IRIN Contributor Tom Westcott analyzes the situation in Libya, where women are suffering different abuses. In an environment where the State has been weakened, smugglers populate the place. In declarations made to IRIN, a 19-year-old girl from Senegal stated: “When we arrived, we were immediately taken to a kind of prison, a house where there were about 200 other migrants. They made us call our families back home and demanded that they sent 2,000 Libyan dinar ($1,458) for each person”. Another 23-year-old Nigerian woman said she narrowly escaped this fate after the woman who arranged her journey to Libya, with the false promise of a retail job in Europe, turned on her in Sabha. “Her Libyan boyfriend came to meet us and they told me I had to pay 2,000 dinar ($1,458) if I wanted to continue my journey. When I said I couldn’t pay, he said: ‘you will use your body to get the money’. But I refused,” she said. “They made me call my mum and put the phone on speaker and beat me so my mum could hear me screaming.” Her captors eventually accepted a smaller sum, which a distant relative brought, in person, from Tripoli.
Sabha is one of Libya’s most lawless towns, where deep-running tribal divisions mean large parts of the city are inaccessible to residents, depending on their tribal background. “Nobody controls Sabha and no one feels safe here,” said Ahmed. “The Third Force [a ‘peacekeeping’ force from Libya’s third city of Misrata] say they are in control, but they actually only control one neighborhood.” Frustrated security officials admit that undocumented migrants are the least of their problems. “The crime rate here is not 100 percent, it is 150 percent,” said a senior police officer in Sabha, who spoke to IRIN on condition of anonymity. Click here to access the full article.
IRIN Contributor Tom Westcott analyzes the situation in Libya, where women are suffering different abuses. In an environment where the State has been weakened, smugglers populate the place. In declarations made to IRIN, a 19-year-old girl from Senegal stated: “When we arrived, we were immediately taken to a kind of prison, a house where there were about 200 other migrants. They made us call our families back home and demanded that they sent 2,000 Libyan dinar ($1,458) for each person”. Another 23-year-old Nigerian woman said she narrowly escaped this fate after the woman who arranged her journey to Libya, with the false promise of a retail job in Europe, turned on her in Sabha. “Her Libyan boyfriend came to meet us and they told me I had to pay 2,000 dinar ($1,458) if I wanted to continue my journey. When I said I couldn’t pay, he said: ‘you will use your body to get the money’. But I refused,” she said. “They made me call my mum and put the phone on speaker and beat me so my mum could hear me screaming.” Her captors eventually accepted a smaller sum, which a distant relative brought, in person, from Tripoli.
Sabha is one of Libya’s most lawless towns, where deep-running tribal divisions mean large parts of the city are inaccessible to residents, depending on their tribal background. “Nobody controls Sabha and no one feels safe here,” said Ahmed. “The Third Force [a ‘peacekeeping’ force from Libya’s third city of Misrata] say they are in control, but they actually only control one neighborhood.” Frustrated security officials admit that undocumented migrants are the least of their problems. “The crime rate here is not 100 percent, it is 150 percent,” said a senior police officer in Sabha, who spoke to IRIN on condition of anonymity. Click here to access the full article.