LIBYA SLAVE Trade and the silence of the world!

By Laswet Savadye

“So enormous, so dreadful, so irremediable did slave trade’s wickedness appear that my own mind was completely made up for abolition. Let the consequences be what they would: I from this time determined that I would never rest until I had affected its abolition.” William Wilberforce

In Africa, it’s sad one flees genocidal regimes in their home country, only to be enslaved by other Africans on their way to Europe. Such has been the fate of many Africans in Libya.

Black Africans are being sold in open-air slave markets but you won’t hear much about that from the mainstream news media or the foreign-policy pundits. The silence is deafening!

The footage below is from Libya, released recently by CNN.

It shows young men from sub-Saharan Africa being auctioned off as farm workers in slave markets. African migrants are being sold for as little as $400 in Libya.

This is a huge indictment on the African leaders, SADC, AU, ECOWAS for not commenting and condemning the slave trade in Libya. Where is the mainstream African media?

In The Gambia, Karamo Keita set up a group to warn fellow youngsters not to attempt the trip to Europe, after suffering horrific abuses in Libya including slave labour.

“In Libya, black people have no right,” he told AFP back in September. “We were taken to various farms where the Libyan guy sold us as slaves. We worked on the farms for free.”

News of the auctions sparked protests outside of the Libyan Embassy in Paris. French soccer star Paul Pogba raised the issue after scoring a goal for his club, Manchester United, putting his wrists together as if they were handcuffed. Pogba has been joined in the protest by other big names such as a Villarreal striker Cedric Bakambu and West Ham’s Cheikou Kouyaté.

Libyan authorities have been denying the reports of a booming slave trade in Libya but after the expose by CNN the Libyan officials said they would launch an investigation.

Alioune Tine, Amnesty International’s West Africa director, said “hostage-takings, violence, torture and rape” were well documented in Libya. “And we’ve been talking about slavery for a long time,” he added. France requested an urgent meeting of the UN Security Council, with President Emmanuel Macron branding the auctions a crime against humanity.

The UN Secretary General said, “I abhor these appalling acts and call upon all competent authorities to investigate these activities without delay and to bring the perpetrators to justice, I have asked the relevant United Nations actors to actively pursue this matter.”

He went on to say that the reports from Libya demonstrate some of “the most egregious abuses of human rights” and may amount to crimes against humanity. Secretary-General António Guterres urged the international community to unite on the issue and called on all countries to adopt the UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime and its protocol on human trafficking.

The question that can be asked however is, how did Libya descent into this inhumane mess? Libya has been beset by chaos since Nato-backed forces overthrew long-serving ruler Col Muammar Gaddafi in October 2011 as reported by the BBC in May 2017.

Then US Secretary of State Clinton understood in early 2011 what was happening concerning the rebel genocidal targeting of black Libyans and African migrants, yet pushed to arm the rebels and overthrow Gaddafi anyway.

She was given the intelligence brief which gave evidence this was happening on March 27, 2011. But even without such a classified intelligence report personally delivered to her, such war crimes were so well known that a full month prior on February 28, 2011, Al Jazeera could published a story entitled, African Migrants Targeted in Libya.

But even years later, as such race-based war crimes have now been exhaustively documented, Hillary has consistently indicated that she has no regrets. Though her beloved Libyan rebels, legitimized and empowered through broad support from the West, were literally killing people based on the color of their skin, not a single one has ever been convicted in a court of law or punished for their crimes.

Moreover, Hillary has never so much as hinted at the problem, though her public stature would allow her a world-wide platform to speak against atrocities at any time, possibly preventing further crimes. Instead, she has simply chosen to conclude her role in the tragic story of Libya with her crazed and gleeful declaration of “we came, we saw, he died.”

Since then Libya became a massive transit hub for sub-Saharan Africans setting sail for Europe.The EU has been desperate to stem the influx — more than 1.5 million migrants have arrived in Europe since 2015, according to UN figures.

In their efforts to stem the influx, are European governments have been complicit in setting up measures that have seen a massive in drop migrant arrivals. This involves sending intercepted migrant carrying vessels back to Libya where they are exposed to the risk of torture, rape, forced labour and extortion.

Analyst Hamidou Anne also said a passive response from African leaders was in part to blame for the unfolding disaster, along with “systematic racism in the Maghreb countries”. This is a huge indictment on some of the dictators in Africa who have collapsed the economies of their nations forcing their citizens to be economic refugees in other countries.

The blame is equally placed on the USA and EU states who come into Africa under the guise of peacekeeping and investment yet they cause and engineer chaos in some African countries. China has been fingered in the recent military coup that occurred in Zimbabwe even its officials have denied having anything to do with it. However circumstantial evidence on the ground says otherwise. News 24 reported that both US and China allegedly of the coup before it happened.

The international community cannot continue to turn a blind eye to the unimaginable horrors endured by migrants in Libya

United Nations chief Antonio Guterres said that he was “horrified”; African Union chief Alpha Conde was “outraged”. But that alone is not enough!

My plea to them and the world is that don’t just condemn, ACT! Faced with a crime against humanity you don’t just condemn it, you act.

Here is my loud message to the world, “You may choose to look the other way but you can never say again that you did not know!” – William Wilberforce

Laswet Savadye is a former student leader, a budding academic, current human rights activist, socio-economic analyst and commentator with a special focus on Africa. He writes in his personal capacity. He can be contacted by email on [email protected]