 You know, on Monday evening, this ship responded to a distress call at sea and took the migrants on board. But today, when permission to dock in Italy was initially denied and the migrants were told the Libyan Coast Guard would be coming for them, the situation turned ugly. In the end, the Italian Coast Guard was forced to intervene to help save the ship's crew. Nancy Lindborg is the President of the US Institute of Peace and has just returned from Libya. Nancy, thank you very much for joining us. Are we going to see more and more situations like the one we've just seen with the Vostolassa of immigrants being rescued by ships, not being able to find a berth for them to dock in as European countries get more restricted and still more people come from Libya? That's certainly a possibility. What we are seeing, however, is that there's been a significant drop in the crossings of the Mediterranean into Europe since the height of this crisis two years ago. But what it fundamentally signals is that people are going to continue to take enormous risks for a better life. And the solutions have to rest not only in how do we deal with the problem, but how do we deal with the symptoms of why people are leaving their homes in the first place? There's been a drop in the number of Syrians coming, because the Syrian war went through Turkey and through Greece and up into Europe that way. But the numbers of people coming out of Libya where you've just returned from is still fairly regular at the moment. What are the conditions when you spent time there and you just came back a week ago, what conditions did you find migrants in? Well, the situation in Libya is that you have a well-oiled smuggling machine in a country that is basically without a functioning government. And so there are built-in business and economic incentives to move people from further south in Africa, the Sahel, Nigeria, Chad, et cetera, up through Libya and then to turn them over to the human smugglers to cross the sea. So a big part of this issue has got to be stabilizing Libya, helping a more functioning government and creating different incentives for the smugglers who right now are making a lot of money on this whole human smuggling operation. Nancy, I remember when I was on one of the ships off the coast that some of the boys that we saved had been kept in a hole on the beach until the conditions were right to send them out to sea in a hole on the beach for days. And that experience today that we've seen on the Vostalasa tells me that they're so desperate not to be sent back to these people smugglers and to these detention centres that they're going to take on ship crews that save them. Yes, well, what we know is that there's somewhere between 7,000 and 10,000 migrants who are in a series of detention centres in Libya. And again, it's without the kind of regulation or oversight or ability to know that they're being taken care of and it adds to the tragedy of the situation. They are a small percentage of about 700,000 migrants who are in Libya overall. So there's a much larger population, some of whom we're trying to find work in Libya. But either the work wasn't there or the insecurity and the lurking violence of Libya pushes them to keep moving on across the sea into Europe and take that risk. Nancy Limburg, thanks very much for coming in to join us. This is happening, of course, as Nancy was suggesting, Christian, at a time when we need to look at the root causes of this, people are going to still keep on trying to, as they have here in the United States and they're trying to leave those Central American countries. It's exactly the same pattern. People are in a desperate situation. They try to leave, they're prepared to take enormous risks and pay out large sums of money to these people smugglers. There has to be a better way of addressing this problem because just building walls or saying, we're going to stop all these boats from docking in Italy. I'm not sure that that's the long-term solution. And yet we're at a time when governments are not interested, particularly in supporting the progress that might stabilise these countries. There has to be a better solution, though, for the ships that are at sea. It is a law of the sea. It is maritime law that you pick up people who are in distress. If you can't dock with the people that you've... You're almost, you know, taking your boat through. If you can't take those people back to land, then what do you do? And if you're facing this risk that your ship's going to be taken over and that you have the Italian ghost car has to come and save the crew because there's a mutiny on board the ship, that puts ships in an awful predicament. So Europe has to find, for me, a better solution. It seems to me that these disembarkation centres that they're talking about in Europe, that's not really going to be the solution, particularly if people, like you say, are going to take these risks. And what was the... When you were on that ship off the coast of Libya, what was the impact on the crew of rescuing all of these migrants? Oh, it's pretty brutal. I mean, I think people overlook the fact that these NGO crews are on board these ships for months on end in some fairly rough conditions crossing over to the Libyan coast. And then you pull these people on board and they're without documents, without clothes. There may be some dead people in the boat. There may be people who've drowned. It's a desperate condition and some of them are carrying diseases because they've, of course, been in these detention centres. So it does take a huge toll on the crews and they've been given a pretty real deal, these NGO crews, by the Italian authorities because I know what the Italian government is saying, that they're the taxi drivers for the migrants, but you also have to bear in mind the job they're doing. Yeah.