April 2011 - Centre for Civil Society - University of KwaZulu-Natal

and Benghazi reached Al Jazeera the station crossed to a spokesperson for
the European Union. There was talk of the need to affirm ‘European
values’. Moments later the programme cut away to the story of the two
Libyan fighter pilots who had landed in Malta and sought political asylum
rather than obey orders to attack protestors in Benghazi.
Those pilots are not the first people to have arrived in Malta after crossing
the Mediterranean from Libya. But most people who make that journey
don’t arrive in Mirage F1s. Migrants take many routes into Europe. Some
people cross into Greece from Turkey, others from Algeria into Spain. For
many, the way into Europe is through the Sahara into Libya, across the
ocean and into Malta and Italy. The migrants come from Somalia, from
Chad, from Senegal, from Nigeria and from all over North and West Africa.
The journey across the Mediterranean in small and usually over crowded
boats is perilous and many have sunk. If they are intercepted by the Italian
navy the migrants are forced off the boats, often with clubs and batons
that dispense electric shocks, and taken to prisons in Tripoli. In crass
violation of international law no attempt is made to ascertain whether or
not the migrants are political refugees or to enquire into their health or
where the parents of children may be.
From Tripoli they are taken to European funded migrant detention centres
in places like the tiny village of Al Qatran out in the dessert near the
border with Chad and Niger. Al Qatran is a thousand kilometres from
Tripoli and it may take three days for captured migrants to be moved
across that distance in trucks. In the detention centres there may be more
than fifty people in a room. They sleep on the floor. The routine sadism
that always occurs in any situation in which some people are given
absolute power over others is endemic. There are beatings, rapes and
extortion. Suicides are a common response as are mass jailbreaks in which
many migrants have been killed by the Libyan police. But some have
escaped out into the vastness of the Sahara to make what they can of
sudden freedom without papers or money in a desert.
It was in the early days of the 2003 Iraq war that Tony Blair first proposed
the idea that migrants trying to enter Europe should be sent to ‘transit
processing centres’ outside of Europe. There is a similar logic here to the
way in which the United States has outsourced torture to countries like
Egypt.
Muammar Gaddafi’s early attempts to show that he would be able to take
on the policing of Europe’s borders were not a huge success. In August
2004 a plane was chartered to deport 75 captured Eritrean migrants from
Tripoli but the passengers seized control of the plane in mid flight and
diverted it to Khartoum where the UNHCR recognised 60 of them as
legitimate political refugees.
But on the same day that the European union lifted its economic sanctions
and arms embargo on Libya in October 2004 it was agreed to engage with
Libya on ‘immigration matters’ and a technical team was sent to Libya the
following month. The United Kingdom and France both moved quickly to
sell weapons to Libya and in 2008 Italy and Libya signed The Treaty of
Friendship, Partnership and Cooperation between the Italian Republic and
Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya in which Italy agreed to
invest five billion dollars in Libya in exchange for, amongst other things, a
Libyan agreement to undertake to police migration into Europe via Libya.
Silvio Berlusconi declared that closer relations with Libya are about “fewer
illegal immigrants and more oil.” Since then Berlusconi and Gaddafi have,
through the investment arms of their respective family trusts, become co-