The desert front - EU refugee camps in North Africa?
01 March 2005
by Helmut Dietrich
This article first appeared in the German journal Konkret (issue 12/2004) and traces the implementation of the creation of migrant and refugee prisons, so called off-shore centres, in northern Africa, as part of the EU's globalisation of migration control. With the example of recent developments in EU and particularly German and Italian relations with Libya, the author highlights the relationship between military, economic and migration control agreements between the EU and third countries and documents the devastating effect these have for migrants and refugees caught up in the militarisation of the EU's external borders.
"How can you forget the concentration camps built by Italian colonists in Libya into which they deported your great family - the Obeidats? Why don't you have the self-confidence, why don't you refuse?" the Libyan intellectual Abi Elkafi recently asked the Libyan ambassador in Rome, who had initiated the country's orientation towards the West. "The reason I write to you are the atrocious new concentration camps set up on Libya's soil on behalf of the Berlusconi government," Elkafi wrote in an open letter.
In June 1930, Marshal Petro Badoglio, the Italian governor of Libya, ordered the internment of large parts of the then 700,000 inhabitants of Libya. Within two years, more than 100,000 people had died of hunger and disease in the desert concentration camps. Around the same time, Badoglio had fortified the 300 kilometre long Libyan/Egyptian border line with barbed wire fence. This is how the Italian colonists destroyed the Libyan resistance. For years, they had not succeeded - neither by bombing villages and oases, nor by using poison gas. The current Italian government laughs at any demand for compensation, Abi Elkafi writes.
Military camps for refugees - the reality of off-shore centres
Four years ago, the western press received first reliable reports on internment camps in Libya. In September and October 2000, pogroms against migrant workers took place in Libya and 130 to 500 sub-Saharan Africans were killed in the capitol Tripoli and the Tripoli area. To escape the persecution, thousands of builders and service sector employees from Niger, Mali, Nigeria, and Ghana fled south. Many of them were stopped at road blocks in the Sahara and taken to Libyan military camps. Le Monde Diplomatique reported on several camps in where migrants and refugees have been held since 1996 - about 6,000 Ghanaians and 8,000 people from Niger are supposed to be held in one of them alone. The Ghanaian president Jerry Rawlings visited the camp to bring back some hundred compatriots. The Somali Consultative Council appealed to Gaddafi on 22 February 2004 "to unconditionally release the Somali refugees who are imprisoned in your country and who have started a hunger strike immediately and not send them back to the civil war in Somalia." In the beginning of October 2004, the Italian state TV channel RAI showed pictures from a Libyan refugee camp. Hundreds of people were depicted in a court yard, heavily guarded; the barracks apparently do not have sleeping facilities. Reports of some of the Somalis who have recently been deported to Libya confirm the existence of these camps.
Did the Libyan government originally build these camps in order to provide a labour force for major building projects in the south of the country ("greening the desert")? Or are they an attempt to fight refugees in transit? In any case, the Libyan government already announced some time ago that undocumented immigrants would be imprisoned in southern Libya and deported. In December 2004, the Libyan interior minister Mabruk announced without further explanation that Tripoli had deported 40,000 migrants in the last weeks alone.
These imprisonments and deportations have now become antecedents of the so-called off-shore centres of the European Union, propagated particularly by Germany's interior minister Otto Sch