Libya, torture and deaths.The suspension of human rights financed by Rome and Brussels

Of Nancy Porsia

The refinancing for the Libyan Coast Guard has already been approved by the Council of Ministers at the beginning of July, and the Senate will soon be called to vote.Although the torture, deaths and more generally the systematic violation of the most basic rights of migrants in Libya have been widely documented by investigations and reports, the Italian Parliament could for the fifth consecutive year vote in favor of refinancing the Libyan Coast Guard.

Bodies swollen with water, with skin scaly from sun and salt burns, scattered in random order along the shoreline, return to dot the Libyan coasts.“This is a horror we thought was a thing of the past.Instead he comes back on time,” says a man from Zwara, a city on the coast in the far west of Libya.It was him last May 21st, to find the bodies of two children spat out by the sea together with that of a woman.“It was dawn, I was taking a walk, like every morning, by the sea near the family holiday home, when I noticed those small bodies,” says the man.

For Ahmed, not his real name, it was not easy to find people willing to recover those bodies.The government organization Libyan Red Crescent has long denounced the precarious conditions in which they find themselves carrying out delicate tasks like this.Essentially the operators, all volunteers, are not even covered by medical insurance.Even the local Security Directorate, which has been responsible for this sad task for two years, appears reticent towards such delicate operations.On the other hand, their boss had been arrested a month earlier in a sort of feud between armed groups, and for them that was enough to exempt them from work.“I reminded them that these were children, that they could not be left there.I had to insist, yes, but then luckily the men from the Security Directorate arrived and recovered the bodies that the strong current and the storm of the day before had most likely dragged to the shore."However, according to a fisherman from Zwara, other bodies remained abandoned for days on the island of Farwa, a strip of land about five kilometers off the coast of the town of the minority community of Amazigh, or Berbers. 

With the end, last October, of the offensive of General Khalifa Haftar, the strong man of the East who in April 2019 had launched an offensive on the forces of the Government of National Accord based in Tripoli, supported by the United Nations , there are many migrants who today enter the country through the porous borders of the desert to the south.The squares of the main cities along the Libyan coast, where migrants pile up waiting for someone to load them into a pick-up truck for a day's work, are packed again, say residents of Tripoli, Misurata and Zwara.The relative overcoming of the COVID-19 emergency and the suspension of restriction measures have also led to a new boost in the movement of migrants through Libya. 

After about four years, the numbers therefore they start to rise again.In the first six months of 2021, migrants landed in Italy they are about 19,800 compared to 6,184 in 2020 and 2,397 in 2019, creating quite a few embarrassments between Rome and Brussels, where governments had shown satisfaction with the results achieved by policies to contain migratory flows.However, it seems that the cap that Italy and all of Europe had placed as best they could at the mouth of the Mediterranean following the outbreak of the civil war in Libya, investing huge resources in Libya, may soon be blown.Since 2017 Rome he spent approximately 784.3 million euros, while Brussels another 400 million, therefore approximately 1 billion and 100 million euros allocated to finance the Libyan Coast Guard and the other competent authorities of the North African country, theoretically committed against human trafficking.Today as well as on vexed question of how legitimate the cooperation with the Libyan Coast Guard is, inaugurated by the then Interior Minister Marco Minniti with the Memorandum of Understanding and relaunched by Brussels with support for the Libyan military through the European Union Trust Fund to Africa (EUTFA), we must also reflect on the failure of what was sold to European public opinion as the line of pragmatism. 

It was known, not only in intelligence circles, but also in diplomatic ones, what the risks were connected to the financing of the Libyan Coast Guard, as well as in general of the institutions of a country with a failed state and in the midst of civil war like Libya.Armed groups that answer to the Ministry of Defense or the Interior often draw from illicit trafficking in order to finance their resistance on the front, when they are not corrupt Libyan officials who instead seek a mere personal business opportunity in illicit activities .In fact, Italy and Europe have decided to entrust the delicate task of managing migrants, and therefore the rights of vulnerable people, to a country that not only has never signed the Convention on Refugee Rights of 1951, but in which the rule of law has been totally lacking for years, or rather decades.In such a war economy, Italy and Europe have consequently closed agreements with representatives of political lobbies implicated in trafficking, and the same ones who, if necessary, would be able to stop it.

