Smuggling, Trafficking, and Extortion: New Conceptual and Policy Challenges on the Libyan Route to Europe
Abstract
This paper contributes a conceptual and empirical reflection on the relationship between human smuggling, trafficking and kidnapping, and extortion in Libya. It is based on qualitative interview data with Eritrean asylum seekers in Italy. Different tribal regimes control separate territories in Libya, which leads to different experiences for migrants depending on which territory they enter, such as Eritreans entering in the southeast Toubou controlled territory. We put forth that the kidnapping and extortion experienced by Eritreans in Libya is neither trafficking, nor smuggling, but a crime against humanity orchestrated by an organized criminal network. The paper details this argument and discusses the implications.
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Smuggling, Trafficking, and Extortion: New Conceptual and Policy Challenges on the Libyan Route to Europe
by Kuschminder et al.Introduction
The Mediterranean Sea has developed as a main irregular migration and asylum seeking route towards Europe during the 2010s. The situation has been escalating since 2014 as it became clear that the conflict in Syria was deteriorating, with dramatically rising flows from Turkey to Greece in 2015. During the “refugee emergency” between the summer of 2015 and March 2016 over one million people crossed the Greek–Turkish borders and took the “Balkan route” towards Austria, Germany, Sweden and other western and northern European countries where they largely sought asylum. Italy has also been facing sustained asylum seeker and migrant flows mainly from sub-Saharan African countries since 2013. Unlike Greece where after the peak of 2015–2016 flows have receded to a few tens of thousands per year, in Italy annual arrivals remained above 150,000 in the period 2014–2016 and only receded in 2017 to 120,000 after the Italian government engaged with Libyan authorities to reduce departures from the Libyan coast.
Two of the main challenges in the Mediterranean flows today include: the significant death toll particularly along the Libya–Italy route where the sea crossing is long and dangerous—it is estimated that nearly 10,000 people11
See http://migration.iom.int/europe/
have died or gone missing in the last three years (2016–2018) in the effort to cross the Mediterranean—and the terrible violence transit migrants and asylum seekers are subjected to when crossing through Libya. While both the Turkey–Greece and the Libya–Italy pathways are fraught with uncertainty and hardship for the travelling migrants and asylum seekers, migrants arriving in Italy have faced much harsher conditions en route in Libya. This occurs at the hands of unscrupulous smuggling networks that often involve local militias and tribal groups earning profits out of this human trade.
Recent scholarly literature has paid increasing attention to the role of “transit as a process” and “transit spaces” in the migration process. While earlier research and policy debates focused on “transit countries” presuming that transit can clearly be framed as within a national jurisdiction, more recent work speaks of “transit spaces” to capture the liminality of transit migrants. This has been reflected across Europe from no-man’s lands like the “jungle” at Calais (Ansems de Vries and Guild 2019), to the Baobab collective in Rome (Galluzzo 2016), or the Oranienplatz in Berlin (Fontanari and Ambrosini 2018). Ansems de Vries and Guild (2019) argue that these “spaces of transit” have become increasingly coercive, which is demonstrated by police violence, the destruction of living spaces and the denial of access to rights. Our study is inscribed within this framework of critical analysis of current migration and asylum seeking flows that are fragmented and nonlinear, with important “spaces of transit” in between. In this paper, we move out of European “spaces of transit” to examine the context in Libya, which has arguably become the most brutal space globally of transit for migrants.
This paper contributes a conceptual and empirical reflection on the above issues using qualitative data from 2016–2017 on Eritrean migration and asylum seeking flows via Libya to Italy. Our aim is to inform both the analytical and the policy debate on the realities of transit spaces on the ground, focusing on the case of Libya. We recognise that the situation in Libya is highly fluid and this analysis is based on the context around 2016–2017. We identify three important conceptual and policy-relevant issues on which the study sheds light.
First, transit in Libya challenges our conventional distinction between migrant smuggling and trafficking in human beings. Thus far migrant smuggling has been conceptualised as a (at least initially) voluntary socio-economic transaction: the migrant (or asylum seeker) is in search of a service that would help him/her cross a border undetected and the smuggler offers this service upon an agreed price. Despite being seemingly a contradiction this understanding presumes a certain level of “rule of law”. It presupposes that there is a legality of an agreed contract that is violated by the smuggler if the migrant is not delivered to their destination. This relationship is based on mutual dependency (for the completion of the transaction) and on trust, which is built through ethnic networks and mediated payment procedures. In Libya on the south-eastern route that Eritreans most commonly traverse the situation, however, is different as no transaction is agreed between the migrant and the smuggler. Instead, in a context of a state controlled by tribal regimes, migrants are kidnapped and extorted for ransom. As will be demonstrated in this paper, this creates a “space of exception” (Agamben 1995, 2005) that is void of both national and international law. The role of the smuggler therefore changes as the smuggling network comes to represent some form of local order and authority that is imposed through a system of violence. In this paper, we first demonstrate how this system has emerged in South East Libya and is a unique systematic approach of kidnapping and extortion. Conceptually, we examine how this unique situation compares to our existing definitions of human trafficking and human smuggling.
