Migration is an age-old fact of life that governments must accept if they want to manage the flow of job-seekers moving from Africa to Europe, Libyan leader Moammar Gadaffi told an Africa-Europe conference on migration.
”Action against nature is like rowing against the stream, which leads to failure,” Gadaffi told African and European interior ministers at the first African Union-European Union conference on migration, the Libyan news agency reported.
”The current populations of the world are originally migrants who came from other places,” he told the ministers at a meeting at his home in Tripoli on Wednesday evening.
Gadaffi’s comments put him squarely on the African side of the debate about how to control the sharp increase in the number of impoverished Africans seeking a better life in Europe.
Africa has urged Europe to be more open to legal migrants and argues a crackdown on migrants, without more development aid, will only push the flow to other places.
European governments, some of them under pressure at home to toughen immigration policy, have accused African counterparts of failing to fulfil accords pledging to combat illegal migration.
Routinely dismissed by Western commentators, Gadaffi’s opinions are listened to closely in Africa thanks to his advocacy of African unity, support of African Union bodies, funding of African development projects and his oil wealth.
Libya’s role as a transit point for migrants heading north gives it a strategic importance in efforts to manage migration. The country of 5,5-million says it plays host to two million illegal migrants, which it calls a threat to the social fabric.
The conference is intended to send a signal that the two regions can improve security cooperation on land and sea borders and address the poverty that is forcing Africans northwards.
Land belongs to all
The conference is expected to publish a joint communiqué on Thursday calling for increased cooperation on migration.
Illegal migration is a thorny issue in Europe, where politicians have made election capital with pledges to stamp it out, while economists say more immigration is needed to make up for falling birth rates.
Gadaffi said migration had complex roots, nurtured by a powerful mixture of world population growth and war as well as a historical legacy of colonialist intervention and slavery.
”Political borders, official papers and identities set for every group of people are new, artificial things not recognised by nature,” the news agency reported him as saying.
”Land is property of everyone, and God commands all human beings to migrate on earth to seek a living, which is their right.”
Abolishing migration would logically imply that people everywhere should return home to the continents their ancestors first migrated from, he said.
”Europe itself encouraged Asian and African migration to compensate for the manpower shortage caused by the death of scores of millions of men in both First and Second World Wars, which were sparked by Europe.”
”The population of Europe are migrants from Asia, the population of North America are migrants from Europe, the population of South America are migrants from the Iberia peninsula and Africa and other places.” – Reuters