It was on June 21st when the MV Lifeline, a Dutch-registered migrant rescue ship patrolling the Mediterranean for German NGO Mission Lifeline, rescued 234 people it discovered floating in rubber dinghies near the coast of Libya. Shortly afterwards, panic set in among the group as they saw a Libyan coastguard vessel approach the ship.
“They tried to couple up beside the ship,” said Aboubacar, one of the rescued migrants, recalling the incident in an interview with Mediapart. “Then their captain launched a small boat to come over to talk. They wanted to recover us.” The migrants onboard the MV Lifeline shouted in frightened protest. “Rather than be handed over to the coast guards we were ready to jump,” added Maida (whose real name is withheld here), another from the rescued group.
The MV Lifeline was finally able to continue on its way north towards Europe with the migrants still safely on board. But it was to become trapped in yet another standoff with the Italian and Maltese authorities who have begun refusing access to their ports by maritime rescue vessels operated by NGOs. After five days drifting in diplomatic limbo, the Lifeline was finally allowed to dock in Malta, after a deal was brokered with a number of European countries, including France, which agreed to receive quotas of the migrants.
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However, in a move clearly intended to dissuade non-governmental rescue organisations, the Maltese authorities impounded the Lifeline and arrested its German captain, Claus-Peter Reisch, who was accused of ignoring instructions from Italy’s maritime rescue coordination centre and inappropriately operating a vessel registered as a pleasure yacht for maritime rescue.
On July 5th, a group of 51 of the 234 migrants rescued by the Lifeline arrived in France, where they have been assured of being granted refugee status. Seven of them, given provisional accommodation in the south-west French city of Toulouse (before placement in more permanent centres in the region), agreed to be interviewed by Mediapart – although two, as indicated below, requested that their true names be withheld.
They spoke notably about their experiences in Libya, from where they set sail. Their often horrific accounts of their ordeals they survived in the chaotic North African country, including imprisonment, torture and sexual assault, is all the more disturbing in that the European Union has now decided to supply equipment to beef up Libyan coast guard operations with the aim of containing migrants there.
So far this year, more than 10,000 migrants attempting to reach Europe have been intercepted in the central zone of the Mediterranean Sea and taken back to Libya where they are held in detention centres.
One of those Mediapart interviewed in Toulouse is Ange-Gabriel, 19, a French speaker who, shortly after his mother’s death, set off last year from his native Cameroon, in West Africa to reach France. His plan was to first reach Niger, to the north, and then to cross its common border with Algeria before moving on to neighbouring Morocco, from where he hoped to enter Europe via Spain. He was intent that his route should avoid Libya where, he had learnt from TV reports, many migrants were abused at the hands of gangs in the strife-torn country.
But he said that after reaching the central city of Agadez in Niger, the first leg of his long journey, people smugglers he and his travelling companions had paid to take them to the Algerian border betrayed them.
“In the four-by-four, they told us, ‘Yes, yes, don’t worry’, but in the desert, there aren’t any direction signposts, you don’t know where you’re going,” Ange-Gabriel told Mediapart. "And in any case, you can’t do an about turn. At the end of four days we at last saw a flag, it was Libya. In the first town, soldiers demanded 40 dinars per person to let us through, otherwise it was a beating-up. They also took all the telephones. Then the driver took us to he who had bought us.”
He said he was taken to Sabratah, a coastal town in north-west Libya, where he was detained in a centre along with 266 other migrants, all packed into a tiny space. Some, he said, had been in the clandestine prison, run by a militia involved in people smuggling and financial extorsion, for more than a year. “The next day, the guards demanded 550,000 CFA [editor’s note: a sum of West African francs equivalent to about 850 euros] to free me,” recalled Ange-Gabriel, who comes from a poor family. “There was an African brother who carried out forced labour and who spoke French. He explained that the chief had bought us, that now we had to pay him. They gave a telephone to me to call a close relative. I spoke to my elder sister in local dialect, ‘Above all don’t pay’. To gain time, I made the Libyans believe that my family were going to club together.”
Ange-Gabriel said his sister was contacted more than 20 times by the militia over a period of several months. He said to increase the pressure for a ransom payment, the Libyan guards filmed their prisoners during torture sessions, with guns pointed at their victims, when they would apply electric shocks and use whips to keep the inmates in line.