Second, the situation faced in Libya by prospective migrants en route to Europe, as described above, invites us to rethink the notion of risk, and the strategies migrants use to mitigate it. Recent research (Belloni 2016; Hovil and Oette 2017) suggests that for instance Eritrean migrants are aware of the dangers and hardship that await them in Libya. Nonetheless, they decide to take the risk, which they consider as “calculated” and “mitigated” by seeking support from family networks that pay the ransom to the smugglers so that they can continue their journey to Europe (Belloni 2016; Kuschminder 2017). McMahon and Sigona (2018) as well as Crawley and Blitz (2019) seek to make sense of this disconnect between the risks migrants know they will face and their determination to move on. We explore the issue further and propose the psychological concept of self-deception to examine how Eritrean migrants elaborate the risks of the journey in Libya.
A third issue that arises concerns the legal and policy tools that we can use to understand what is happening in Libya and to offer relevant protection to the people involved. This question is also inscribed in the wider debate of whether a humanitarian perspective towards current flows from Africa to Europe across the Mediterranean should be seen as a matter of compassion and assistance (see Cuttitta’s [2018a, 2018b] critical analysis of Mare Nostrum and of the NGOs' work) towards victims and helpless people in need. Or, alternatively, should it be framed in a more political way, interrogating the role of European governments and businesses (in the oil, construction and border security sectors) in the situation in Libya and the wider MENA region (Akkerman 2018; Fotiadis 2015). We are in need of new conceptual and policy tools to deal with people who cross from Libya to Italy and while in transit in Libya face extortion and torture. Should we consider them as victims of human trafficking and provide relevant safeguards? Or should we simply consider them as smuggled migrants entering as willing agents into a voluntary, although risky, transaction under certain constraints? Or do we need a new legal and conceptual categorisation that takes into account not only the relationship between the migrant and the smuggler but also the socio-political context? If so, what is this and what are the implications? We provide answers to these questions in the conclusion.
This paper starts with introducing the Libyan context, five years after the fall of the Qaddafi regime and the way in which migrant smuggling fits into the economy and political structure of the country, particularly regarding the southeast region presently controlled by the Toubou. We argue that beyond merely a failed state, what exists today in Libya is several tribal regimes that need to be examined separately in order to better understand the migrant smuggling dynamics in the region. The third section of this paper discusses the concepts of smuggling, trafficking and extortion as well as the notion of legality versus illegality as defined in the literature and in connection with the Libyan case. The fourth section presents the design and methodology of the empirical research, while the fifth section uses qualitative interview data to highlight the entanglement of smuggling, trafficking and extortion, migrant agency and calculation of risk. Here we make an important distinction between types of migrations through Libya. In the first case migrants are smuggled to Libya and through forced labour or detention a conversion occurs from smuggling to human trafficking. The second case is when migrants are smuggled to the border of Libya and Sudan, are then held by kidnappers in Libya and extorted for ransom, and upon payment are smuggled to the North of Italy to be pushed to Libya. This second case is the focus of this paper where we demonstrate the need for new conceptualisations to understand this changing migration dynamic. Our conclusions are presented in the final section.
The Libyan Tribal Regimes and Rise of the Smuggling Economy
Since 2014 Libya has been engulfed in a second civil war between several different warring factions. The conflict has multiple layers, including: competing governments, numerous rival armed groups or militias, rivalry between nationalists and federalists, tensions between local tribes, and influence from competing outside powers such as Turkey and Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and NATO (Eriksson 2016). In 2017, there were three governments vying for legitimacy and power: first, the Presidential Council which was established in October 2016 as the UN-backed central government, second, a rival central government led by the Prime Minister, which had no control however of central institutions, and third, a Tobruk-based former government that had been the internally recognised authority prior to the establishment of the Presidential Council (Toaldo 2017). Overall, the country is separated into several different regimes controlled by different tribal and militia groups. These groups vie for power amongst each other. The central resource of oil control has been at the heart of these conflicts, as well as access to and control of the illicit economy, including human smuggling, which has been a lucrative business in Libya.
Reitano and Shaw (2017) have documented how smuggling has become an entrenched and central part of the Libyan economy. With the anarchy that ensued after the fall of Qaddafi in 2011, smuggling became a key revenue source. This enabled smugglers to provide protection to their communities and also created jobs within the industry. Communities thus in turn became involved in this system of patronage, which simplified access to routes for the militias and smugglers (al Arabi 2018).
