Sub-Saharan African illegal immigrants in Gharian’s Abu Rashada detention centre (Photo: Houda Mzioudet)
Tripoli, 3 March 2013:
“They may return, be jailed and so on and so forth; that is life. But otherwise there will be no illegal immigration.”
“They do not want to send us back home. Look at the
food here. They do not want to deport us. We are suffering here. We
want to go back to our countries,” an angry Sub-Saharan African illegal
immigrant told the
Libya Herald from behind bars in the Abu
Rashada detention centre for illegal immigrants in Gharian. Another one
shouted: “Tell the authorities that people here want to go back home.”
Fifty-three young men from different African countries are crammed
into what looks like a rectangular, medium-sized jail cell of the
detention centre. Four or five other equally full mobile metal
structures serving as cells hold more detainees. The 200 or so residents
of the centre have been here between two months and a year awaiting
deportation to their countries of origin. Most hail from Niger, Chad,
Gambia, Ghana, Ivory Coast and Nigeria and have one goal in common: they
came to Libya for work to be able to support their famlilies back home.
“You know we come from a very poor countries, that is why we came to
Libya,” another one added.
Towards the end of the Libyan revolution, and since, there has been a
massive surge of illegal African immigrants into Libya in the absence
of secure border controls. Before that, during the revolution, there
were signifcant numbers of mercenaries coming in to fight for Qaddafi.
Imed Sagher, in charge of the Gharian’s detention centre, confirmed
the presence of some of Qaddafi’s mercenaries in the centre when it held
between 1,600 and 1,700 people at its peak when it first opened in
January 2012.
The International Organization for Migration (IOM), based in Geneva,
has helped send many of the centre’s immigrants back to their countries
of origin, Sagher said. Some returned voluntarily on their own with IOM
assistance. “But”, Sagher complained, “the process of repatriation has
been slow” — as has been the case dealing with the Chadian embassy in
Libya. Nigerian nationals have to be be processed through their embassy
in Tunis.
“The IOM has to deal with their embassies to get them travel
documents to be able to be repatriated quickly. Libya is a rich country
and we sometimes repatriate them using Libyan government resources and
even give them money, as long as they do not stay here,” Sagher
explained. The Department for Combating Illegal Migration (DCIM) gives
those who voluntarily return to their countries of origin $600 to start
their own business in their homeland, he added. But “they may return,
be jailed and so on and so forth. That is life.” he concluded, smiling.
Imed Sagher, head of Gharian’s Abu Rashada illegal immigrant detention centre (Photo: Houda Mzioudet)
“We want them to raise our spirits, thank us or at least ask how we are doing.“
“One hundred and twenty illegal immigrants cross the southwestern
border of Libya daily. Sometimes 200 come in just one day,” Jomaa Saleh
Wasini, a Libyan Tebu military officer and member of Um Al-Aranib
Martyrs Battalion at the Al-Wigh Military Base, just north of the
Libya-Chad-Niger border, told the
Libya Herald. Libya’s
2,000-kilometer-long southern border, with Sudan, Niger and Chad, has
recently become popular with hundreds of sub-Saharan Africans in search
of job opportunities in Libya or hoping to go on to Europe. But
entering Libya illegally is not without risk.
Wasini and his colleagues at the base return migrants entering Libya
illegally to the town of Qatrun further north on the same day they are
caught. Sometimes they are kept overnight in doorless, run-down rooms on
the base and therefore have to be fed. Other times they are
transferred to Sebha.
Jomaa Wasini, Al-Wigh Military Base (Photo: Houda Mzioudet)
In June 2012, around 460 illegal immigrants from Chad were brought to
Al-Wigh. Wasini expressed his gratitude for the IOM’s assistance to
them: “They came five or six times to monitor the situation here. They
helped us with our mission by providing the migrants with sheets and
blankets.”
This work is being done by young and middle-aged volunteers – Libyan
Tebus from the south-west. On our way south to the Al-Wigh Military
Base, we met a 17-year-old who said he was on holiday from school and
was volunteering, along with other former Tebu revolutionsaries to man
the border crossing. The outpost was more like a hut, with almost no
amenities to maintain it. There was a can full of water which one young
man claimed they had to walk several miles to bring, a light bulb
connected to an electric generator and a few chairs.
