Europe is coddling Arab strongmen to keep out refugees

MUCH of Syria lies in ruins, but Bashar al-Assad’s bureaucracy of repression hums along. Earlier this year a pro-opposition website published a list of Syrians wanted by the regime. The database is both staggering in scope—1.5m people, or 7% of the pre-war population—and incomplete. Jamil Hassan, the head of the air-force intelligence service, is said to have told senior officers in July that he wants to arrest twice that number. On August 9th another regime official announced that 100,000 Syrians have died of “unknown causes” since 2017. Many were tortured to death in Mr Assad’s dungeons. Yet European politicians are debating whether to send refugees back to this bloody oubliette.

Seven years ago, when Arabs revolted against their autocratic rulers, European leaders engaged in a collective mea culpa. Decades of working with dictators had not created a stable, prosperous Arab world. From now on, democracy and human rights would be the cornerstones of the European Union’s Middle East policy, they vowed. But the high-mindedness was short-lived. Driven by a fear of migrants, European governments have once again embraced strongmen.

Without a political transition in Syria, the EU refuses to help the regime rebuild the battle-scorched country. But some member states, eager to see refugees go home, want to do it anyway. Russian diplomats have offered to help repatriate migrants in exchange for construction materials and money, and the proposal is getting some attention in European capitals. “It’s going to be very difficult to keep the consensus on this issue,” admits a diplomat in Brussels. Politicians from Germany and Denmark have visited regime-held Syria to assess if it is “safe”; the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany party says it is.

In Libya, where EU members helped overthrow Muammar Qaddafi in 2011, they now work with warlords to round up migrants. Italy has paid off local militias, which hold migrants in abysmal conditions. Torture and rape are common. France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, wants Libya’s feuding factions to hold elections in December. He claims it will stabilise the country. It is more likely to shatter a fragile UN-backed transition and boost Khalifa Haftar, the strongman who rules the east. The EU’s own election observers say the vote will be too unsafe to monitor. But Mr Macron thinks it will help keep African migrants off French soil.

The EU set a precedent in 2016 when it asked Turkey’s authoritarian president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to limit the number of migrants crossing the Mediterranean. He got €6bn in aid and visa-free travel to the EU for some of his citizens. “Arab states saw there was a kind of hysteria, and they knew they could play that card too,” says an official at the European External Action Service, the EU’s diplomatic corps.

In June the Speaker of Egypt’s parliament, Ali Abdel Aal, led a delegation to Brussels. His government holds thousands of political prisoners and is the world’s number-three jailer of journalists. Questioned about this, Mr Abdel Aal offered a laughable defence. Locking up bloggers and activists, he argued, would mean fewer negative stories about Egypt, and thus more tourists. Pressed further, he turned to a familiar argument. Egypt is a country of 97m people just 220 miles from the EU. The threat was obvious: if you thought the Syrian refugee crisis was bad, imagine what would happen if Egypt collapsed.

Such scaremongering is effective. The EU has offered only tepid criticism of Egypt’s army-backed government. Until this summer, none of it was aired publicly. Britain and France have welcomed the president, Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi, for official visits. Even Italy is pursuing closer ties—despite the death in 2016 of an Italian graduate student in Cairo, who was probably killed by the police. “The EU is acting like the junior partner,” complains an Egyptian activist. “Even Trump is tougher on Egypt.”

The conditions that sent millions of Arabs across the Mediterranean still exist. Egypt’s population is young, poor and restless. Militias in Libya today can be just as brutal as Mr Qaddafi’s regime was. And Mr Assad, needless to say, is not a stabilising force. The EU might succeed in sending some refugees home. More will come.