He said the prison was rife with fleas “which suck on you”, adding: “People begin to rot.” The whole town, he said, was covered in prisons.
Ange-Gabriel arrived in Sabratah in the summer of 2017 when, controlled by a chieftain nicknamed “The Uncle”, the town was regarded as the main centre for people smugglers involved in launching clandestine crossings of the Mediterranean. The activity has since then declined and moved further along the coast, most probably as a result of secret deals between Italy and local ruling militias around Sabratah.
Eventually, Ange-Gabriel was freed. “A Ghanaian who was with me in the cell had a brother who worked in Libya as a builder, squirting walls,” he recounted. “The brother paid the ransom for my friend, who got out after several weeks. I promised that if they paid for me too I would work for them once I was out.”
There is an estimated total of between 700,000 and one million migrants living in Libya, including those with proper legal status, a number drawn to the country to earn a better living despite the dangers present and the notorious, endemic racism in the Arab country towards black Africans.
“They clubbed together and freed me,” said Ange-Gabriel. “Afterwards, I worked unpaid for seven months as a joiner, to refund them with interest.” After that, he paid a people smuggler to help him attempt the treacherous crossing of the Mediterranean. He said he called his sister before attempting the journey: “I wanted to warn her, ‘If I don’t call you back it means that I stayed in the water’.”
In the people-trafficking trade, the value of a migrant depends on a number of criteria, including nationality and state of health, and can reach the equivalent of several thousand euros. In the case of Amina (real name withheld), another of the migrants rescued by the Lifeline and now in France, she convinced her brother-in-law to pay 1,000 Libyan dinars (about 600 euros) for her release from detention by a trafficking gang. Speaking to Mediapart, the 39-year-old said she left Togo, in West Africa, in August 2017 following the murder of her husband by the country’s military in a region that is a base of opposition to Togo’s president, Faure Gnassingbé. She said her brother-in-law drove her to nearby Niger, where she hoped, in vain, to find “small cleaning work”. In Agadez, she fell into the trap of a Nigerian woman “who did business with Libya”.
“She promised that there would be work,” said Amina, who told her story to Mediapart while still draped in a blanket handed to her last month after arriving in Malta. But instead she found herself held in filthy cells, where she said she was made to sleep on the ground and became covered in fleas. “Women gave birth there” she recounted, “children died because they ate badly”. She said she was sexually assaulted: “I was frisked, my breasts were held, hands were placed in my leggings.” She said she preferred not to detail such events further.
Fatimah, another of the Lifeline migrants now in France, is from Ivory Coast. The 21-year-old said she left the West African country in order to prevent the ritualistic female genital mutilation (FGM) of her infant daughter which her parents-in-law insisted should be carried out. Fatimah said she had been subjected to FGM when she was 12. “I suffered too much,” she explained, “especially when I gave birth.” After a brief stay in neighbouring Mali, to the north, in the autumn of last year, she travelled with her daughter to Libya, where she spent eight months. “If an Arab catches you, he sells you,” she said. “When you are black, you are a commodity, you’re bought and sold on.” She was taken captive in Libya by a gang who she said she saw shoot a woman dead for no apparent reason, and carry out beatings of men. “The chief was a killer. With the drug that he mixed in his bottle he became mad. One day he shot at the feet of one man, then another.”
She recounted that she managed to flee her captors, finding refuge with a Malian man, and subsequently a second, who gave her lodgings with his daughter and paid her ten dinars per day (about six euros) to do cleaning work. He found her and her three-year-old daughter a place on a rubber dinghy to attempt the crossing to Europe. She said she did not know who paid the people smugglers.
Maida (not her real name), 23, is Somalian and was also held captive by people traffickers who demanded a ransom for her freedom. Nationals from the Corn of Africa had the reputation for the Libyan gangs of being wealthier than West Africans, and the ransom demanded for Maida’s release was 7,000 dollars. “Every morning, when you haven’t paid, it’s ten lashes of the whip for women, 20 for men,” she told Mediapart, speaking through an interpreter.
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Maida is a singer, and video clips of her songs on YouTube had made her a small celebrity in Somalia. But that was not to the liking of the al-Shabab Islamic fundamentalists in East Africa, who in Somalia are engaged in a bloody insurgency against the UN-backed government. “They watched over me, I received text messages ‘we know where you are, how you are dressed’,” recounted Maida, whose father, a member of the army, was killed by al-Shabab in 2007. Her elder brother, she said, later suffered the same fate.
