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By Lorenzo D’Agostino, From CNN
(CNN) At the heart of the deadliest migrant route in the world, a small number of rescue boats brave the choppy waters of the winter Mediterranean. They are picking up stranded migrants attempting to cross from Africa to Europe, with many telling horror stories of imprisonment, brutality and exploitation as they had passed through Libya.
For 11 days in December, CNN was the only media on a boat operated by Proactiva Open Arms, a Spanish NGO that rescues migrants who run into difficulty trying to cross the Aegean and Mediterranean Sea. During its mission, Proactiva picked up 695 migrants from 27 countries, who had all set sail from Libya — over one third of all the migrants who reached Italy in December.
Among them was Nigerian Celestine Ike. The 27-year-old claims he spent nine months stuck in Libya, where he says he had been captured and imprisoned for almost four months, until a friend paid his ransom of 4,000 Libyan dinars ($2,930).
“A lot of blacks are suffering there,” he said. “They are using black men as slaves.”
‘Killed like animals’
Ike refers to his captors as “Asma boys,” a term that many sub-Saharan migrants use to describe those in the business of holding migrants for ransom. Several migrants said that the Asma boys can belong to either criminal gangs, militias or the Libyan police.
Ike said that while he was imprisoned he had been repeatedly shot by his captor. With a damaged finger on his left hand, which he says was smashed with a hammer, he pointed at a bullet wound on his foot. He said that in prison he saw many people dying, and most of them were black.
“You stay there and you see your fellow human beings being killed like animals,” he said.
After his ransom was paid, he says he was pushed at gunpoint onto a dinghy carrying 113 more migrants, from which he was rescued by Proactiva on December 15. The craft had left the western Libyan city of Zuwarah that day. After nine hours at sea, it was found drifting aimlessly, having run out of fuel.
All the rescues carried out by the Open Arms were of boats that had departed from one of three cities — Sabratha, Zuwarah, and Zawiya — some of the country’s biggest trafficking hotspots, according to Amnesty International.
Detention and physical violence
Many of those rescued told CNN stories similar to Ike’s. They painted a picture of Libya as a place where sub-Saharan migrants journeying to Europe are routinely captured, robbed and exploited by locals.
“In Libya, you cannot do anything,” said Ike. “If you’re walking in the street, you’re in trouble. If you work, Libyan men won’t pay you. If you ask for your money, they’ll threaten you.
“The father has guns, the mother has guns, the children have guns — they all have ammunition to threaten blacks.”
Mohammad Guray Farax Quule, a 23-year-old from Somalia, said he was imprisoned three times in Kufra and Bani Walid, and was extorted for a total of more than $8,000. He says he was once forced to be present as 10 of his captors raped one woman.
Diallo Alhassane, 17, from Guinea, said that a Libyan farmer, for whom he was forced to work for four months, once threw into his cell the dead body of a Sudanese migrant who had tried to escape. Alhassane too showed a bullet wound on his foot.
A survey conducted by the IOM found that underage migrants on the Mediterranean route are the most exposed to human trafficking, with a vast majority of them having experienced detention and physical violence in Libya.
Evacuating detention centers
While the number of migrants arriving in Italy from Africa in 2017 is down a third from 2016 according to Interior Ministry’s data, fewer rescues are being carried out by European Union military vessels in the area adjacent to Libyan state waters. Proactiva says that means the burden of rescuing migrants increasingly falls on non-profit human rights organizations like theirs.
The fall in rescue missions by European military comes as the EU pursues a strategy of supporting the Libyan Coast Guard “to enhance their capacity to effectively manage the country’s borders.” The EU has allocated €46 million ($54,6 m) to this program, and Italy has provided training and equipment to the Libyan Coast Guard.
But this strategy has been criticized by humanitarian organizations such as Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders and the United Nations, because migrants intercepted by Libyan authorities are returned to Libyan detention centers.
For more on this story and video go to: http://edition.cnn.com/2017/12/23/world/migrant-rescue-brutality-libya/index.html
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