A year after it received the United Nations Security Council’s approval to try to stop human smuggling out of Libya, Europe is seeking the Council’s authorization to intercept illegal arms going into Libya.
Speaking to the Council on Monday, the European Union’s top foreign policy official, Federica Mogherini, urged members to authorize European naval operations in the Mediterranean Sea “to enforce the U.N. arms embargo on the high seas, off the coast of Libya.”
That arms embargo, often violated, has been in place since 2011, during the revolt against Libya’s longtime ruler, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.
The new European request would allow the existing naval effort, known as Operation Sophia, to expand its mandate in international waters, from intercepting migrant boats leaving Libyan territory to intercepting weapons heading in.
Western diplomats on the Council have said they expect the measure to come up for a vote in mid-June.
“I can only hope that this Council will once again do the right thing,” Ms. Mogherini said, “and help us make the Mediterranean a safer place for everyone.”
It is a politically delicate request, complicated by disagreement among Libya’s rival factions on who rules the country. Enforcing the arms embargo would bolster the United Nations-backed government of Prime Minister Fayez Serraj. The arms that cross the Mediterranean often end up in the hands of militias beyond the prime minister’s control that rule eastern Libya, according to the United Nations.
Martin Kobler, the United Nations mediator for Libya, told the Council on Monday afternoon that the number of weapons floating around in Libya was more than three times its population of six million. “These weapons do not fall from the sky, but come in increasingly through illegal shipments by sea and by land,” he said. “These shipments must end if there is to be any serious hope of bringing peace to Libya.”
The Libyan legislature has yet to give its approval to Mr. Serraj’s administration, and the Russian ambassador to the United Nations, Vitaly I. Churkin, hinted at the difficulties on his way into Council chambers Monday morning. Mr. Churkin said he had “concerns” about how other groups in Libya would react to a Council measure.
Further complicating matters, Mr. Serraj’s government is expected to ask the Council separately to allow exemptions to the arms embargo to combat the Islamic State extremist group. The government has sought broad exemptions in the past and been denied.
But at a meeting of Western and Middle Eastern envoys in May in Vienna, Secretary of State John Kerry said the United States was prepared to “provide humanitarian, economic and security support to the new Libyan government on their request” in its bid to destroy the Islamic State’s presence in Libya.
Europe began its operations to counter migrant smuggling last year after the Council adopted a resolution authorizing European naval forces to inspect suspicious vessels and render them “inoperable” if necessary.
The effort has not stopped migrants desperate to reach Europe, however. Seven hundred people are believed to have drowned in three days in late May, one of the deadliest periods in Mediterranean Sea trafficking.
nytimes.com
