| ABC News | - |
The
first time the young mother tried to flee to Europe on a rickety boat
of fellow migrants from Africa, the overcrowded vessel quickly broke
down and filled with water, forcing it to return to the Libyan coast. The second time, she was arrested and ...
In Libya, Migrants Face Ordeals at Sea and in Jail
The first time the young mother tried to flee to Europe on a rickety
boat of fellow migrants from Africa, the overcrowded vessel quickly
broke down and filled with water, forcing it to return to the Libyan
coast. The second time, she was arrested and placed in a
mosquito-infested Libyan detention center, where she has languished for
months.
She says she lives on bread and water, with only milk for her
8-month-old girl, and is beaten by guards with a hose if she complains.
"They beat us like goats," said Beauty Osaha, 23, who headed north from
her native Nigeria in hopes of a better life. She said the guards at the
facility in the ancient city of Sabratha search migrants' bodies,
including their private parts, looking for money or smuggled phones.
Libya's chaos in the two years following the overthrow of dictator
Moammar Gadhafi has turned the country into a prime springboard for tens
of thousands of migrants, mainly from Africa, trying to reach Europe in
rickety, crowded boats. With police and the military in disarray, human
smuggling has reached the level of a mafia-style organized industry in
which Libya's militias have gotten involved, according to activists and
police.
The danger of the sea journey became particularly clear this month, with
three deadly wrecks of migrant boats coming from Libya. At least 365
people, mostly Eritreans fleeing repression in their homeland, died on
Oct. 3 when their boat from Libya sank off the Italian island of
Lampedusa — one of the worst verified migrant tragedies in the
Mediterranean.
Detention by Libyan militias is the migrants' other potential ordeal.
Activists say militias hold migrants in stores, schools and abandoned
buildings as well as detention centers, abusing them and holding them
hostage until they receive money from the migrants' families. Then the
migrants are freed, only to try again.
"In these prisons, the principles of the Feb. 17 Revolution are being
toppled down. The Libyan authorities must put an end to those pirates," a
Libyan rights group called Beladi, or My Nation, said on its website,
referring to the "revolution" that led to Gadhafi's ouster and death in
2011.
But Libya's government is weak, virtually hostage to the militias, which
originated as rebel brigades fighting Gadhafi but have grown in size
and power.
The government has put some militias on the Interior and Defense
Ministries' payrolls in an effort to control them, but the militias
still do whatever they want. Militiamen this month even briefly
kidnapped Prime Minister Ali Zidan, who has frequently spoken of the
need to rein in the armed groups.
An official with one militia in Tripoli connected to the Interior
Ministry that runs a migrant detention center acknowledged abuses take
place but blamed them on lack of training for the young guards. "They
only get about two months of training, this is not enough," said
Abdel-Hakim al-Balazi, spokesman for the Anti-Crime Department, a
militia umbrella group that keeps security in the capital.
He said that migrants detained by his group are sent to larger detention
centers in cities in Libya's southern deserts, run by other militias.
Soon after, "we just see them free again on the streets," he said. He
added that the southern borders are "wide open" with no government
control.
After the latest migrant deaths, Zidan said his government was
"determined" to stem the migrant flow. He asked the European Union for
training and equipment to help patrol Libya's coast and desert borders,
including access to satellite imagery.
In the first six months of this year, 8,400 migrants reached Malta and
Italy by sea, almost all from Libya, nearly twice the number in the
first six months of 2012, according to the U.N. refugee agency. Smaller
numbers come from Tunisia, and others from Egypt, often heading to
Greece. But even with the ordeals, Libya's weakened enforcement makes it
an attractive path for migrants.
Cities along Libya's 1,000-mile, largely unpatrolled Mediterranean
coastline have become collection points where Africans mass, scrounging
up the cash for boat to take them the 200 miles to Malta or Lampedusa.
Sabratha, a coastal city of about 110,000 people, is now home to some
10,000 migrants, officials here say.
The true number of migrant deaths at sea is impossible to tell, given
the secrecy of the boat journeys. A half hour drive into the desert by a
garbage heap outside Sabratha is a makeshift graveyard, marked only
with a few stones painted white — with no names — where migrant bodies
found washed ashore have been buried.
"Bodies are not buried separately, just all next to each other with no
marks to tell who is where," said activist Essam Karar, who documented
the burials, taking pictures of the bodies.
Under Gadhafi, Libya's policies shifted depending on his whims. At
times, illegal migration was encouraged as a tool to pressure European
countries; at other times, security forces carried out wide-scale
arrests of migrants.
Now officials and activists say trafficking became more organized and that militias collaborate in the profitable business.
"It's a multinational mafia," said Gamal al-Gharabili, head of
Sabratha-based Association for Peace, Care and Relief. Boat owners are
mostly Libyans connected with Sudanese smugglers bringing in migrants
from Horn of Africa countries, he said.
Abdel-Salam al-Kerit, another Sabratha activist involved in aiding
migrants, said the migrants used to have to pay multiple smugglers
across the land route through Libya. "Now you pay once and for all," he
said. "The network extends from the southern borders of Libya to the
shores."
Bassem al-Gharabili, a police officer at the anti-trafficking body in
the city, said smugglers have become more professional, using larger
boats, and are expert at eluding security forces.
"Traffickers monitor us as much as we monitor them. They have spies in the sea. They could be fishermen," he said.
Ramadan, a 25-year-old Eritrean detained at the Sabratha facility, said
he first tried to flee Africa along the Egyptian-Israeli border but was
caught by smugglers who tortured him with electric shocks and chopped
off some of his fingers.
He then tried crossing to Europe from Libya twice. The first time, he
survived a rickety boat packed with 50 people that partially broke down
after four hours at sea. Three people on board died. The second time, he
was detained in Sabratha. There, he said, he was beaten by guards.
"Better to die. I have nothing," said Ramadan, who spoke on condition
his full name not be used, fearing further trouble from officials.
In a dark cell at a detention center in the town of Sorman, near
Sabratha, Israel Koja said he ran away from his hometown in Nigeria
after militants from the Islamist extremist group Boko Haram stormed his
house, tied him up and stabbed him.
Koja, 33, paid $1,200 for traffickers to cross the desert into Libya, but has spent more than a year in the jail.
"I escaped a hell to fall in another hell," Koja said.
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