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‘Let me die’: tortured migrants and rescue ships face off against EU-sponsored Libyan forces
When Sulaiman saw the Humanity 1 approaching, he thought to himself: “if they are Libyans, let me die. I will not go back there.”
The 25 year old Nigerian man is one of many rescued by the German NGO SOS Humanity on Tuesday (27 October) to have escaped living hell in Libya, at the hands of a regime paid by the EU to keep migrants away from its borders.
“I was in prison for one year, for no reason,” said Sulaiman, whose name has been changed to preserve his anonymity. “Any time in the morning they come to distribute food, there are beatings. No one lets you go without a beating,” he told EUobserver.
Every day he’d subsist on one small slice of bread in “a cage for 100 people, where there are all skeletons,” he described with tears in his eyes.
Sulaiman had tried to leave Libya twice before on small boats, but each time he’d been pulled back to land by violent militias, one of whom he described to be an ‘official’ authority.
Data from the International Organisation for migration (IOM) and the UN found over 200,000 people to have been illegally intercepted in the central Mediterranean and returned to Libya since 2016.
And like many other search and rescue organisations, SOS Humanity’s own work has been significantly impeded by Libyan groups – whether they be the so-called Libyan coast guard or paramilitary groups known for hijacking small migrant boats in open sea to rob everyone on board and pull them back to illegal detention facilities.
Men, women, families with children, and unaccompanied minors alike are kept in prisons until they can pay their way out.
“I lied, and told my family I was in Tunisia,” a young boy from Sudan told EUobserver.
“I knew my mother couldn’t take it, knowing what would be happening to me in Libya,” he said, after having been rescued by SOS Humanity alongside 27 others in the early hours of Tuesday. He is one of 10 children aboard traveling alone.
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