Migrants only make up one part of the illicit economy in Libya, which is comprised of four parts: weapons, migrants, drugs, and smuggling goods (Shaw and Mangan 2014). These four parts are interconnected, demonstrating that human smuggling is entangled with other criminal activities in Libya. Human smuggling is the most widespread in Libya (Shaw and Mangan 2014) and is a lucrative business. The European External Action Service estimates that annual revenues from human smuggling in Libya amount to 250 to 300 million euros (Furness 2017).
There are four central migrant smuggling routes through Libya (Shaw and Mangan 2014). The first is from the coastal west with migrants originating mainly from West African countries such as Gambia, Senegal, and Mali. The second is from the southwest along Libya’s border with Niger with migrants originating mostly from Nigeria. The third route is from the southeast along the border with Sudan with migrants originating from Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia and Eritrea. The final route is the coastal east along the border with Egypt with migrants originating mostly from Egypt, but also Syrians and South Asians have travelled this route. Figure 1 shows the main smuggling routes across Libya with their different entry points.
Eritrean migrants enter Libya from the southeast via Sudan, which is territory controlled by the Toubou (also known as Tabu or Tobu). This differs from sub-Saharan Africans who enter Libya primarily in the southwest via Niger in territory controlled by the Tebu or Toureg or the coastal west in territory controlled by the Zintani (Reitano and Shaw 2017; Shaw and Mangan 2014). These different places of entry into different territories of control, or tribal regimes, result in differing experiences between sub-Saharan African migrants and migrants from the Horn of Africa (Kuschminder 2017).
In this paper, we focus on Eritrean migrants, and thus this section will focus on the tribal regime and smuggling economy of the Toubou in the southeast. According to Tinti and Wescott (2016), this route is the most organised and features the highest levels of criminality in the country. At the same time, there is the least amount of research on this route as it remains largely inaccessible to researchers (Tinti and Wescott 2016).
The southeast of Libya is sparsely populated and the Toubou people are from a nomadic heritage and thus have extensive knowledge of routes across the desert (Shaw and Mangan 2014). The Toubou are a marginalised group in Libya and under Qaddafi their land was taken away in favour of the Zwaye people. This has meant that the illicit market and human smuggling has long been a central source of income for the Toubou people. With the fall of Qaddafi, the Toubou were able to secure the territory against the Zwaye in the southeast. They then built alliances with groups to the north that controlled access to the sea. Through these alliances, the Toubou established a monopoly control of trade, smuggling, and trafficking from the Horn of Africa and were able to swiftly move migrants from entry in the southeast to the north to be pushed to the Mediterranean Sea (Reitano and Shaw 2017).
In southeast Libya, the Toubou now have control of the territory, as shown in Figure 2. They have local legitimacy in that through the illicit economy (a central component being the human smuggling) they have the money to provide for communities, maintain the territory and keep local populations safe (Reitano and Shaw 2017). Furthermore, the illicit economy provides employment in a suffering economy. The warring rival powers in the North that are seeking legitimacy over the country have no reach in this part of Libya, and thus there is an absence of any form of a judicial system or protection for the human rights of migrants.
(source: Shaw and Mangan 2014:31; reproduced here with permission from Mark Shaw, Director, Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime)
The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) is the central actor providing assistance to migrants in Libya (such as through shelter and return programmes), but IOM’s presence does not extend to the southeast in the Toubou controlled territory (interpreted from IOM Libya capacity diagram [IOM 2017:12]). Resultantly, Eritreans and other migrants entering along this route are highly vulnerable to an established, systematic, and highly organised criminal network of exploitation which defies the conceptual and policy boundaries of both migrant smuggling and human trafficking.
Migrant Smuggling and Trafficking in Human Beings Within the Libyan Tribal Regimes
EU concerns about irregular migration flows from sub-Saharan and Horn of Africa countries have contributed to the hardening of borders and the intensification of controls along trans-Saharan routes (Brachet 2018). This in turn led to the professionalisation of migrant smuggling networks and services as well as their criminal upscaling. The hardening of the Niger–Libya border, the increase of border patrols through EU funding and EU technical equipment, and the disruption of local economies of transit (that included formal and informal travel agencies of various sorts) have all led to a shift towards more organised and criminalised smuggling operations in the region (Brachet 2018). Thus, earlier rides of irregular migrants or asylum seekers on trucks loaded with goods travelling north or on pick-up trucks operated by the “agences de courtage” (that were operating legally) have now been replaced by armed smugglers on powerful sport utility vehicles (SUVs) that travel through the desert by night avoiding checkpoints. In the past, border guards checking the trucks or pick-up trucks were hardly interested in stopping the irregular transit migration flows—they were rather focusing on taxing them illegally to let them go through (without much concern whether their crossing the borders to Libya was legal or unlawful) (Brachet 2018). Border guards and check points in the way we understand them in the EU or United States hardly existed, while the risks involved in this smuggling business for the drivers were low and the profits high. As things have changed, truck drivers–amateur smugglers have been replaced by armed militias with bigger and more powerful vehicles to evade the increasing police and patrols.
