Ship of Humanity

Abebe was one of 206 people rescued by MSF from two severely overcrowded, unseaworthy boats in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea on the afternoon of September 19, 2024. Both boats, carrying women, men, and children mainly from Syria, Eritrea, and Ethiopia, had left Sabratha, Libya, early that morning.

When we sat down to talk, I heard about the suffering behind Abebe’s kind eyes. A 20-year-old graduate in statistics, Abebe said he fled the ongoing conflict in his home region of Amhara, in northwestern Ethiopia, in 2023. He described feeling pressure from the Amhara militia group known as Fano to take up arms against the government and under suspicion from Ethiopian federal forces regardless of his actions. “I don’t want to fight. The Fano says [they] fight for the freedom of Amhara, but I don’t see that freedom. They make a lot of death on both sides. I don’t want to die.… They [the military] assume all of the Amhara people are Fano, so the military may shoot, beat, or arrest us…. So I had to leave the country.”

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Abebe told me he had spent two months in smuggler captivity in Kufra, a major smuggling and transit hub for migrants and asylum seekers in southeast Libya, where he was beaten until his mother sold their home to pay for his freedom. When he tried to cross the sea the first time, in April 2024, crammed into the hull of a wooden boat with people vomiting around him from seasickness and the smell of gasoline, he said, the Libyan Coast Guard forces intercepted the boat and took the passengers back to Zawiya, a town on the western coast of Libya around 45 kilometers west of the capital, Tripoli.

There, he was detained for four months in the Al-Nasr detention center, also known as the “Osama prison.” With no money to buy his way out, Abebe said, he worked for the man running the prison – cleaning, interpreting – until he was finally released.

Abebe’s experience encapsulates the sacrifice and determination of so many asylum seekers, refugees, and migrants. It also illustrates the consequences of the European Union’s policy to deter and contain migration no matter the human cost.

Rescue at Sea

The EU has abdicated its responsibilities for search-and-rescue in the Mediterranean and arguably become more complicit in abuses against migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees in Libya and elsewhere.

It is now replicating its abusive model of cooperation with Libya with other countries – like Tunisia and Lebanon – where people face abuse and repeated expulsion or deportation despite the risk of further harm (known as chain refoulement). And Italy now systematically obstructs the humanitarian work of rescue groups.

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In 2017, I witnessed the Aquarius crew rescue more than 600 people in 6 different operations coordinated by the Italian Maritime Rescue Coordination Center (MRCC). The ship was able to disembark everyone in Palermo, Sicily, and return quickly to international waters off the coast of Libya to assist other boats in distress.

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This time around, the Italian MRCC ordered the Geo Barents to return to Italy immediately after the rescues and forced the ship to go all the way to Genoa, three days’ navigation from the central Mediterranean, to let the passengers disembark. Then the government ordered the ship detained for 60 days on the grounds that the crew had failed to comply with orders from Libyan authorities, despite the fact that a Libyan patrol boat had interfered menacingly in one of the rescue operations. All of that means precious time taken away from the Geo Barents’ life-saving work.

The MSF crew were alerted about two wooden boats by Seabird, a small airplane operated by the rescue organization Sea-Watch. 

During the second rescue, I witnessed a Libyan patrol boat race toward the wooden boat while the MSF crew were still helping people onto the small inflatable boat they use to carry out rescues. Someone on the Libyan boat ordered MSF over the radio to stop the rescue or they would open fire. After tense negotiations, the rescue team eventually brought everyone on board the Geo Barents. The Libyan boat – built in an Italian shipyard and donated by the Italian government – circled the rescue ship several times before it sped away.

How the Libyan Patrol threatens the Geo Barents

“They don’t care if you are dying”

If rescue is the greatest hope of people on unseaworthy boats, interception by Libyan forces is one of their deepest fears. Over the years, I’ve heard many people say they would have preferred to drown than be taken back to Libya. Everyone I spoke to on the Geo Barents described some form of abuse in Libya, ranging from extortion to forced labor, torture, and rape. Their accounts were distressingly similar to those I heard seven years ago on the Aquarius.

The evidence of brutal treatment of foreign asylum seekers and migrants in Libya is overwhelming. The United Nations has said there is evidence of collusion between state forces, including the Libyan Coast Guard, with trafficking and smuggling networks, and concluded that state security forces and armed militias have committed crimes against humanity against migrants in Libya.

Many Africans said they spent months, even years, in smuggler captivity. Afnii, an 18-year-old Somali woman, told me very softly that she was gang-raped by smugglers multiple times near the end of the two years she spent confined in a smuggler warehouse in Kufra. Released from the warehouse and dispatched to Tripoli to fend for herself when she became pregnant, Afnii gave birth to a little girl, depending on handouts and help from strangers to survive.

She told me that when she decided to attempt the sea crossing with her daughter, they ended up in another nightmarish smuggler warehouse, where one of the smugglers refused to find food for her baby unless Afnii had sex with him. Her daughter died when she was seven months old. Afnii is the pseudonym the young woman chose for herself: it was her daughter’s name.

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Huda, now 18 years old, said she was trafficked out of Somalia when she was just 13. She said she spent two years with her young aunt “without seeing the sun” in a smuggler warehouse in Kufra where they and hundreds of others were subjected to terrible abuse. Huda said she and her aunt, whom she considers more of a sister, were not raped like so many other women there because they were young, but that the man in charge regularly beat them and “took us one night and then he did something bad to us … we didn’t deserve that.”

Habtom, 40, from Eritrea, said he spent six years in Kufra in conditions akin to slavery. “They [the smugglers] forced us to work on a farm for no pay,” he said, adding that the smugglers made videos of people being beaten to show to their family and friends to raise the money for release. When he and others were caught trying to escape, the smugglers beat them “with the butts of guns, pipes, tree branches. They don’t care if you are dying.”

