14Vile slave sale revealed
World leaders vow to fight Libyan auctions
THE SCENE appeared lifted from a mid-19th century New Orleans market, with an auctioneer soliciting bids from wouldbe slave owners.
But the video was shot with a cell phone, and the footage is of a slave sale in current-day Libya where African migrants seeking freedom were instead peddled as property.
The clip quickly caused a global furor, with world leaders at the European Union-Africa summit in the Ivory Coast this week committing to combatting the sale of human beings.
“Slavery has no place in our world and these actions are among the most egregious abuses of human rights,” declared UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres before the two-day session.
French President Emmanuel Macronl Macron said European and African leaders pondered the right way to pursue and arrest those dealing migrants as slaves — including smugglers with links to terrorist groups.
All human traffickers would be targeted with “military and police actions on the ground to trace back these networks,” he said. “It is not a question of saying that we will declare war.
“But there is stronger police action that must be done to dismantle these networks.”
A CNN report shone a spotlight on the slave trade, starting a global wave of unanimous condemnation.
The stunning, surreptitiously shot video obtained by network reporters captured a slave-peddling salesman in a camouflage outfit taking bids on human beings.
“Does somebody need a digger?” the auctioneer asks. “This is a digger, a big strong man, he’ll dig. What am I bid? What am I bid?”
Estimates for the number of migrants stranded in fractured Libya run from 400,000 to 1 million. Since the toppling of Libyan strongman Moammar Khadafy’s regime in 2011, the rise of unchecked rogue militias created endless national complications.
At the crux of the issue are the hundreds of thousands of migrants trapped in Libya during their desperate treks for a better life outside their homelands.
Passage through the North African nation is generally the path taken by migrants headed across the Mediterranean Sea for refuge in Europe. Roughly 3,000 die annually as they cross the sea.
Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari called Wednesday for the return home of all his citizens stuck in Libya.
“Some Nigerians,” he noted, “were sold like goats for a few dollars in Libya.”
With the return Tuesday of 242 migrants, more than 4,000 stranded Nigerians have been brought back this year.
The foreign affairs minister for Burkina Faso, angered by Libya’s role in the sales, ordered his Libyan ambassador to return home.
The EU, the UN and the African Union did announce plans to establish a special task force empowered to protect migrants and refugees “along the (escape) routes and in particular inside Libya.”
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose nation has brought in 1 million migrants and refugees since 2015, added her voice to the call for action.
“It’s very important that we simply support Africans to put a stop to illegal migration, so people don’t have to either suffer in horrible camps in Libya or are even being traded,” she said at the start of the summit.