Sad tales of slavery from Libya
The recent deportation of thousands of Nigerians from Libya was a sad tale. And in this report, WOLE SHADARE spoke with some of the deportees about their experiences
One remembers slave trade historical sites around Nigeria with statues showing the torture and bad treatment the victims passed through. It was a pure case of man’s inhumanity to man. Our correspondent recalls a recent visit to historical slave site in Badagry, the thoughts that rang through was that of strong bond as a people and as Africans.
The trials faced have showed Africans as one of the strongest people in the world. Nigerians are among the nations with the highest number of undocumented migrants trying to make the treacherous crossing to Europe from Libya across the Mediterranean Sea.
The Libya slave trade rings a bell! Is history coming back to us just the same way our fore fathers exchanged us for mirrors, spears, shields etc? Now it is our African brothers selling their fellow Africans for as low as $400. Many described it as inhuman and degrading.
Shockingly, the new slave trade, the human trafficking in Libya, is being carried out by many nationalities, including Nigerians and Ghanaians, according to a Cameroonian returnee, who was abducted in Libya. Foka Fotsi, who was trafficked twice, stated that those in charge of one of the places where he was held, included Ghanaians and Nigerians.
Fotsi’s story corroborated another testimony by a Nigerian in Edo State, who identified one Charles, a Nigerian as the trafficking kingpin. Unable to find work to support his family, Fotsi decided to leave Cameroon last year, but fell into the hands of a Libyan kidnap ring before reaching Europe. “There was torture like I’ve never seen. They hit you with wooden bats, with iron bars,” he said, removing the hood of his sweatshirt and showing the still raw red wounds on his skull.
“They hang you from the ceiling by (your) arms and legs and then throw you down to the floor. They swing you and throw you against the wall, over and over again. “They are not human beings. They are devils personified. It is simply best described as “Man’s inhumanity to Man”.
Within the last several days, Libya has been cast into the spotlight after footage of an apparent slave auction was re-leased online by CNN, which was recorded with a hidden camera phone, as part of an exclusive report “People for sale” published earlier last month.
Libya is the main transit point for refugees and migrants trying to reach Europe by sea. In each of the last three years, 150,000 people have made the dangerous crossing across the Mediterranean Sea from Libya.
For four years in a row, 3,000 refugees have died while attempting the journey. This is according to figures from the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), the United Nations’ migration agency.
The Libyan Coast Guard — supported with funds and resources from the E.U. and more specifically, Italy — has cracked down on boats smuggling refugees and migrants to Europe. With estimates of 400,000 to almost one million people now bottled up Libya, detention centres are overrun and there are mounting reports of societal evils like robbery, rape, and murder among migrants.
Conditions in the centres have been described as “horrific,” and among other abuses, migrants are vulnerable to being sold off as labourers in slave auctions. With the security and financial collapse in Libya, human trafficking and smuggling have become a booming trade. Modern-day slavery is widespread around the world and Libya is, by no means, unique.
But what’s particularly shocking is that this is happening effectively in the open where people can go to a farmhouse, place a bid and end up ‘owning’ a human being. There is no proper registration process for the tens of thousands of refugees arriving Libya. According to reports, the business of detention centres is unsupervised in some parts of Libya and stories of torture, rape and forced labour have emerged.
When the centres get too crowded, people are then allegedly sold off like goods in an open market. Survivors have told the UN’s migration agency that they use smartphones to connect with human smugglers to get them to Libya’s coast and that they were then sold, being held for ransom, used as forced labour or for sexual exploitation.
Over the past two weeks, Nigerians have added their voices to the global uproar over the exposed tales of slave trade, torture and killings of migrants in the Maghreb region.
Each time a new batch of returnees arrive, they bring with them tales of horror from the transit country, where they hoped to take the treacherous journey through the Mediterranean Sea.
Over 5, 000 Nigerians have been repatriated from Libya by the IOM since the beginning of 2017. Twenty-year-old Clement Chibuzor from Delta State, along with 146 other Nigerians whose ghoulish appearances showed the horrific experiences they must have experienced in Libya was just a teenager working as a Plaster of Paris artisan when his father met a trafficker, who told him he could get his son to Europe.
The young lad had worked as a POP artisan for eight months with little money in his pocket, his father told him not to worry about the money. “I never thought about going to Europe. My father was the one who brought up the idea.
He sold his land and raised N450, 000 which he gave to my ‘burger’ (trafficker). He did not tell my mother until I was already in Libya,” Chibuzor said. The young man spent 18 months in Libya. He left Nigeria, a hopeful man, but he returned like a mere cargo, thankful to be back to safety.
