The quest for an honest job that ended in a Libyan hellhole
When Osas Akahomoen set out from Nigeria in search of work in Europe in 2016, he imagined his qualifications as a welder would help him find a decent job and a living wage somewhere in Europe.
Instead, he embarked on an odyssey of suffering that would see him kidnapped and ransomed twice, abandoned to die by people-smugglers in the Sahara desert, and finally held incommunicado in a barely sanitary detention centre in Libya without functioning lavatories.
“There’s no toothbrushes, no running water, there’s lice everywhere. At least in Nigeria I can have a shave. I can brush my teeth,” he said in an interview in the Libyan compound where he is being held. “I just want to go back to Nigeria. And I wouldn’t advise anyone else to do what I did. I have lost four years of my life.”
Mr Akahomoen, a thoughtful 28-year-old from Nigeria’s Edo province, has been through an extraordinary ordeal. But among the inmates of Libya’s migrant detention centres, it is not out of the ordinary.
More than 40,000 would-be migrants to Europe have been intercepted at sea since Italy began paying and equipping the Libyan coastguard to do so in 2017. But the fate of those detained has caused outrage. Last month, the EU’S commissioner for human rights called on Italy to suspend the arrangement because of “serious human rights violation”.
“Humanitarian rhetoric doesn’t justify continued support to the coast guard when Italy knows people apprehended at sea will be returned to arbitrary detention and abuse,” said
Judith Sunderland, of the Europe and Central Asia division at Human Rights Watch, in a statement calling for Italy to suspend the programme.
Oil-rich but sparsely populated, Libya has long been a destination for immigration. Under Muammar Gaddafi’s regime, there were as many as two million migrants workers living and working here, sending money back to families across Africa and the Middle East.
But since Gaddafi was overthrown in 2011, it has also become an attractive route for people-smugglers offering desperate people such as Mr Akahomoen the ticket to a better life in Europe.
It is difficult to tell how many people have crossed the war-torn country’s porous desert borders over the past nine years, but the UN estimates there are 650,000 migrants living in Libya today, mostly from sub-saharan Africa and the Middle East. About 43,000 are registered as refugees fleeing conflict, but most are economic migrants, either seeking work in Libya or hoping to move on to Europe.
Distinguishing between those attracted by the illegal route to Europe, and those settling in Libya, is difficult because many would be immigrants get stuck, drawn into a semi-permanent community as they try to raise cash for the next journey.
“I’d never seen Libya on a map, and now I’ve been here three years,” said Akia Hassan, a 31-year-old mother of one from Lagos, who like many sub-saharan Africans now runs a stall in the city of Misrata.
Like many, she never planned to settle in Libya and still hopes to raise the money to “cross the sea”, but has no idea how long it will take.
Life for Libya’s migrant diaspora is not easy. Mrs Hassan barely earns enough to get by, let alone raise the cash for the boat. And her husband has been in jail for four months after being picked up in a random sweep by local police. The route across the Sahara is controlled by highly organised criminal groups who have extensive networks in both Libya and countries of origin like Nigeria and Niger.
But as Mr Akahomoen discovered
‘They left us in the desert, and drove off saying they were going to get water. They never came back’
on his journey, they can be treacherous to deal with. “They left us in the desert, and drove off saying they were going to get water. They never came back,” he said. “We spent eight days in the desert and had to drink our own urine to survive. Eleven people died of thirst. I watched my cousin die in front of me. Her name was Evelyn. She was 19.”
When he reached the Libyan desert city of Sabha, which has become the main staging post on the trans-sahara migration route, he was kidnapped and held for four months until his family in Nigeria could scrape together an $800 (£612) ransom.
When he got to Zawiyah, the coastal town west of Tripoli that has become the hub for the people-smuggling industry, he was kidnapped a second time and held in a cell for six months.
Finally, after over a year of doing casual welding jobs, he raised the 2,500 dinars (£500 at the current black market rate) to pay for a place on a dangerously overcrowded rubber dinghy last month. It was intercepted within hours on Jan 11.
The detention centre in Tripoli consists of a fenced prison compound containing a concrete-floored hangar where the 160 male inmates sleep on thin mattresses on the floor, a patch of concrete exercise yard, a lavatory and shower block. Thirty-seven women are kept in separate accommodation.
There is a tiny yard. When The Daily Telegraph visited, inmates said there had been no running water in the lavatories for days. They had been getting by on plastic containers brought in by the guards.
Jean Paul Cavalieri, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ (UNHCR) head of mission in Tripoli, says the situation is slowly improving, with numbers in detention centres down to around 2,000 from about 5,000 a year ago, but international efforts to grapple with the issue have suffered repeated setbacks.
Operation Sophia, the EU’S maritime patrols off Libya, was suspended in March last year after Italy said it would no longer receive migrants rescued from the sea. Italy said this week that it was willing to restart patrols to enforce the arms embargo on Libya, but that Austria’s conservative government, fearing a further influx of migrants, has blocked the move.
And the UNHCR announced it was too dangerous to continue operating its gathering and departure facility, a transit centre opened in Tripoli only last year, because a military base that could make it a target for shelling had opened next door.
Last year, about 53 people were killed when a migrant centre in Tajourer, just east of Tripoli, was hit by an LNA airstrike apparently targeting nearby military facilities.
Among the detainees in the same compound where Mr Akahomoen is being held are a large group of Somali teenagers – the youngest among them just 12 – who said they had been in the bare compound for a year.
“We’re never going back,” said Adrus Osman, a 17-year-old from Mogadishu who said his goal was to live in London.
“We will get to Europe. Those are our hopes and dreams.”