European Council on Foreign Relations, told The Times: "If migrants continue to arrive and Italy decides to give them papers to cross borders and leave Italy it would be a nuclear option."

And since "Italians have lost any hope of getting help from the EU" they may say, "If you won"t make it a common challenge, we will" Toaldo added.

This is precisely what some in Gentiloni"s government are already doing: Mario Giro, Italy"s deputy foreign minister, and Luigi Manconi, a senator with the ruling Democratic Party, told The Times that issuing migrants with temporary visas was under discussion. Giro believes that Italy can exploit European Council Directive 2001/55, developed after the Balkans conflict to give temporary European entry permits to a large number of displaced people.

Needless to say, if Italy pursues this course of action, and ultimately activates the "nuclear option", support for the Schengen scheme, which allows all EU citizens to travel freely across the Continent, may be in jeopardy. Worse, since for most of the migrants the final destination will be Germany, it may rekindle the same migrant crisis which at the end of 2015 saw Angela Merkel"s approval rating plummet as her countrymen slammed her "Open Door" (since shut) policy.

The Italian rescue ship Vos Prudence arrives in the port of Salerno carrying 935
migrants, including 16 children and 7 pregnant women on Friday

The move will also drastically escalate tensions with not only Austria, but neighboring Frace, which have used dogs and the threat of armoured vehicles to push back migrants who try to enter through Italy"s northern border. France 24 reports that perhaps in anticipation of such a move, vast white tents erected in a former military zone on the outskirts of the tiny village of Conetta, house some 1,400 men from across Africa, packed onto endless rows of bunks.

"I used to call this place a modern lager," Cona mayor Albero Panfilio told AFP, referring to concentration camps. The commune of Cona includes the little village of Conetta. "After two years this is (still) a place where human beings are squashed in together, with no hope for the future."

"Now I call it a human warehouse. The migrants arrive, they don"t know where to put them, they have a warehouse, they dump them here." He added that the asylum seekers were treated "like garbage."

Meanwhile, 10 kilometers away, in Bagnoli di Sopra, 700 migrants are crowded into another former military base surrounded by barbed wire fences with no access to journalists. 

Finally, a question emerges: with Europe helpless to prevent Italy from pursuing this path should Rome choose to do so, will Brussels activate its own "nuclear response" in retaliation. Recall that in 2011, a "united Europe" and the ECB removed then-PM Sylvio Berlusconi almost overnight when the former premier threatened to exit the Eurozone, by sending yields on Italian bonds soaring above 10%. While this time Italy"s economy is (relatively) sound, should Rome proceed to dump 200,000 unwanted migrants in Europe"s lap, the one certain response would be a financial one, with Mario Draghi sending a very clear message if not to his native country, then certainly the current government, which will immediately be blacklisted by Europe, with any and all measures taken to remove it.