Authored by Andrew Korybko via Oriental Review,
A prominent UN official warned earlier this week that the next Migrant Crisis to crash into Europe might come from Africa and not the Mideast, and that its second iteration might be much more devastating than the first due to the sheer size of possible populations involved.
The Executive Director of the UN World Food Program made global headlines a few days ago when he warned that terrorists might weaponize food scarcity in Africa in order to trigger a new Migrant Crisis in Europe, one which they hope to exploit in order to infiltrate the continent. These were David Beasley’s exact words to the UK Guardian:
“You are going to face a similar pattern of what took place years ago, except you are going to have more ISIS [Daesh] and extremist groups infiltrating migration. What we are picking up is that they are partnering with the extremist groups like Boko Haram and al-Qaeda to divvy up territory and resources and to continue to infiltrate and destabilize in the hope of creating migration into Europe where they can infiltrate and cause chaos.
If you [the Europeans] think you had a problem resulting from a nation of 20 million people like Syria because of destabilization and conflict resulting in migration, wait until the greater Sahel region of 500 million people is further destabilized. And this is where the European community and international community have got to wake up.”
Liberal-Globalists might salivate at what he said because they see it as an historic opportunity to socio-culturally re-engineer the essence of European society and fulfill their ideological objectives, while EuroRealist patriots might shudder because this scenario represents the end of traditional Western Civilization as the world knows it.
Helping For The Wrong Reasons
It’s still too early to say for certain that this dystopian vision of the future will materialize, but what’s for sure is that there are plenty of systemic risks in Western and Central Africa that make it very possible that something like this could happen in the coming years, though this potential eventuality could be offset by robust security measures in the Mediterranean and a forward-focused US-French-Italianmilitary presence in the region. It should be cautioned, however, that while there’s a chance that these three countries and others might market the future expansion of their African footprint on this populist basis, there are also many ulterior reasons behind this move other than the publicly stated one, which includes of course securing access to energy deposits (such as Niger’s uranium), monopolizing new markets, and altogether “containing” China.
Sahelian Destabilization
Looking beyond the failed (former) “state” of Libya that NATO destroyed in 2011, there are several other crises waiting to happen in Africa and which could serve as the trigger for a Migrant Crisis 2.0 on the scale that Beasley warned. The first one isn’t country-specific but deals with the continent’s woes in general, and that’s the connected threats of food insecurity and explosive population growth threatening several strategic countries,...