Among the Libyan officials responsible for the Italy-Libya cooperation process on the fight against human trafficking, the head of the coast guard of the city of Zawiya, Abdul Rahaman Al Milad, more famous with his name of wars Bija, he was personally accused of being involved in migrant trafficking.He remained in his post until 2018, when his name was included in the list of Libyan citizens sanctioned by the UN Security Council because he was involved in human trafficking and diesel trafficking, and subsequently received an arrest warrant from the Attorney General of Tripoli, was arrested last October at the strong insistence of the then Libyan Interior Minister Fathi Bashaga.Bashaga had made the fight against traffickers the strong point of his politics and electoral campaign.Already in 2019 he had declared that some traffickers like Bija were still at large only because his Government's military forces were unfortunately busy defending Tripoli from the offensive of Haftar and his Russian allies.Bashaga had promised that once the war was won, he would have a number of known traffickers arrested.And at the end of the fighting, the former Interior Minister kept his word:Zawiya's chief coastguard he was arrested.

However, in the elections for the interim Libyan government held in Geneva last January, Bashaga lost, and with him evidently the policy of intransigence towards the trafficking network.Not only did Abdul Hamid Dbeiba win businessman of Gheddafi memory, but even one of the leading men in the former Colonel's court.For Dbeiba, peace between the parties is a matter of business, and he talks to everyone who has power.Certainly among these there is also the trafficking lobby.It is no coincidence that a few weeks after Dbeiba's election, last April Bija has been released due to insufficient evidence.Details for Italy and Europe, which for years have been focused solely on the politics of controlling numbers, in which the issue of human rights remains pure speculation of an optional nature.

On the other hand, Brussels had already been quite clear since the time ofagreement with Erdogan's Türkiye in 2016 on the deportation of Syrian asylum seekers from the Schengen area.“We pay you to keep them, and what you do is none of our business”, is essentially the message sent by Europe to the countries south of the Mediterranean.Legitimized and financed, the Libyan officials therefore had irrefutable proof of their impunity.It is no coincidence that from 2016 onwards the border between the so-called camps in which traffickers seize migrants and the detention centers managed by the Department against Illegal Migration (DCIM) of the Ministry of the Interior has been narrowing.In traffickers' camps as well as in official detention centers, thousands of migrants are tortured for the purpose of extortion and women often suffer sexual violence, leading to cases of death due to trauma.Just a few days ago, some underage girls they declared of having been raped in a prison managed by the Ministry of the Interior in Tripoli.

As proof of the terrible conditions faced by women, men and children forced into arbitrary detention, for indefinite periods, in Libyan prisons, Doctors Without Borders also reported last June 22nd he announced the suspension of its assistance activities in two of the centers in the capital managed by the DCIM.According to the non-governmental organization, the recent overcrowding of detention centers would have exacerbated the already precarious conditions of the migrants detained there.In the Al Mabani center, detainees went from 300 to around 2,000 in the space of just one month, MSF officials reported at the end of May, resulting in tensions between people in detention and prison guards.At the end of May there was a shootout in which one person was killed and two minors were seriously injured, while on June 17 the guards of Al Mabani opened fire again, wounding several migrants.

And the overcrowding recorded today in the DCIM prisons in Libya is also a direct consequence of the policy of intercepting migrants at sea by the Libyan military, hoped for and planned by Rome and Brussels and implemented by the Tripoli authorities with the help of partners north of the Mediterranean.Since the beginning of 2021, around 14,000 migrants have been intercepted by the Libyan military in the central Mediterranean, compared to around 10,000 brought back throughout 2020 and 7,000 intercepted in 2019.However, these are not migrants stopped near the Libyan coast, but men and women fleeing first from their own countries and then from Libya and already shipwrecked in international waters.In fact, to the Libyan military, those unable to carry out search and rescue at sea autonomously so as to require support on site of the European partners, the competence of the Search and Rescue (SAR) area up to 80 nautical miles was recognized, practically halfway between Libya and Lampedusa. 

