Status: 08/19/2021 8:06 p.m.
Noisy Monitor research refugees in Libyan camps continue to be mistreated and exploited. For years, the federal government has been promising to work to improve the situation – so far, apparently without success.
“We need freedom “shout a hundred men crammed close together in a dark cell. Their hands are crossed in protest against their imprisonment in one of the Libyan refugee camps. The video showing the protest matches that ARD magazine monitor before. The camp is one of many to which people are brought who are intercepted by the so-called Libyan Coast Guard while trying to flee to Europe. On paper they are refugee camps – in fact, they are prisons.
Teklia is one of the refugees who were there. In the meantime he has made it out of the camp. He cannot forget the violence he experienced there to this day: “The guards hit us with metal bars,” he says. “They took their gun and put it to our heads to scare us.”
monitor spoke to many refugees who were imprisoned and tortured in Libyan camps – also because the EU helped set up the system that intercepts them and brings them to the camps while they are fleeing.
Systematic returns to detention camps
In recent years, the EU has supported the establishment of the so-called Libyan Coast Guard with millions in funding. It brings people back to Libya. There have been reports of torture and exploitation of migrants in the camps for years. The German government and the EU are also aware of this.
That is why in the past promises were made again and again that the refugees should be placed in state detention camps. The situation there should get better, aid organizations should ensure humane conditions. About 100 million euros flowed from Germany. Chancellor Angela Merkel declared in August 2017: “We have to ensure that these centers operate within the framework of a humanitarian standard so that we can say that basic human rights can be respected there.”
Four people per square meter
However, the state camps apparently did not bring about the desired improvements. Also because the Libyan coast guard is becoming more and more efficient: This year alone, they have intercepted more than 20,000 people and brought them back to Libya – almost twice as many as in the entire previous year.
That leads to completely overcrowded camps, criticizes Beatrice Lau from the aid organization “Doctors Without Borders”. “We are talking about four people in one square meter. Without fresh air, with limited access to water and food. This repeatedly leads to violence between security guards and migrants.”
The Sudanese Emeka also experienced violence in one of the state camps in Libya. “They beat up each of us one night,” he says. “They hit the legs and the head with the club. They hit a boy on the head and he collapsed. They carried him away. I don’t know whether he died, I never saw him again.” It is difficult to verify such experience reports. But they are believable. Doctors Without Borders has documented dozens of injuries from beatings in this camp.
Torture and exploitation in Libyan prisons
Opposite to monitor Many refugees also report that the guards demanded a ransom for their release – and threatened violence if money could not be paid. A young man from Eritrea gives a detailed account of how he was tortured. The Libyan coast guard, supported by Europe, had taken him to a state camp as well: “They took us to isolation rooms,” he recalls. “My hands were tied to the ceiling, I had to sleep standing up. They beat us in the morning and in the evening. Every day they asked for money. I thought my life was over, that this was the end.”
At some point a friend paid the ransom of the equivalent of 500 euros – money that mostly goes to criminal militias. They control almost all Libyan detention camps – including the state ones. The militias make a profit from the system, says Harry Johnstone from the “Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime”. He has been researching this for years: The refugee business is a million dollar business, he says. He assumes that this will turn over between 400 and 800 million euros per year.
“The militias that control the detention center receive money from so-called sponsors who then force the migrants to do unpaid work,” explains Johnstone. “They get money from people smugglers and human traffickers who paid for the migrants who then tried to get on a boat to Europe again.” A vicious circle for the people: They pay a ransom, some of them are put back into a boat from custody, only to be intercepted and locked up again by the coast guard. The more people the Coast Guard intercepts, the more profit for criminal militias.
The illusion of better camps
Why does Germany also support such criminal structures financially? on Monitor-The Federal Foreign Office does not respond to this request. Instead, it is only said that the situation in the detention camps remains “unacceptable”. One advocates “the creation of open alternatives” in Libya.
Only: Such “open camps”, in which people are not locked up, do not yet exist in Libya. And the federal government has apparently not yet been able to enforce the much-invoked humanitarian standards. The Libyan Ministry of the Interior recently opened a detention center for vulnerable women and children. Amnesty International has now documented systematic sexual abuse: You see “an extremely worrying pattern of rape and sexual violence against women,” according to Amnesty International. This shows “clearly how unsuccessful the attempts to improve the conditions in the facilities were”. All of this is hard to bear for Teklia. He himself is now safe in Sweden. Many of his friends in the Libyan camps are not.