This transformation of migrant smuggling networks has been further compounded by the lack of state control and law enforcement in Libya. Government instability and inter-ethnic fighting in the country and the concomitant collapse of most economic activity have created fertile ground for the sprawling up of militia groups that have taken hold of previous irregular migrant detention centres. Not only have these been transformed into prisons but also the arrested irregular migrants are forced into bonded labour for several activities from house cleaning for girls and women to shop-keeping, agriculture, transport and other jobs for boys and men to, of course, drug dealing and prostitution for either. Such work in exchange for freedom to travel north has become a common “currency” in a collapsing and cash strapped Libyan economy (al Arabi 2018; Gallien and Herbert 2017).
What starts as migrant smuggling under highly risky conditions of which migrants (particularly Eritreans) appear to be aware of (Belloni 2018; Hovill and Oette 2017; Kuschminder 2017), becomes extortion for ransom. The question arises as to first: do current legal and political science definitions of trafficking in human beings include kidnapping and the extortion of ransom from the families of the victim? And second, can the people who suffer this treatment be considered as victims of trafficking and thus be subjected to relevant policy provisions, including special protection?
The United Nations Convention22
The United Nations Convention Against Transnational Organised Crime, adopted by General Assembly Resolution 55/25 of 15 November 2000, is the main international instrument in the fight against transnational organised crime. It was open for signature by Member States at a High-Level Political Conference convened for that purpose in Palermo, Italy, on 12–15 December 2000 and entered into force on 29 September 2003. The Convention is further supplemented by three Protocols, which target specific areas and manifestations of organised crime: the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children; the Protocol Against the Smuggling of Migrants by Land, Sea and Air; and the Protocol Against the Illicit Manufacturing of and Trafficking in Firearms, Their Parts and Components and Ammunition. For more information, see: http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/organized-crime/intro/UNTOC.html
Against Transnational Organised Crime and the Smuggling of Migrants Protocol defines migrant smuggling as the “procurement, in order to obtain, directly or indirectly, a financial or other material benefit, of the illegal entry of a person into a State Party of which the person is not a national or a permanent resident” (Article 3, Smuggling of Migrants Protocol 2000). Article 6 of the same Protocol requires states to criminalise both smuggling of migrants and enabling of a person to remain in a country illegally, as well as aggravating circumstances that endanger lives or safety, or entail inhuman or degrading treatment of migrants. The Protocol draws attention to the fact that migrant smuggling is a transnational crime and that smuggled migrants are often subjected to life-threatening risks and exploitation while the smugglers make huge profits by playing on people’s hope for a better life.
While both the spirit and the letter of the Protocol draw attention to the vulnerability of smuggled migrants, the transposition of the same in national and EU law has tended to neglect this aspect (Gallagher 2017). It has rather emphasised the nature of migrant smuggling as a voluntary transaction between the migrant (customer) and the smuggler (service provider, for profit) without paying sufficient protection to the smuggled migrants’ basic human rights. Several EU member states have legislated to establish irregular entry and stay as offences, often punished with custodial sentences (FRA 2014). This has contributed to a net categorisation of smuggled migrants as criminals themselves, who willingly and consciously violate the law and engage in criminal actions while trafficked migrants are clearly identified as victims of their traffickers.
In theory, migrant smuggling involves a facilitation of the irregular transit and entry into a country and stops there, at the completion of the agreed journey. By contrast trafficking involves an element of not only deception and coercion (again in theory not present in migrant smuggling) but also of exploitation at the place of arrival. At the same time trafficking does not require the crossing of international borders (European Commission 2011; Gallagher 2017). In other words, compared to the smuggling of migrants, human trafficking differs less in the acts committed by traffickers (according to the UN definition these include recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, all acts that are also involved in the smuggling of migrants) but more on the means and purpose of these acts which may not be simply the profit, but also the exploitation such as sexual exploitation, forced labour, slavery or similar practices and the removal of organs (see also Ricard-Guay 2016).
These definitions however and the distinction that arises from them tend to become meaningless in situations such as those along the trans-Saharan African routes where there are no clear state authorities while, however, migration controls are enforced by para-state actors such as the different tribes and their semi-formal accords with the UN recognised government of Libya as well as other tribes and actors in the country (al Arabi 2018). Indeed, we are not talking here about weak or failed states but rather about the re-emergence of a tribal regime that has replaced the state, with its own informal rules, thus creating a “transit space of exception”. Libya’s history is based on tribal authorities that were united for its independence in 1951 and were carefully managed and appeased under Qaddafi (Ben Lamma 2017). Post-Qaddafi “marks the return of the tribe as a main political actor at the heart of society … [and] shows that tribalism never disappeared from the collective consciousness of Libyan societies” (Ben Lamma 2017:57). Paradoxically, and out of fear of uncontrolled migration and asylum seeking flows, international actors like IOM and the EU itself provide operational support in Libya and Niger, with a view to re-establishing basic rule of law conditions and controlling the borders. This effectively, however, contributes to the reinforcement of the tribal regime (Howden 2017).
