Since former US President Barack Obama's tenure, drone warfare has become the preferred option for governments wanting to engage in aggression while limiting scrutiny. This detachment has allowed governments to perfect inhumane tactics — whether drones are used for bombing or surveillance. The EU's purportedly peace-building agenda is finding drone surveillance a useful tool to support its anti-migrant stance.
The EU is reported to have invested £95 million in Israeli drone technology for Frontex to provide intelligence on migrant movement in the Mediterranean. Rescue operations in the Mediterranean have been largely left to NGO ships as the EU scaled back on its missions, in accordance with the exclusionary politics it adopted after playing a role in the Middle East and North Africa foreign intervention.
So far, Frontex has not explicitly linked drone investment to EU migration policies, although its website states that it is testing new equipment for border and sea surveillance in Greece. Opting for surveillance of migrants instead of rescue operations will result in death by drowning, or torture and possible deaths in Libya. For both scenarios, the EU has cultivated its own brand of impunity. Looking away has become politically acceptable.
Increasing drone surveillance has been described as 'a way to spend money without having the responsibility to save lives'. However, the EU's anti-migrant stance goes beyond refusing responsibility. It is an adamant declaration of how the bloc has determined to continue engaging in different forms of warfare.
An estimated 686 migrants have drowned so far in 2019. These numbers do not include migrants who drowned off the Libyan coast. If surveillance is used without any form of rescue operations, the death toll will rise, even as the EU will be able to congratulate itself on having diminished the 'burden' of immigration while consolidating the reality of the Mediterranean Sea as a graveyard.
With less direct involvement and more investment in surveillance, the EU unleashes the possibility of increasing its own perpetuation of human rights violations. InfoMigrants has reported that for over a year, Frontex surveillance has not been accompanied by EU search and rescue efforts. The bloc can instead focus on funding the Libyan Coast Guard to do its dirty work while attracting less scrutiny.
Reports of horrific abuse and torture in Libyan detention centres have surfaced time and again in the media, and a report by Doctors Without Borders stresses that migrants' biggest fear is being returned to Libya, on account of