http://time.com/4538445/libyas-migrant-economy-is-a-modern-day-slave-market/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+time%2Ftopstories+%28TIME%3A+Top+Stories%29
Libya’s Migrant Economy Is a Modern Day Slave Market
Karl Vick _at_karl_vick
Oct. 21, 2016
A hellish place of human trafficking
For migrants from sub-Sahran Africa, Libya was a destination even
before Muammar Qaddafi fell in 2011, and the country turned itself in
a boat launch to Europe. The dictator fancied himself as a munificent
overseer of the continent below. When liberation struggles were
underway against colonial masters, Qaddafi sent guns and money, and
when the newly independent nations set out to organize themselves as a
bloc, he not only helped fund the African Union, but proposed an even
more ambitious configuration, The United States of Africa. It never
went anywhere, not least because the dictator was, of course, more
Arab than African. (The north African expanse of the Mahgreb, which
includes Libya, is part of Africa on the maps, but separated from the
sub-Saharan African region where migrants hail from by both desert and
culture.)
But Libya has oil, and therefore money, so those who had neither set
off across the Sahara to get what they could. More than a million
Africans were working in Libya when Gaddafi was deposed in 2011. They
didn’t make much, but it was enough to send something back home, and
endure the resentments of Libya’s Arab population, much of which
persisted in regarding blacks as their inferiors. In 2000, more than
600 African migrants were killed at the hands of Libyan mobs shouting
“blacks must go.”
All of which sets the stage for what Libya is today: A trading floor
for African lives. Since Gaddafi’s demise, no coherent government has
taken control of the country. The political void has been filled by
armed groups—including Islamists affiliated with ISIS and al
Qaeda—competing for territory. But in terms of economics, Libya has
devolved into a primitive state. In addition to oil, it now trades in
humans.
“I came to Libya to document the migrant crisis, the humanitarian
crisis of migrants trying to reach Europe through Libyan territory,”
says Narciso Contreras, an acclaimed photojournalist who made three
trips to the country this year. “But actually what I found going in
Libya is a market.”
Images of Contreras’ discovery appear in the Oct. 31 print edition of
TIME, and in the LightBox photo gallery online at Time.com. They show
despondent men and women confined in warehouses, prisons and
courtyards, migrants reduced to chattel and sold from smuggler to
militia to trafficker, and back again —and often paying for the
privilege. Eventually, many will be placed on a boat pointed toward
Europe. But that’s often only after months, even years in the
purgatory of Libya. Half of migrants who reach southern Italy report
having been held against their will inside Libya—often for ransom,
according to a new study by the International Organization for
Migration, released Oct. 18. For more than a third, their journey took
more than six months.
Inside the Libyan Detention Centers Where Humanity Ceases to Exist
Those journeys begin at home, typically in West Africa (though in
recent months, a third of African migrants arriving in Italy began
their journey in the Horn of Africa, many fleeing political
persecution in Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia or Sudan). West Africans
typically migrate for economic reasons, setting off from Senegal,
Nigeria, Ivory Coast. The smugglers they pay to bring them north are
part of an interlocking network frequently extending all the way to
the coast. The business of moving humans has overtaken goods smuggling
in Libya since 2011. “I’ve seen very widespread racism and xenophobia
in Libya,” says Hanan Salah, senior Libya researcher for Human Rights
Watch. “Dark skinned people in general face discrimination. If you’re
a Syrian Arab who speaks the language, you’re definitely better off.”
Contreras, supported by the Carmignac Photojournalism Award, spent
weeks in the country’s lawless south, cultivating contacts with the
desert tribes that move the migrants from neighboring Niger via
“unofficial routes”—including the dry river beds that double as
smuggler’s roads, according to a May study for West Point’s Combating
Terrorism Center. At one point, the photographer arranged to meet a
convoy carrying 1,500 migrants at a pass in Libya’s border. If the
number sounds large, Contreras says one U.N. official told him that 3
million migrants have come into the country. Perhaps 60 percent end up
staying, often as indentured servants earning their way out of
detention centers or passage on a boat. They are vulnerable both to
their controllers and to militiamen who stop them at a checkpoint and
deliver them to detention centers that double as clearing houses.
“This is not just smuggling migrants. It’s a market where migrants are
bought and sold on a daily basis,” Contreras says. “And detention
centers serve as distribution points.”
Nominally under control of one of two competing, interim governments,
the centers are in fact controlled by militias, according to human
rights activists. So if, under Gaddafi, the country was a destination
for economic migrants, it has reverted to something from the
mercantile era, with Arabs trafficking in black bodies. “It’s a kind
of slavery,” says Contreras. “It is something from the past.” He
describes meeting Rasheed, a Ghanaian who had been a taxi driver in
his home country, and had been unable to produce the $200 to $700
bribe that would release him from detention in Zawiyah, on the
northwest coast. Rasheed had then become the property of a militia
commander, who had him serve coffee to the photographer as the
commander looked out at the sea, which militias also control.
“Since 2011, the Libyan economy has been in freefall,” Contreras later
wrote. “There is no money in the banks, public sector workers go
unpaid and the black market is booming. People fetch a high price.”
Received on Sun Oct 23 2016 - 10:57:05 EDT