This situation overturns all previous reasoning of cost-benefit analysis where studies (Friebel and Guriev 2006; Koser 2008) presumed that migrants adopt a cost-benefit analysis before engaging the services of the smuggler, considering the expected income after the migration, the cost of the smuggling services (and whether it is affordable or not) and the overall equilibrium in terms of information, risks and profits of all the agents involved (smugglers and smuggled migrants). Even more recent approaches (e.g. Herman 2006; Triandafyllidou and Maroukis 2012; see also Baird and Van Liempt 2016 for a review) that pay attention to the social and cultural processes that underpin smuggling, and highlight the wider array of social relations (notably strong and weak ties within ethnic networks; see Herman 2006) and experiences that guide the choice of smugglers and the trust and fear relationships between smugglers and the smuggled, presume that smuggling happens in a world of organised states and tight border controls where the smugglers offer a service so as to overcome or avoid these controls.
How can we conceptualise migrant smuggling and human trafficking when this happens in a region where a tribal regime controls the territory and where there is little distinction between migrant smuggling networks and “border guards” or where actually the border tribes are the border guards and purveyors of justice? They make money in an otherwise imploding economy while regulating the flows (see also al Arabi 2018 for an analysis of the tribal regime in Libya). And how can we expand our concept of trafficking in human beings to include cases that take place in a “transit space of exception”, where there is no government or state authority that claims jurisdiction and to whom one could address a claim and expect to find protection, and in which there is extortion and torture (rather than exploitation as such) in order to obtain profit from the kidnapped—earlier “voluntarily” smuggled—migrants in order to allow them to continue their journey? What is particularly interesting is that the kidnapping and extortion do not foresee exploitation properly speaking in the sense of forcing somebody to work under severely exploitative conditions, but rather a criminal act of torture and extortion for profit. The analysis of our empirical data based on the experiences of transit of Eritrean migrants through Libya sheds light on these questions.
Research Design and Methodology
This paper draws on a case study of Eritrean migrants arriving in Italy. Eritreans were one of the largest asylum seeking groups in Italy in 2015 and 2016, despite being a small country of only 5.2 million people and 2016 has been termed the “Eritrean Exodus” (Mengiste 2018). Since 2000, Eritreans have been fleeing their home country, arriving first in Ethiopia and Sudan, and then attempting or planning onwards movements. Poor livelihood opportunities, lack of autonomy and access to employment opportunities are key reasons that Eritreans seek to move onwards from Ethiopia (Mallett et al. 2017). Formerly Israel was a target destination, but both difficult conditions in Israel and increased kidnapping on the Sinai route through Egypt have stemmed this flow. The main reasons cited by Eritreans for leaving include: to escape forced military conscription, endemic poverty, lack of opportunities, and lack of political freedom (Horwood and Hooper 2016). The respondents in this study reported similar reasons for leaving Eritrea.
This paper examines the experiences of Eritrean migrants that arrived in Italy between 2016 and 2017. The paper draws from 34 interviews conducted with Eritreans between January and June 2017. The interviews were conducted in Rome (12) and in Milan (22). An Eritrean research assistant was recruited in Rome who arranged interviews with respondents via assistance from an NGO and all interviews were carried out in a community centre.
In Milan, permission was received from the City to conduct the interviews. The Comune di Milano (City of Milan) has a different structure than other parts of Italy wherein the Comune has its own migration and refugee team that is separate from the Prefettura and national level administration. The Comune therefore manages reception of asylum seekers arriving in Milan outside of the national dispersal programme. The Comune provided permission and support for this research and coordinated an introduction to two NGOs, Fondazione L’Albero della Vita and Fondazione Progetto Arca onlus, which are contracted by the Comune to provide reception assistance. Both NGOs provided support to the project by inviting the interviewer to their centres and informing their beneficiaries of the interviews. Separate to this, an independent Tigrinya translator was hired for the interviews. Finally, during the fieldwork in Milan, policies and practices were changing within the city, and some Eritreans were also approached on the street for interviews.
All interviews began with a detailed verbal informed consent process. The interview methodology used a life cycle approach, beginning with leaving the country of origin, experiences in countries of first reception, decision making processes, coming to Italy, initial arrival, current situation, and future plans. The interviews generally lasted from 30 to 60 minutes. All interviews were transcribed and interviews conducted via translation were simultaneously translated and transcribed directly from the respondent. The analysis was conducted by first reviewing all transcripts for content understanding and to identify different experiences of extortion, smuggling and trafficking. Second, themes were developed and the interviews were then coded using qualitative software Nvivo. Third, additional themes were added as they arose in the transcripts. Finally, different cases were identified that could represent different scenarios for the analysis. The focus of this analysis is exploratory and the sample is too small to be representative.
