Torture In A Libyan Refugee Camp — An Italian Priest’s Appeal For Humanity

-OpEd-

TURIN — “You who live safely in your warm homes, you who find warm food and friendly faces when you come back home, consider if this is a man… consider if this is a woman, without hair and without name.” The words of Jewish-Italian writer Primo Levi — in his book If This Is A Man, about his incarceration in the Auschwitz concentration camp — come to mind as we watch yet another video of a woman being tortured in Libyan refugee camps, released on Jan. 6.

In this case, however, the woman has a name, which we know thanks to Refugees in Libya, a social movement led by migrants offering solidarity among migrants in Libya and elsewhere. Her name is Naima Jamal, she is a 20-year-old from Oromia, a region in Ethiopia struck by the plagues of war and droughts triggered by the climate crisis. Naima had to leave Oromia, but because she did not have access to safe and legal migration channels, she had to travel on the desert road — like many others.

She was kidnapped by human traffickers in May 2024, shortly after her arrival in Libya. Since then, her family has received numerous ransom requests, which they could not afford to pay. On Jan. 6, the traffickers sent a video to Naima’s family, where she was brutally tortured, asking for €6,000 to free her. They also sent a picture, where it is possible to see more than 50 other victims with their bodies chained and their gazes lowered.

Terrible violence

This is only one of numerous recent developments. While it is said that the number of migrants arriving in Europe has decreased, two elements must not be forgotten. First is the high number of shipwrecks — at least three around New Year’s Eve, with 50 victims including children — due to a lack of structural rescue operations and to numerous obstacles blocking the work of NGO rescue boats. Second is the terrible violence perpetrated against migrants stuck in Libya and Tunisia.

On Jan. 3, a group of eight people from Gambia contacted us from the desert. They tried to reach Europe by sea five days earlier, but they were caught by Tunisia’s Garde Nationale on the basis of agreements signed with the EU and Italy. After they were caught at sea, the Garde Nationale brought them back to Tunisia and deported them to the desert. They are currently missing.

On Jan. 4, Libyan militias deported more than 600 people from Sub-Saharan Africa to the Dirkou desert — at the border with Niger.

Our responsibility

All this is the result of Italy’s rejection policies, which consist in funding Libyan and Tunisian authorities to detain migrants, catching them and bringing them back at all costs. Today, as the Italian government speaks of “fighting human traffickers,” some clarifications are necessary.

The agreements signed between the Italian and the Libyan government in 2017 — in which the first offered financial assistance and technical support to the Libyan coast guard to weaken migration fluxes in the Mediterranean, while the second engaged to improve the conditions of its reception centers for migrants — were concluded with the involvement of one of the most brutal leaders of the Libyan mafia, Bija.

Europe finances militias, commissions the construction of detention centers.

The agreements have been punctually renewed and, thanks to them, the power of the Libyan mafia has grown, with many of its leaders now occupying institutional posts. The most striking case is that of Emad Trabelsi, current minister of Interior in the Tripoli government.

Subversive act

In numerous reports published by the UN, the U.S. State Department and Amnesty International, Trabelsi is defined as “one of the worst violators of human rights and humanitarian law.” While experts consider him to be a leader of human traffickers, Italian authorities have received him multiple times over the years, to discuss containment policies targeting migrants.

In all this, the cry of migrants is rising thanks to Refugees in Libya. The organization’s spokesperson, David Yambio, recently released a long statement, where he affirmed that “Europe finances militias, commissions the construction of detention centers and calls these agreements ‘border management.’ It condemns violence in its speeches but distributes money to those that execute it. Libya is a creation of Europe, its obscure secret, the hell it built to keep its hands clean.”

Yambio and other people working with him endured what the UN calls “unspeakable horrors.” And yet, there is also hope in their words, hope that results from solidarity and love. “Justice must be an action that breaks chains and builds bridges. It must be restorative, addressing the wounds of history, and transformative, reshaping the systems that perpetuate these injustices.”

What can save us all

“To us, justice is not an abstract ideal, but the daily act of standing up, speaking openly, and refusing to disappear. It is the solidarity that we find in each other, the light we share even in the darkest places. It is the awareness that, even if they tried to erase us, we are still here and we will not stay silent. Until then, we will support each other, as we have always done. Because even in the darkest corners of this world, we can find the light in each other’s strength.”

This light is exactly what we need in an individualist society fascinated by authoritarianism, to the point that solidarity seems to have become a subversive act. The path to defeat human traffickers is clear.

We must stop the pushback agreements. We must hold hands with the migrants themselves and with the Tunisian and Libyan civil society that resists the mafias. In the night of history, the light of this resistance of solidarity and fraternity is the only thing that can save us.