Tebu volunteers in one of the makeshift border post in the south-western area of Um Al-Aranib (Photo: Houda Mzioudet)
Wasini stated that he and his colleagues work in coordination with
the DCIM and the Ministry of Interior (MI). They carry out daily patrols
to prevent illegal immigrants coming into Libya and alcohol being
smuggled from Niger and Chad. The Al-Wigh base has two warehouses where
bottles of alcohol and around 20 kilos of drugs seized from smugglers
were stored, waiting for Libyan authorities to come and eventually
destroy them.
He said they use their own private resources to stop smugglers, many
of whom are Libyans from towns in Fezzan such as Sebha. “In 2011, we
captured 15
qintars [750 kilos] of drugs” Wasini
insisted. And he expressed his frustration with the working conditions
in the border post. He wished that the Libyan authorities would visit
them. “We want them to raise our spirits, thank us or at least ask how
we are doing.”
However, Libyan authorities, the successive governments of the
National Transitional Council and the General National Congress, have
found it extremely hard to protect the country both from the outside and
the inside. The presence of militias in the main cities was seen to
pose a stronger challenge.
However, that is changing. In January 2013, in the oasis border town
of Ghadames, the Libyan Prime Minister Ali Zeidan met with his Tunisian
and Algerian counterparts for a regional summit on border control.
Earlier, he had visited Niger, Chad and Sudan for talks on the same
issue. A decision was taken to close the border with Algeria, Niger,
Chad and Sudan and declare the south of Libya a military zone. This was a
move towards insuring stability in an area that Libyan authorities had
struggled to keep under control since the fall of Qaddafi’s regime.
This decision has been rejected by Libyan Tebus in the south. They do
not see it as necesary or as a measure that can effectively work in the
short or the long run.
“It is not an easy situation. Libya has lots of challenges as a newly-emerging democracy.“
According to an IOM project officer in Tripoli, “irregular migration”
(the term used by the organisation) is not a problem by itself. ”The
issue is that somebody is choosing that way of coming illegally. People
have the right to move. We are assisting migrants by doing assisted
voluntary return to their countries of origin if they voluntarily want
to return. We do not take part in any forced removals but we understand
every state’s right to choose who can be in their land and who cannot
be.”
The IOM has developed software for a biometric system that can keep
track of who is being detained and who is not. It is “for the
residents’ well-being primarily and not for law-enforcement purposes,”
the IOM official insisted.
“It is not an easy situation. Libya has lots of challenges as a newly-emerged democracy.
It is a process. It takes time to put these facilities in place to
have what migrants and detainees need there,” the officer concluded.
A truck loaded with various items including scrap in the middle of the Sahara desert belonging to Nigerien/Chadian immigrants (Photo: Houda Mzioudet)
Besides assisting with the voluntary return of immigrants to their
countries of origin, the IOM also carries out medical checks in
detention centres to see who is fit to travel. This is in addition to
spot-checks to the detention centres across Libya to monitor the
situation and see to the needs of the residents. During the
Libya Herald’s
visit to the Gharian detention centre, we were told by Imed Sagher, the
head of the centre, that the condition of the its “temporary” residents
has improved significantly in the last few months.
In the period between 1 October 2011 and 31 December 2012, the IOM
has assisted the voluntary return of 6,809 nationals from 20 sub-Saharan
African countries. Most returnees came from Niger – 2,238. The number
of all returnees was 1,876 by December 2011 and 4,933 more returned by
December 2012. November 2011 saw the peak of migrants returning to their
home countries.
In Murzuk, town council president Mohamed Adam told the
Libya Herald
that south-western towns are powerless in halting African migrants from
entering Libya. While the town is not directly affected by the issue,
it is a transit point for both seasonal migrant workers and illegal
migrants who go to Sebha, then Tripoli and sometimes try to reach
Europe. ”It is hard to deal with it. What shall we do? We have an
immense Sahara desert of about 2,000 kilometres to Kufra in the east.”
libya herald.