The rest of Habtom’s story gives insight into the economy of exploitation and violence that involves both smugglers and state actors. He told me the money he finally scraped together for his release got him a package deal: travel from Kufra to the coast, a first attempt at a boat crossing, money to cover release from detention if intercepted, and a second attempt. Habtom’s first attempt ended after only 30 minutes when the Zawiya Libyan coast guard intercepted his boat. He said he spent four days in the Osama prison before money exchanged hands and he was able to try again.

Through its support for the Libyan Coast Guards, the EU contributes directly to this cycle of extreme abuse. EU institutions and member states have poured millions of euros into programs to beef up the capacity of the Tripoli-based Government of National Unity, one of two competing authorities in Libya whose power rests largely on fungible alliances with militias to intercept boats leaving Libya.

The EU border and coast guard agency, Frontex, flies aircraft over the central Mediterranean and provides the coordinates of boats carrying migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees to coastal authorities, including Libya: this information facilitates interceptions and makes Frontex complicit in the abuse.

Almost everyone I spoke to on the Geo Barents, regardless of nationality, described experiencing at least one interception at sea followed by detention upon return to Libya. Besides Abebe, four others had been held in the Osama prison; all five of them said they paid large sums of money in exchange for their freedom.

Ahmed, a 16-year-old Syrian, told me he had attempted the boat journey four times before being rescued by MSF. On his first attempt, in December 2023, he suffered chemical burns all over his body from gasoline mixed with seawater in the hull of the wooden boat where he lay for 13 hours before the interception. After he recovered, months later, he said, he attempted three times but each time his boat was intercepted, and he was detained upon return to Libya. On his fourth attempt, in August, he said two black speed boats intercepted his boat almost immediately. He and roughly 130 others were taken to the Osama prison, where he stayed for six days in what he described as a crowded, dark room with an uneven floor covered in overflowing wastewater from the toilet. Ahmed said a guard who took a dislike to him, beat his head against a wall. He had to pay US$1,500 to get out.

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The account I heard from Nulan, a 24-year-old software engineering graduate from Syria, illustrates a newer piece of this horrifying puzzle: interception by Tunisian forces followed by expulsion to Libya. The EU has increased its financial and political support to Tunisia for migration control even amid an alarming deterioration of the human rights situation in that country and discrimination and abuse against migrants.

Frontex follows the same protocol to alert Tunisian authorities about boats in the Mediterranean as it does with the maritime coordination centers of EU states, despite documented cases of abuses by Tunisian security forces including excessive force, arbitrary arrests and detention, dangerous actions at sea, and collective expulsions.

Nulan said he had spent roughly 18 hours at sea on his first of four attempts to cross the Mediterranean, in February 2024, when Tunisian forces began chasing his boat, threatened to shoot, and ultimately threw a net to disable their engines. Nulan described being detained overnight, guards taking everyone’s phones and money, and then taking him along with roughly one hundred other people to the Libyan border.

He said he was handed over to the “Libyan government … waiting for us at the border” and then detained in the al-Assa detention center, about 20 kilometers inside Libya from the border with Tunisia. “It’s not a prison, it’s a horror place. Guns everywhere. They punish people. No food, no water. If you have to drink water you have to go the toilet…. It’s a horrendous place, horrendous people. Unbelievable.” Nulan told me he paid $1,500 for his release after four days.

A lot of Humanity on One Ship

I spent most of the three days sailing to Genoa on the “shelter deck” where all the men stayed, sharing smiles with those I couldn’t reach across the language barrier, watching people speak animatedly, play cards, or rest, figuring out alongside them with the help of a map the names of the islands we passed as we got closer to the peninsula. There were always men draped over the railing at the back of the deck, staring out to sea, while others chatted as they waited outside the medical clinic for their time with the doctor and nurse. There was always someone helping MSF staff to clean or hand out food. One afternoon, a few members of the rescue team got a group to do stretching exercises.

When I wasn’t there, I was on the smaller deck where women and younger children stayed. It might have been a quieter place if it hadn’t been for the four rambunctious children of a preternaturally calm Syrian woman. Little Adam, an 18-month-old Eritrean boy, not to be outdone, crawled every inch of the place. Maria, the MSF midwife, an exuberant Belgian woman with a warm smile, a keen eye, and check-ups to be done, asked various MSF crewmembers and observers like me to help keep the children occupied. Some of the women were talkative and curious, even joyful and hopeful, while others were more reserved. Some bore the scars of the hardship and violence of their journeys.

It was a lot of humanity on one ship in the middle of the sea. Each person with their own character and stories, united by the often-terrifying circumstances of these journeys but also a tenacious commitment to life.

The Road Ahead

The mood on board was electric when the Geo Barents reached Genoa on September 23. As much as people are fleeing hardship and abuse, they are also moving toward a future they want to build for themselves and their families with their aspirations and determination.

Huda, the 18-year-old Somali woman, taught herself English by watching movies and reading books in the library at night when she was an unpaid domestic worker for a wealthy family in Tripoli for over a year. Forced to leave school when she was just 12, Huda said she dreams of studying. “I want to get an education since I didn’t have the opportunity in my country, and for my past four years I was just surviving. The goal is to go to school, to learn, and I was hoping to become a doctor so I can help people.”

Nada, 34 years old and seven months pregnant, and Firaz, a 50-year-old father of four, both from Syria, told me they endured abuse to provide stability and promise for their children. When I asked Ahmed, the 16-year-old boy from Syria, about his hopes for the future, he said he wanted to take up tennis and guitar again and continue his studies to become a dental lab technician.