By Biran Gaye
Dozens of African migrants and refugees have recently been captured for ransom in Kufra, Libya as modern slavery continues to rear its ugly head on the continent in the 21st century.
According to Refugees In Libya, Naima Jamal is among dozens of victims of Libya’s modern slave trade. Jamal, a 20-year-old Ethiopian woman from Oromia, was abducted shortly after her arrival in Libya in May 2024.
Since then, her family has been subjected to enormous demands from human traffickers, with calls coupled with threats and cruelty, the organisation said.
Their ransom demands rise and shift with each passing week as the traffickers currently demand $6,000 for her release.
Inhuman treatment
Refugees in Libya added the traffickers sent a video of Naima being tortured yesterday.
The footage, which her family received with horror, shows the unimaginable brutality of Libya’s trafficking networks. Naima is not alone. In another image sent alongside the footage seen by Foroyaa Newspaper, over 50 other victims could be seen sitting on a bare floor, with their bodies looking haggard and spirits dampened, awaiting to be auctioned like commodities in a market that has no place in the 21st century but thrives in Libya, a nation where the echoes of its ancient slave trade still roar loud and unbroken.
“This is the reality of Libya today,” says activist and survivor David Yambio. “It is not enough to call it chaotic or lawless; that would be too kind.”
He added: “Libya is a machine built to grind Black bodies into dust. The auctions today carry the same cold calculations as those centuries ago: a man reduced to the strength of his arms, a woman to the curve of her back, a child to the potential of their years.”
Naima’s present situation is one of many faced by African migrants and refugees. Libya has become a living hell for Black migrants, a place where the dehumanization of Blackness is neither hidden nor condemned. Traffickers operate openly, fueled by impunity and the complicity of systems that turn a blind eye to this horror.
Yambio indicted the world for being indifferent and insensitive to the plights of these vulnerable groups.
“Libya is Europe’s shadow, the unspoken truth of its migration policy—a hell constructed by Arab racism and fueled by European indifference. They call it border control, but it is cruelty dressed in bureaucracy,” he alleges Europe.
“The $6,000 ransom demanded for Naima is not just a price for her life; it is a price for the silence of a global community that allows this horror to happen to the black child. And yet, for many, this is not survival, it is a cycle of endless suffering.”
The fate of Naima and the other 50 victims in Kufra remain uncertain as their cries are usually met with indifference by those who could intervene but choose not to.
Migrants in Libya are extremely vulnerable to sex and labor trafficking, including those seeking employment in Libya or transiting Libya en route to Europe. An international organization reported indicators of exploitation and abuses amounting to trafficking are experienced by 76 percent of men, 67 percent of women, and 77 percent of children and youth transiting Libya. Migrants living in Libya are vulnerable to exploitation by state and non-state actors, including employers who refuse to pay laborers’ wages. As of October 2022, international organizations estimated there were at least 667,440 migrants, of whom 43,000 are registered refugees and asylum-seekers, in Libya. Migrant workers in Libya predominately come from Sub-Saharan and Sahel states. Informal recruitment agencies recruit undocumented migrants to work in the agriculture, construction, and domestic work sectors; the lack of government oversight and workers’ undocumented status increases migrants’ vulnerability to trafficking. The country continues to serve as a departure point for migrants, including unaccompanied children, crossing the Mediterranean to Europe from North Africa; the number of sea departures from Libya to Europe increased in 2022 by over 13 percent from 2021, in part due to decreased economic opportunities in Libya and the region. Elements of the LCG reportedly work with armed groups and other criminals, including traffickers, to exploit migrants for profit. There are financial incentives for smugglers and traffickers to prevent the disembarkation of migrants transiting the Mediterranean and to return migrants to Libya for detention and further exploitation. In 2022, an international organization reported cases of traffickers compelling migrant boys to drive boats to Europe who were then detained in Italy on the grounds of facilitating migrant smuggling. An international organization reports the LCG intercepted and returned 24,684 refugees and migrants to Libya in 2021, a decrease of 24 percent compared to 32,425 in 2021. Since 2017, due to violence and localized conflict, as well as pandemic-related border closures and movement restrictions, traditional smuggling and trafficking routes became more clandestine, creating greater risks and dangers for migrants; an international organization reported increased incidences of forced labor in smuggling hubs of Sebha, Brak al-Shati, Shwayrif, and Bani Walid since 2017.
Various armed groups, criminal gangs and networks, tribal groups, smugglers, and traffickers, cooperate and compete in the smuggling and trafficking of migrants to and through Libya, while carrying out serious human rights abuses and violations against migrants, including torture, sexual abuse and exploitation, rape, extortion, ransom, theft, and forced labor. International organizations report smugglers and traffickers trade migrants and refugees within illicit networks, while holding them in inhumane conditions. Highly organized trafficking networks subject migrants to forced labor and sex trafficking through fraudulent recruitment, confiscation of identity and travel documents, withholding or non-payment of wages, debt-based coercion, and verbal, physical, and sexual abuse, according to the US Department of State.
In some cases, migrants reportedly pay smuggling fees to reach Tripoli, but once they cross the Libyan border they are sometimes abandoned in southern cities or the desert where they are susceptible to severe forms of abuse, including human trafficking.
Factors aiding the phenomenon
This cruel treatment of refugees and migrants raises new questions about three major political, socioeconomic, and moral dilemmas for the Libyan government as well as for the European Union and international community.
First is the structural and ethical failure of a fragile government that has ignored several personal and institutional accounts about the growing pattern of exchanging human beings, as “merchandise,” for money in the 21st century.
Naima’s story, Yambio adds, is not an anomaly but the legacy of a history that refuses to end.
The activist insists: “Justice must be more than a word spoken in comfortable rooms; it must be action that breaks chains and builds bridges.”
Naima’s survival, and that of countless others like her, depends on whether the world chooses to act or continues to turn its back on the horrors ongoing horrors in Libya.
In the sub-Saharan Africa, poverty and economic hardships have been the driving factors of migration, with several young people embarking on the illegal migration through the North Africa.
War, political instability, and natural disasters displace individuals or entire families in the continent. When people are forced to flee their homes and communities, they can experience financial hardship, homelessness, and culture shock.
Trauma and financial burden on relatives
Meanwhile, their families are left to battle with raising the funds demanded by traffickers or risking the loss of their loved ones forever. With significant ransoms often demanded, the victims’ families are normally left with little or no money to get after paying huge ransoms.
Sometimes, they get depressed before meeting the huge demands of traffickers to rescue loved ones.
‘The world must confront the uncomfortable truth: the slave trade is alive and thriving in Libya. It thrives in the silence of nations, in the shadows of complicit systems, and in the unchecked racism that dehumanizes Black lives,” lamented.
