The rogue general and the migrant 'massacre' on the Mediterranean
<
http://www.opendemocracy.net/author/hans-lucht> Hans Lucht
8 June 2014
Pressure on Europe as asylum-seekers in Libya risk everything to reach
safety in Italy while the EU looks the other way.
In the migrant ghetto of Abu Salim in Tripoli, Libya, a group of about 80
Eritrean asylum-seekers live in the ground floor of an uncompleted house.
It's a hostile and dangerous environment, and everybody wants to escape to
Europe.
One man has an open wound from scabies that has developed into heavy damage
to the skin. He's holding his arm in pain; blood is running on to the floor
of the dark and musty room where they sleep 10 people on the ground. Like
his friends, he has fled military service in Eritrea and is now a wanted man
in his home country. He is only waiting for the weather to improve so that
he can leave for Europe.
"We can't stay here, not even for five minutes - it's a dog's life", his
friend told me during recent ethnographic fieldwork among African migrants
and asylum-seekers in Tripoli.
It's summer in Libya and high season for one of the most dramatic and
dangerous expressions of the deepening inequality between lives in Europe
and lives in Africa, as the boats from Africa and Asia arrive in Italy. A
few weeks ago yet another boat went down off the Libyan coast with 40 people
drowning and 40 people still missing, and the day after another boat
capsized south of Lampedusa claiming at least 17 dead in a recurring tragedy
condemned by Pope Francis as a 'shameful massacre'.
The numbers arriving in Italy are 10 times higher than last year in what the
Italian government has called a 'biblical exodus' from north Africa. The
numbers Italy has rescued at sea are now above 40,000 people, and could
surpass the numbers recorded during the Arab Spring in 2011 when 62,000
reached Italy.
Unfortunately, the pressure on Italy's sea borders is not likely to
decrease. Ex-general Khalifa Hifter - the renegade general disowned and
humiliated by colonel Gaddafi and then given political asylum and backing in
the US - threatens to throw Libya further into anarchy with his all-out war
against the Islamists in Benghazi and Derna.
The EU and the US more or less publicly support the general and fight
against 'the foreign terrorists'. It appears that the west has grown
disillusioned with the messiness of the Arab Spring and now longs for
another military dictator that can guarantee stability and business as usual
in one of Africa's biggest oil producers. The question is if the EU and the
US are ready to help the thousands of refugees that may have to escape the
escalating conflict or whether that will be left, again, to Egypt and
Tunisia and to a much lesser extent, Italy.
The worsening conditions in Libya leave asylum-seekers with little choice
but to risk their lives, a young Eritrean woman explained. As security in
Libya is falling apart and attacks on African migrants happen daily, they
are too afraid even to sleep at night.
"They can come in at any time and steal from us; they just break in the door
and take phones and money. Every night there's shooting and bombs. We fear
for our lives here".
Though the Libyan navy is in better condition than the Libyan army, it does
not have enough ships, equipment or training to stop the asylum-seekers even
if it patrolled the 1,800 kilometers long coastline around the clock.
Currently the navy has no radar monitoring or other means of surveillance at
its disposal. But instead of looking to Libya to police its borders, navy
spokesperson colonel Ayob Ghassem told me, Europe should remember its own
moral and historical responsibility in the countries where the migrants come
from, and help develop them.
"Libya is paying the price for illegal immigration - more than we can
afford," he said, "But Europe should ask itself: Why are we even arresting
them? As long as they are going to Europe, and not coming back, is it still
in our interest to stop them?"
Let's not jump to the conclusion that Libya's more than one million migrants
all want to come to Europe, as some Italian officials claim. That is not the
case and never has been the case. To most Asian and African migrants, Libya
is a labour destination, and they are not willing to risk their lives to
reach a crisis-stricken Europe.
But there are people here - Eritreans, Somalis, Syrians - that have no
choice but to leave their homes, and Europe cannot afford to let them perish
on the Mediterranean. As the first article of the Charter of Fundamental
Rights of the European Union states: "Human dignity is inviolable. It must
be respected and protected."
The surge in arrivals is putting pressure on the Italian government, and the
centre-right parties are calling for a revision of Italy's expensive but
life-saving Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) operation, set up in the wake of the
Lampedusa disaster in October of last year when more than 350 people died.
The Italian Prime Minister, Matteo Renzi, has accused Europe of hypocrisy in
the face of human suffering. The EU "can't save governments and banks and
then let mothers and children die," he said.
Yet, Mr. Renzi may find it hard to convince Germany and France, who received
respectively 127,000 and 65,000 asylum-seekers in 2013, that Italy should
have special treatment. As the recent European elections showed,
anti-immigrant agendas have strong public backing and there appears to be a
worrying acceptance that migrant deaths are a necessary evil, even a warrant
of our continued prosperity.
Upon a visit to a Libyan migrant prison, I came across a young woman from
Eritrea with a three-weeks-old baby boy in her arms. She was two months
pregnant when she fled Eritrea, but was apprehended at sea and sent back to
Libya. The boy, her first child, was born in the centre. As she went in to
labour the prison guards, much to their dismay, had to drive her around in
their private cars in the middle of the night in order to find a hospital
that would receive her, because in Libya a pregnant woman without a husband
will often be refused medical assistance.
The boy is healthy and smiling, but the overcrowded prison is not a place to
raise a child, she says. Therefore she has decided to try for Europe again.
"The conditions here are driving us back into the boats", she says, as she
rocks the baby in her arms.
Received on Sun Jun 08 2014 - 16:43:30 EDT