At the end of 2015, Maida travelled to Yemen in search of her mother who had sought refuge there, but was detained for not having legal status in the country. She had left her daughter behind in Somalia. It was in the context of the chaos of the civil war in Yemen that she accepted an offer to help her escape to Libya, from where she would pay for her passage.
But she said that in Libya, in May 2016, she was taken captive, and despite calls to her aunt and former husband neither accepted to help her. Maida said a scar on her arm was from being stabbed by one of her guards. According to her account, she was one of about 400 migrants kept in a confined space that had no windows, and offered no possibility of sleeping stretched out. The food they were given, she said, was pasta cooked in seawater. Maida fell ill, and rapidly lost weight, but she said that was in a way lucky because she would see healthy girls taken out of the detention room only to return in tears.
“There was also tuberculosis,” recounted Maida. “So, in order not to infect everyone, the chief decided to have a clean-up. Us, those who were unwell, left with a group who had paid for their release.”
Caught in a spiral of captivity, escape, and detention
While some of the migrants rescued by the Lifeline escaped falling captive to the Libyan militias, that did not save them from being detained by local authorities for not having proper legal status in the country. The detention centres are where many migrants picked up by the Libyan coastguards are taken. That was the case for Abazer, a Sudanese national.
Born in the rebel region of Darfur, in west Sudan, his father was a warlord wanted by the government. Abazer, speaking through an interpreter, said that in 2015, following the death of his brother, he found exile in Egypt, which shares a common border with Sudan. He survived on small jobs. “I knew that for Libya it was best to try something else,” he told Mediapart. But in May 2017 he had decided to seek passage into western Europe, where he knew that refugee status was regularly accorded to migrants from Darfur, and a group of Egyptian people smugglers offered to take him to the Libyan coastal town of Tobruk, a little more than 100 kilometres across the border with Egypt. He said he was promised that from there he would be immediately put on a dinghy heading for Italy.
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But as they set off on the treacherous journey, Abazer and his companions in the boat were rounded up by the Libyan coastguard before they reached international waters. They were taken to a detention centre where, while the guards wore police uniforms and did not demand ransoms from prisoners’ relatives, Abazer said they “hit everyone, all the time, with batons".
“We cleaned, we washed clothes, we did paintwork, without ever being paid,” he recalled, describing it as at worst a sort of “slavery”, at best forced labour. But after two months he made his escape from the compound.
He said that he succeeded in finding a place once more on a Europe-bound dinghy thanks to savings he had kept in Egypt, using a traditional Arab system called hawala – which, based on confidence, allows for the transfer of money between agents without passing via banking systems.
But again, he and the others on the boat were caught and brought back to Libya. In all, in the space of a year, Abazer managed to escape three times from detention and was caught three times attempting to leave Libyan waters by boat. Luck appeared to finally smiled upon him last month, when on June 21st he was rescued from his flimsy dinghy by the Lifeline.
Meanwhile, both he and a number of migrant rescue NGOs suspect that there are Libyan coastguards bribed by people smugglers to allow some dinghies to escape, identifiable by markings on the boats.
Aboubacar, 20, is from Ivory Coast. He said he fled the country to escape the wrath of the father – a magistrate – of his girlfriend after she died following a botched abortion. He arrived in Algeria, where he found work cleaning cars, and notably the four-by-four vehicle of a wealthy Libyan who often crossed the border to make purchases. The Libyan offered Aboubacar 1,000 dinars (about 600 euros) per month, plus accommodation and food, to work as a labourer on his farm. The Ivorian took up the offer in November 2017 and spent the next three months looking after the farm's fruit and vegetables.
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But during that time, he said he never ventured into the streets of the nearby town. “I wasn’t prohibited from doing so, but I was told ‘if you venture outside and an Arab gets you he’ll put you in prion’,” he recounted. “Then also, I was well treated, I had a TV and a fridge.” He said in February 2018, just three days after he asked his boss how to change dinars into euros, a group of armed men entered his lodgings asking where his money was. He says today that he is convinced his boss was behind the robbery. Other migrants who spent time in Libya have spoken of similar experiences, suggesting that what happened to Aboubacar was part of a regular criminal system.