The purpose of the interviews was to understand respondents’ decision making factors and experiences in coming to Italy and within Italy. Discussions regarding Libya were the most difficult for respondents, and not all respondents discussed their experiences in Libya. Respecting the respondents, the principles of do no harm, and adhering to the principles of the European University Institute ethics committee and approved ethics application for this study, specific questions were not asked regarding conditions and experiences in Libya, such as “did you witness the death of another migrant?”, “were you raped?”, and “did you experience torture?”. All information provided in this paper is from general questions of “where did you go?” and “what happened next?” Likewise, respondents were not probed further regarding conditions and experiences, and all information provided in this paper was openly brought forth by the respondents. The implications of this are that first it is highly probable that the degree of abuses experienced in Libya are not fully detailed within these interviews and second, that secondary sources are also used to understand conditions and experiences of Eritreans in Libya.
Almost all respondents were living in a reception centre at the time of interview, with the exception of a few Eritreans in Milan who were currently living on the street. Nearly half of the respondents were female (47%) and the average age was 25 years old. Respondents were from different parts of Eritrea, with a larger percentage originating from the Southern region. Respondents had various durations of their migration journeys ranging from as long as six years to only a few months.
The Entanglement of Smuggling, Trafficking, and Extortion, Migrant Agency, and Calculation of Risk
This section assesses the entanglement of smuggling, trafficking, and extortion by analysing three phases of the migration process: first, the information, recruitment and planning for the migration and the extent to which deception and coercion is or is not involved; second, the experiences and processes of the migration; and third, the experiences upon arrival and the extent to which there is a continuation of trafficking or extortion.
Research on the smuggling industry from Eritrea illustrates that there are a range of actors involved in these mobilities. “Pilots” are used to facilitate the movement from Eritrea to Ethiopia, and these are the men that accompany and guide migrants across the border (Belloni 2015; Mengiste 2018). The “pilots” are often viewed as saviours who assist in exiting the regime (Mengiste 2018). The next stage of the journey is facilitated by delaloch (literally meaning smugglers in Amharic) who can facilitate the journey to Sudan (Mengiste 2018) or from Sudan semsari (Belloni 2015). Hawala networks are essential within the process for money transfers of the smuggling fees.
In this paper, we only focus on respondent’s experiences within Libya. We use the term “smuggler” as this is the language that was used in the interviews via translation. Within the interviews “kidnapper” was also used and there was recognisable ambiguity in terms of who was who in Libya. Most likely, there were several actors involved, such as: transporters, guides, brokers, landlords, and scouts; however, this was not clear to the respondents due to their situations. Thus, we use the term “smugglers” as encompassing of the actors that were in control of the migrants during their migration experiences in Libya.
Information, Recruitment, and Planning
Yes. I had information about that. It is a matter of luck. I knew that I might get kidnapped or arrested but one way or another death is death and I wanted to try something for a change. In my journey, I was afraid with every move I made because I might face something bad, but I was lucky. (Amanuel, 37 year old man)33 Pseudonyms are used throughout this paper to maintain the anonymity of respondents.
Amanuel left his wife and children behind in Eritrea to make the journey. He plans to have reunification with them as soon as possible.
Knowing the risks, however, is of course different than experiencing it yourself, which was also discussed by respondents. Fatima, a 24-year-old woman, stated: “Yes I have heard about it [risks in Libya] but you can’t actually imagine the pain unless you see it by yourself.” Fatima had left Eritrea when she was 20 years old and had lived for three years in Ethiopia. She recalled her time in Ethiopia: “It is just you can’t make any change by sitting in the camp. Of course, they give us food, we eat and sleep but that wasn’t enough for me.” Her cousins had left three years earlier and had gone to Switzerland. She spoke to them, but they told her not to come via Libya; they told her of the risks and dangers. She decided on her own to come and contacted smugglers to take her.
Fatima’s story shows, as with the other respondents in this study, that she was not recruited to migrate, she experienced no coercion, no deception, and actually had fairly accurate information on the risks involved. Further to this, she was even deterred by migrating by her cousins who had experienced the difficulties of the journeys. There is increasing argumentation from a policy perspective that information provided from trusted sources will decrease migration journeys to Europe, as is evidenced by information campaigns focusing on providing information via trusted sources (see for example Browne 2015); however, as evidenced by Fatima, this is often not the case. Despite the information she had, the lack of opportunities in Ethiopia and feelings of a wasted life prompted her onwards. The strong agency of irregular migrants/asylum seekers and the power of hope for a better life have been documented also in a recent study (Triandafyllidou 2017) that covered Afghan and Pakistani migrants to Greece (Dimitriadi 2017; Maroufof and Kouki 2017).
