political conFlictS and Migration in the Mena StateS 185
violent demonstrations and conf licts, even leading, perhaps, to armed
resistance. In Algeria, for example, there has been a wave of social protests
of young people because of state ‘neglect’ and among the rural population
because of a lack of water, butane gas, infrastructure etc. since 2004. Social
protests during the Arab Spring in 2011 arose out of overall discontent with
government politics and policies and will be reproduced in the future if
the root causes persist. The possible migration potential^30 from domestic
conf licts cannot be accurately predicted, but examples from the recent past
teach us that conf licts can quickly provoke considerable migration streams
of several hundreds of thousands of people.
Politically motivated migration from Algeria (f leeing Islamist violence)
at the beginning and in the middle of the 1990s, the massive f light of the
non-Arab population because of attacks by the Arabic Janjawid in Darfur
since 2003, the large-scale emigration of Iraqis since the civil war began
in 2003 or the f light of the population out of Southern Lebanon and Beirut
due to the airstrikes of the Israeli military in the war of 2006, are examples
of what happens when 200,000 or 400,000 or more persons must suddenly
pick up and leave their homes. Even though most of these refugees end up
only moving to other places within the country or a neighbouring country
due their lack of resources, such migrants do make up a large percentage
of those who seek refuge in Europe. This is particularly the case when we
are talking about conf licts in countries directly bordering the Mediter-
ranean Sea, and when there are already large settlements of that group in
continental Europe.
In coming years, a large number of refugees will f lee their home coun-
tries because of the deteriorating economic conditions and the worsening
environmental pollution and conf licts in North Africa and the entire Mid-
dle East. The Scientif ic Advisory Committee to the German Government
‘Global Environmental Changes’, in its summary report entitled Securit y
Risk Climate Change of May 2007, has projected this state of affairs. On the
regional hotbed of North Africa it writes:
North Africa: political crisis potential and migration pressure will rise
because of the combination of increasing droughts and water shortages
with continued high population growth, weakening agricultural
potentials and dwindling capacity to solve political problems. The30 Independent thereof is the continual migration of young adults, in particular, who look to
f ind their way to Western countries because of the socio-economic plight, unemployment and
lack of prospects in the MENA countries.