The thousands of bodies piled up continuously in the DCIM centers around Libya tell of the physiological process of a country like Libya which, despite the proclamations of European governments which since 2016 have tried to see the Libyan puppet institutions as legitimate partners, remains a country without a state or national security apparatus.In this context, the heavy funding from Italy and Europe could do little in the long term, except to replenish the coffers of those armed groups, or those criminal networks within the institutions, which of migrant detention its business.

The same Al Mabani prison - in which MSF last June 21 asked the administration to open an investigation to identify among the guards those responsible for the beatings of detained migrants - was opened illegally in a former tobacco factory, in west of Tripoli, by representatives of the lobby of the city-state of Zintan, to which the head of the DCIM, Abd Al Hafid Mabrouk, also belongs.During 2019 and 2020, migrants intercepted by the Libyan military at sea and rejected by the directors of other centers were often taken to the former tobacco factory without leaving a trace.To date, Al Mabani is among the detention centers for migrants recognized by the DCIM.However, yesterday as today, it is enough to pay around 2,000 dinars to buy back your freedom and leave the Al Riadi tobacco factory, say some migrants who have passed through there.

Libya looks ahead to December 24, the 70th anniversary of Libya's independence, the day on which Dbeiba's interim government should hand the country over to presidential elections.To date, however, the date of the referendum on the Constitutional Charter has not yet been set, nor is it clear which electoral law will go to the vote.Certainly the date suggested by the then Special Representative for the United Nations in Libya, Stephanie Williams, could in reality prove to be yet another diplomatic error in Libya, which at that point would once again find itself with a Government with an expired mandate and therefore without legitimacy.In the second Berlin conference, which was held on 23 June, the international community insisted with Libyan representatives on the need to go to the vote as scheduled and, preferably, to ensure the evacuation of foreign mercenaries from Libyan territory.But Europe and Italy know that they now have little bargaining power in a country in which Putin's Russia and Erdogan's Turkey define the details of many other negotiations.The arrival of Democrat Joe Biden as President of the United States remains the only glimmer of hope for the creation of a joint control room with Europe.Meanwhile the Russians and Turks maintain their positions in the field.While Rome and Brussels can do nothing but continue to send funds to prevent, at this point, their Libyan partners from reopening the sea, requesting further support.And who knows how long the Italian duty commander will be able to remain at the head of the coordination center in Tripoli of the Nauras operation, the Italy-Libya bilateral mission through which the Italians support the Libyan military in their interceptions of migrants at sea.

And to think that in Zwara in 2014, right at the dawn of the civil war launched by General Khalifa Haftar against the government of Tripoli, they managed to close the sea, or rather to challenge the traffickers, often their own uncles and cousins ​​if not fathers , just to put an end to the macabre spectacle of death on their beaches.Civil society took to the streets against the so-called “vampires of Zwara”.And to discourage migrants, young men and women had hung color prints of swollen bodies with burnt skin spat out by the sea in city bars.At the time, some parts of civil society, but also of the city administration, offered to collaborate with the Italians to open a humanitarian corridor.But the proposal remained a dead letter.While the Libyan civil war has turned into a proxy war between Turkey and Russia, many of those girls and boys who were in the streets against traffickers in 2014 have also taken to the sea to escape that hell.And for those who remained, those bodies lying on the seashore are almost no longer newsworthy.

On the other hand, few in the city last July 3 stopped to discuss the 43 people who left Zwara and died a few miles away, off the coast of Tunisia.Here migrants heading to Europe by sea seek shelter to avoid the Libyan coast guard, which boasts the support of resources and technologies made in Europe.Once upon a time in the Amazigh city the hunt would have begun for the criminal, for the man who had stained his hands with blood out of greed.But not today, the news of the shipwreck of the boat that left Zwara as well as the news of the fourteen bodies resurfaced in the same hours from the sea in the nearby city of Zawiya, do not capture attention.Perhaps because for Libyans migration, the dead, the survivors of the sea are now issues confined to politics, and they are no longer interested in politics.

Preview photo credits:Nancy Porsia – Libya, 2016.A Nigerian woman feeds her one-month-old son only water after losing milk due to precarious living conditions in a Libyan detention center.She has been locked up in the Surman women's migrant prison for three weeks, after being intercepted and arrested by the Libyan Coast Guard together with about a hundred migrants aboard a dinghy off the coast.