Just in case you thought so – and people tend to think a lot these days as you well know – I am not in favor of all migrants-to-be coming from across the Mediterranean to Europe. But I certainly do not want migrants and refugees to become victims of crimes against humanity in Libya, partly as a result of European border security, i.e. with your and my tax money.
This observation – this goes further than an accusation – comes from the report No Way Out of human rights organizations ECCHR, FIDH, and LFJL from last November. Up to today, and with 100 percent certainty into the foreseeable future, such qualifications recur in reports from human rights and aid organizations. You get that 100 percent certainty from me because, whatever the outside world says hopefully about elections and constitutions, there is hardly any prospect of dismantling the den of robbers that Libya has become after 2011. Would you cooperate if you were a robber? And also because Europe sees no reason to end its cooperation in the Libyan approach to migrants and refugees.
Some numbers for perspective. More than 67,000 migrants and refugees from overseas arrived in Italy last year, more than in the corona year 2020 but much less than in the record year 2016 (180,000). As far as we know, 1,550 migrants drowned in the central Mediterranean last year. The Libyan coastguard removed a total of 32,000 people from boats and dinghies at sea, of whom 6,000 in December alone (International Migration Organization). Once back on land, they are transferred to official or clandestine detention camps, where torture such as electric shocks, and sexual violence, including rape and forced prostitution, are commonplace (UN report October 2021 and various other reports). Libya’s many armed militias rely on slave labor by captured migrants and extortion. Those who want to leave have to pay their jailers. Family at home pressured to pay ransom. There is also a Department for the Fight against Illegal Migration, which, according to a UN spokesperson in the European Parliament, is now sending more people back home than ever before. Among other things, to no man’s land in the desert, and without provisions.
Oxfam, Doctors Without Borders and Amnesty International Last week celebrated the fifth anniversary of the EU-Libya liaison with angry statements about the ‘hell conditions’ for migrants in Libya and the ‘complicity in them by EU and EU member states’. The EU now has hundreds of millions of euros in Libya, in particular for equipment and training of the Coast Guard and other border security agencies. The EU allows the Libyan Coast Guard to operate in international waters up to nearly 100 miles from the coast. Human rights violations or not, all that support continues. The EU hopes to supply the coastguard with five more vessels before the summer, when more migrant boats are expected. A spokesman in the European Parliament last month emphasized the “rescue” of tens of thousands of migrants.
Remarkable: our own Ministry of Foreign Affairs has published the report No Way Out sponsored. Has it read the content?
Caroline Roelants is a Middle East expert and separates the facts from the hype here every week.
A version of this article also appeared in NRC on the morning of February 7, 2022
#participate #mistreatment #migrants