None of the respondents spoke of being actively recruited, that is approached and convinced to migrate, by smugglers or traffickers for migrating to Libya. From these respondents, it is evident that there was no deception nor coercion in the recruitment and planning of the migration, and hence it would be difficult to consider these migrants as victims of trafficking. This is not to say that the journey went according to plan, but it is highly arguable that Eritreans have accurate information regarding the risks and are not actively recruited, coerced or deceived into migrating.
Fatima’s initial comments—“you can’t actually imagine the pain unless you see it by yourself”—reflects a critical point in considering information access, planning, and deception. Although respondents were aware that they face risks and choose to make the journey, their understandings of precisely what this may entail are not necessarily fully comprehended, or they are repressed to protect themselves from the decision. This suggests the psychological concept of self-deception, which can be defined as “an intrapersonal process that fortifies and protects the self from threatening information” (Smith et al. 2017:93) or “any information processing bias that favors preferred over non-preferred conclusions has the potential to facilitate self-deception” (Smith et al. 2017:94). Avoiding information is a key form of self-deception (Ditto and Lopez 1992), and people self-deceive by favouring welcome over unwelcome information to reflect their plans or motivations (Smith et al. 2017). The main reason for self-deception is to protect oneself and one’s psyche from the hostilities in the world (Taylor and Brown 1988). Adopting an approach of self-deception to the information, recruitment and planning stage of Eritreans’ migration to Europe via Libya enables an understanding of the complexities of this decision, and suggests that many of the respondents, such as Fatima, may self-deceive themselves regarding the risks in order to propel themselves forward. As self-deception was not the focus of this study, it is an area for further research in understanding information processing and decision making of migrants.
Experiences and Processes of Migrating
Hovill and Oette (2017) note that although respondents were aware of the risks prior to migrating, the details were less clear and little information is provided within networks on how to protect oneself or avoid the migration risks. In this section, we question if it is even possible to avoid the risks as nearly all respondents interviewed in this study were kidnapped and extorted in Libya.
The process of extortion most commonly begins in the desert near the Sudan/Libya border wherein the migrants are transferred from the Sudanese smugglers hired in Khartoum to the Libyan smugglers. Commonly, the migrants are brought to a certain place and told to wait. This can be for hours or for days. Respondents reported running out of food and water and having to find their way back to a town because the Libyans did not come. Eventually, when the Libyans do arrive the migrants are then taken to compounds referred to as prisons, jails or the smugglers’ place. Within these compounds different conditions exist, but in general men are separated from women or the pregnant and ill are separated from the healthy and the migrants are locked inside. Often there is an Eritrean translator who tells the migrants that they have been kidnapped and that their families need to pay for their release. They are ordered to phone their families and give instructions for how to transfer funds. The amounts reported ranged from US$4000 to 10,000. Respondents reported being regularly beaten and tortured while waiting for the transfer, not allowed to go outside, poor hygiene conditions and prevalence of disease, and lack of food and water. Some respondents discussed being traded between different smugglers or moved between different locations. In general, they did not know what was happening in these situations.
Upon paying the amount, some respondents stated that they were transferred to a different part of the compound where paying migrants were kept. The conditions were a bit better and they were able to go outside sometimes. After some time in this compound they are brought to the sea and pushed out to the Mediterranean.
Within this situation migrants have limited ability to exercise their agency and protect themselves, and we question if it is even possible to protect oneself and avoid the migration risks? The systemisation of the kidnapping and extortion does not suggest that migrants are able to refuse, nor to pass through the desert in Libya without being detected by these groups. This therefore creates a “transit space of exception” wherein the normal transit space possibilities of negotiation, acquiring information and decision making, or chance opportunities are not possible. In this transit space of exception agency is virtually removed and migrants are at the whim of the systemised kidnapping and extortion industry.
Returning to Fatima, she was kidnapped in Libya and her family was asked to pay $7000. Her family had difficulties affording the money and she was forced to stay for nine months in Libya. Fatima did not want to talk about what happened to her in Libya, but said it was difficult.
The smugglers chose a girl they like and make her stay for about a year and they let her go whenever they want and chose another girl for the next year. You cannot imagine the feeling we had when we saw this, especially their husbands and brothers. The husbands cannot stop them because they immediately kill him if he tries to stop them. There is nothing you can do.
This quote furthers the previous point of the limited ability to exercise agency within the current situation of the systemised kidnapping and extortion along the Sudan–Libya route where there is no sense of state authority to whom to turn. Several respondents reported witnessing migrants being killed in Libya. Thus, standing up to the smugglers in an effort to protect oneself and one’s rights does not seem a viable option.