As he stepped off the plane; Chibuzor looked nothing like a 20-year-old. His hollow cheeks told of starvation while his skin told of suffering in disease-ridden cells. He said: “After many of my co-travellers died in the desert, I was kidnapped as soon as I got to Libya.
I was in prison for four months until my father sent N300, 000 for my release. “In the prison, our food was a piece of bread every day. When I got out of the prison, I was on the street one day when I met a Nigerian who promised to help me. I worked in his house for some weeks until he sold me to a gang.
They kept me in the cell. I was there for a very long time. I cannot count the number of people who died in the cell. “The police were raiding different places where black people were kept and I willingly surrendered to the police. That was how I got an opportunity to come back to Nigeria.
“While working on the streets of Libya, if the gangs saw you, they would grab you and put you in a cell. They put you in a cell with many others where you would either be sold or made to call your people to pay for your freedom.
“While I was trying to get money to free myself from the prison, I spoke with my father two months ago. He then told me that if I had the chance, I should return home. I told him that I might die before I get the opportunity to return home because I saw people die every day.” Many of the returnees who shared their experiences vowed never to attempt the dangerous journey again.
The returnee explained that a friend of his, who made it to Europe, convinced him to embark on the journey. According to him, 41 of them set out in Kano for the journey through the desert, but only 10 made it to Libya. He said their fate was sealed when their vehicle developed an engine fault in the desert. Another Nigerian girl, (name withheld) who was recently deported from Libya, narrated what she went through in the hands of her slave masters who raped her and other ladies repeatedly, including being raped by 18 men in one night.
The 19-year-old indigene of Edo State, who was part of the victims to be repatriated to the country after their harrowing experiences in the North African country while trying to cross into Europe, told Woleshadare.net that what she went through was the worst kind of experience anyone could go through.
The teenager, who refused to give her name for fear of stigmatization, said she was persuaded by her friend to make the trip, adding that the girl was not so lucky as she lost her life in the process. Her words: “I left Nigeria early 2017 with the help of one lady who claimed to have been sponsoring people abroad. I don’t also want to reveal her name, but she is currently in one country in Europe. “I cannot also say how long she has been in the business. She told me she was taking us to Germany, but we ended up in Libya.
I spent so much. I do not really like recalling the whole trauma; I am just happy that I came back home to meet my family and friends. “I was learning a trade before I embarked on this journey through the persuasion of my female friend.
“When we left Benin in March this year, I did not tell my parents. I only told one of my brothers that I would be travelling to Lagos with my friends to see one lady who promised to assist me with some money to start my business when I was through the trade.
“On getting to Lagos, I met a lot of girls from Edo, Delta and Rivers State. We stayed in Lagos for three days before taking off to Kano and from there; we commenced the journey to Libya. She described it as a bitter experience, saying that she would not advise anybody she knows to engage in such a hazardous trips further describing it as “journey of the survival of the fittest”.
To her, a lot of strange things happened which everybody knows about, stressing that in Libya, they were treated like slaves, taken to an unknown place where their sufferings continued. She discussed that the lady that took them there handed them over to some group of very wicked human beings who kept telling them that they would soon cross over to Italy.
“The worst thing that happened to me was the day I slept with 18 men in a single night, it was an experience I can never forget in life. In fact, Arabs are the most evil set of human beings on earth. After they used me, I was paid N15, 000 and my so-called sponsor took N10, 000 from it, gave me N5, 000.
They gave me one type of drug before we started the business.” President Muhammadu Buhari ordered the immediate evacuation of Nigerian migrants in dire straits in Libya. During an interaction with the Nigerian community in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire recently, the President said his administration would make the country conducive to discourage the youth from risking their lives. Abike Dabiri-Erewa, the senior special assistant on diaspora and foreign affairs, said 5000 Nigerians stranded in Libya have been brought back to the country under the current administration.
Ghana’s President, Nana Akifo-Addo, also criticised Libya over migrant slave markets, saying the abuses call to question wider African unity. Akufo-Addo condemned the practice in a post on his Twitter account recently, calling it “gross and scandalous” abuse of human rights. But he also said the auction made “mockeries of the alleged solidarity of African nations grouped in the African Union, of which Libya is a member”.
The AU has called for “urgent measures” to stop the abuse of black Africans in Libya, which critics say has been fuelled by EU-Libyan cooperation to curb migrant crossings to Europe. The EU, on its part, said it would pressure the UN-backed government in Libya to prosecute the slave traders and push for improvements in conditions at migrant detention centres.
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