But he bounced back after he found a job, thanks to a Malian, working in the kitchens of a bakery, and with the money he earned he was able to pay people smugglers for a place on a clandestine crossing of the Mediterranean. “We were launched at Khoms, near Tripoli, but the coastguard discovered us,” he recalled; “Our captain refused to stop. The Libyans made waves, we almost fell into the water. That lasted about two hours, then three coastguards jumped into the Zodiac, stopped the engine and brought a ladder. We had to climb aboard [the coastguard boat] one by one.” He said they were then taken to the Tariq al-Matar detention centre close to Tripoli.
“Sometimes the HCR [officials from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees] visited the cells, asked us if all was well,” he recalled. “In the presence of outsiders, the guards watched themselves. But in reality we were badly treated, deprived of food and walkabouts. The IOM [UN International Organisation for Migration, whose activities include organising the repatriation of migrants to their original countries] also came. But these international bodies cannot do much in the centres, only register complaints.” Aboubacar heard that the Ivory Coast consulate had been contacted to arrange his return to his native country. With the help of an outside source, he arranged his escape from the centre by bribing a guard with 1,000 dinars he had borrowed and which he was to reimburse rapidly.
According to his account, he had only just found a small job in Tripoli when he was arrested at a foyer for foreign workers and reincarcerated in a prison where he said conditions were “much more difficult” than at the Tariq al-Matar detention centre. He said he was beaten there. Along with seven other inmates, he escaped by dislodging tiles on the prison roof, no doubt facilitated by the slowing down of prison surveillance due to the start of the Ramadan, the month-long fasting observed by practicing Muslims. He said that after his escape, “I was able to make bread for a month in a baker’s and earned a nice sum”. With that he was able to again try to make the clandestine crossing of the Mediterranean. The people smugglers launched him and other migrants into the sea on two rubber dinghies: he said one quickly sprang a leak just a few metres from the beach, while the other, in which Aboubacar had taken his place, headed north and was found by the Lifeline.
Only one of the seven migrants from the Lifeline interviewed by Mediapart had managed to avoid captivity in Libya. His name is Altaib, a Sudanese national from the Darfur region, where his father was murdered. He crossed Libya from town to town, odd-jobbing in construction work, warehouse stores and on farms. Also speaking to Mediapart through an interpreter, he said he spent four months working in date fields where he was paid “sometimes at the end of the day, sometimes at the end of the week, sometimes never”. When he had amassed 1,500 dinars he paid people smugglers the fee for a crossing to Europe by boat, and ended up rescued by the Lifeline. At the time of the interview, he was hoping to soon phone his four brothers in Darfur, whose numbers he knows by heart.
Why, Mediapart asked him, do the people smugglers always use the same routes, under the noses of the Libyan coastguards, instead of, for example, departing from the coast of neighbouring Tunisia? “In Libya,” Altaib replied, “nobody suggests that to you.”
When Mediapart met with the seven migrants in Toulouse on July 10th, they were due to be given official refugee status (or at the least what is officially called “subsidiary protection”, which precedes refugee status). That is delivered by France’s Office for the Protection of Refugees and the Stateless (the OFPRA) which had already questioned them all about their circumstances after they disembarked from the Lifeline in Malta. Meanwhile, the French Office for Immigration and Integration (the OFII) is responsible for finding them permanent accommodation, to ensure they sign what is called a “contract of integration” within France (detailed here, in French) which includes courses for learning the French language and about civic duties.
The group insisted on their gratitude to France for receiving them. Aboubacar said that in Malta, “the authorities explained to us that we had benefitted from an exceptional solidarity, that eight countries had agreed between themselves to receive the refugees from the Lifeline”. But those categorised as “economic migrants” were not included in the quotas. “I asked what would become of those people not taken in following their interviews,” he added. “I was told that they would be repatriated back to their countries, all these people who have lived through ordeals.” He said he had left a cousin in Malta, who had higher education diplomas but who was “not even interviewed by the French”. He said he advised the relative to seek asylum in Belgium.
All of the seven agreed with Fatimah’s comment that “France must help the brothers directly in Libya and have the prisoners released”, apparently unaware of the support the European Union was now providing to the Libyan coastguards in order to prevent migrants from leaving the country's shores.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse