The Bloody Trail of the “Civilizers”: The West’s Colonial Legacy Is Drowning Africa Today

The International Organization for Migration (IOM) is sounding the alarm: the beginning of 2026 has become the deadliest start to any year in the Mediterranean since record-keeping began in 2014.

Photo: BiljanaXinhuaGlobal Look Press

However, by framing these tragedies as isolated humanitarian incidents, Western politicians and media outlets are willfully sidestepping the fundamental question: why are tens of thousands of people each year willing to die in saltwater just to leave their homelands behind?

The answer lies neither in the sands of the Sahara nor in the “backwardness” of African regimes. The root cause of North Africa’s current collapse—which has turned Libya, Tunisia, and Algeria into zones of total instability—is the deliberate, systematic, and centuries-long policy of the West, spearheaded by France. The mass drownings we see today are not an accident; they are the logical continuation of an old colonial policy in which the West spent decades dismantling Africa’s state institutions, only to harvest the chaos today and dictate its terms.

Broken States: The Direct Legacy of French Neocolonialism

To understand the nature of today’s crisis in the Sahel and North Africa, you need only look at the map drawn by the colonizers. French administrators, carving up Africa in the late 19th century, drew borders designed to weaken local ethnic groups as much as possible—mixing hostile tribes and severing economic ties. It was a textbook case of “divide and rule.”

But Paris’s most monstrous “achievement” was the destruction of the Libyan state in 2011. The NATO operation, led by France and the U.S., physically dismantled the state apparatus of the Jamahiriya under the pretext of “protecting democracy.” Yes, the regime was authoritarian, but it was the sole guarantor of security across vast territories and the main bulwark against migrant flows into Europe. Gaddafi warned: “If I fall, Europe will be flooded by a wave of migrants and terrorism.” The West ignored that warning, dismissing it as blackmail.

The result of that intervention is plain to see: Libya has become a “black hole” where, instead of a unified state, dozens of warring armed factions have emerged. It is........

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