Where 10,000 Africans have drowned; and more will follow

More than 1,800 immigrants are sometimes packed into the detention centre designed for 850, which pushes others to squatter in makeshift plastic shelters littered all over the compound.

According to UNHCR, around 36,000 “boat people” made it to Italian soil in 2008 --- a 75 per cent increase compared to 2007 figures. This means the country absorbed half of the 67,000 immigrants who arrived by sea in Europe.

While hell reins the surface of this haunted sea, capitalism thrives deep in its belly. Running for 520 km from Mellita in Morocco to Sicily through the same route followed by immigrants seeking to land in Lampedusa is the longest underwater pipeline in the Mediterranean called Greenstream.

Among the bones of thousands of would be immigrants buried in this salty water grave, eight billion cubic meters of gas pumps annually from Africa to Europe.

Meanwhile, the crisis continues to play itself out tragically back in Africa. Since it’s not a signatory of the Geneva Convention, Libya does not recognise refugees hence those illegal immigrants deported back to the country are physically abused in the numerous detention centres.

Investigations by independent journalists and NGOs have shown that, on various occasions, the Libyan and Moroccan authorities have arrested and abandoned large numbers of migrants from sub-Saharan Africa in the desert, where many die of hunger and thirst.
Besides dumping the immigrants in the inhospitable Sahara, the Gaddafi regime signed an accord with the eccentric Silvio Berlusconi last year giving the Italian Guardia Costiera a license to intercept shiploads of immigrants in the high seas and turn them back to Libya.

In return the conservative Italian government is building a 1,200 kilometre highway, stretching from the Tunisian border in the west to the Egyptian frontier in the east, as a compensation for colonising the Maghreb nation from 1911 to the World War II.

This is besides the US$5 billion to be extended in investments for the next 25 years, building of immigrants holding centers on the Libyan coast, donation of patrol boats and training personnel to man them, and holding joint military exercises among other goodies.  

There are so many immigrants’ detention camps in Libya today that European media sometimes refers to the country as the African “Guantanamo Bay”.

“Until 2007 the medium length of detention was less. In that period the Libyan government would transport migrants on its own, but as their presence grew, Libya decided their families or their countries owed them this service,” a Libyan immigration official said on condition he not be named.

The unofficial alternative is through bribing the corrupt jail wardens who demand up to U$1,000 per prisoner.

With up to 60 people living on crude bread and water in a five by six meters stone cube cells, sleeping on a cold floor and subjected to a daily life of humiliation and harassment, these detention centres have echoes of World War II concentration camps (without the gas chambers).

Matters blew up on the evening of August 9 when around 300 immigrants, mostly Somalis and a few Eritreans incarcerated at the Ganfuda detention camp near Benghazi tried to escape.

The Libyan police descended on them with a vengeance, leaving six refugees dead, a dozen missing and more than 50 seriously injured.

Despite censorship by the secretive Libyan authorities one of the prisoners who recorded the incidence through a cell phone leaked the photos to the outside world.