Experiences upon Arrival in Italy
I was hopeless in Libya with all the kidnapping, hunger, and disease and not talking to my family for four months. When I came here and heard people talk about how they are late on receiving the relocation I told them they have to be happy they made it this far.
This is not to say, however, that the experience did not leave emotional scars. When I interviewed Fatima, she had been in Italy for approximately five months. She was currently seeing a counsellor as she stated “because due to the past life I had nightmares every day that I can’t sleep. Now I am relatively okay though”. It is clear that Fatima was kidnapped and kept as a prisoner in Libya, but it is unclear if she experienced particular abuse beyond this while in Libya. In either case, however, there is increasing evidence that the horrors of the journey and in particular in Libya led to trauma and post-traumatic stress (see for example MSF 2015). Fatima has taken the experience with her and is trying to heal from it in Italy.
It is evident that upon arrival in Italy there is no continuation of the kidnapping and extortion experience. Unlike victims of human trafficking, and contrasting here the well documented case of Nigerian women in Italy, there is no continued relationship with the criminal networks and the smugglers that kidnapped them. The migrants have passed through the transit space of exception. It may still be with them as trauma, but the bonded relationship has been broken.
Discussion and Conclusion
While at first glance the experience of Eritreans crossing Libya on their way to Italy and other European countries may seem like a case of human trafficking, it does not legally qualify as one since it does not meet the definition of recruitment, act, and exploitation after arrival. Indeed, there are a number of elements that define the phenomenon, which are not unique to Libya, and hence require a new analytical and policy framework. This would enable the phenomenon to be better understood and possibly addressed.
In contrast to Hovill and Oette (2017) we argue that while Eritreans are victims of organised criminal networks they do not qualify as victims of human trafficking. There is no recruitment, coercion, or deception involved in the process. They have information regarding the risks even if, as we argued earlier, they underestimate the “certainty of the risk”; that is, the extremely high likelihood to be kidnapped, tortured, and/or raped. In addition to this, and different from trafficking conventional definitions, there is no exploitation after arrival either in Libya or in Italy. Once the families pay, the Toubou networks release them and they are transferred into the hands of the tribes that operate along the coast, who then push them to the unsafe boats to Italy (for more on this, see Kuschminder 2017). This is not to say that Eritreans are not, nor cannot be trafficked from Eritrea via Libya to Europe. This may also occur; however, this particular phenomenon of kidnapping and extortion should not be considered as human trafficking.
The smuggling business in the Toubou region should also be contextualised as within a region where other economic activities have virtually collapsed and organised crime is normalised as a way of survival. Kidnapping and extortion along smuggling routes occurs in other places too in the wider Middle East region. In our own research, there is evidence of this occurring in Iran of Pakistani and Afghan migrants (unpublished results; see also Donini et al. 2016; Kaytaz 2016 for examples). The differences are, first, in the scale and systemisation; and second, that in the tribal regimes of Libya and absence of any central rule of law, this system is able to grow and operate without any checks or balances. Whereas the unlucky migrant may be kidnapped and extorted in Iran, it is highly unlikely that an Eritrean can pass through southeast Libya without being kidnapped and extorted.
What is special about the Toubou region is the fact that the smuggling industry along the Sudan–Libya route operates within a “space of exception”, a void of both national and international law. Libya, in this case, is not best conceptualised as a failed state. The Toubou region is now a tribal regime that could be labelled a transit space of exception (not strictly in the sense of Agamben [1995, 2005] where the spaces of exception are created by the state), in a sense of exception from both national and international law, returning to a pre-modern system of rule. Eritreans in Libya are not simply victims, they become “homini sacri” in the sense that Agamben (2005) has argued—they can be killed without anyone being sanctioned for murdering them.
It is thus evident that experiences in Libya go beyond simply violating the migrants’ human rights. They can be conceptualised through a twofold distinction: there are migrants who are smuggled through the region and then are forced to work for the smuggling tribes, in which case we may speak of a conversion of the smuggling into human trafficking; or they are kidnapped in order to extort money from their families (as detailed in the case of Eritreans in this paper). This latter phenomenon should be considered as a crime against humanity44
The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (2002) defines crimes against humanity as including: (a) murder; (b) extermination; (c) enslavement; (d) deportation of forcible transfer of population; (e) imprisonment or other severe deprivation of physical liberty in violation of fundamental rules of international law; (f) torture; (g) rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilisation, or any other form of sexual violence of comparable gravity; (h) persecution against any identifiable group or collectivity on political, racial, national, ethnic, cultural, religious, gender as defined in paragraph 3, or other grounds that are universally recognised as impermissible under international law, in connection with any act referred to in this paragraph or any crime within the jurisdiction of the Court; (i) enforced disappearance of persons; (j) the crime of apartheid; (k) other inhumane acts of a similar character intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health.
orchestrated by the organised criminal network enacting the kidnapping and extortion. Indeed, while trafficking usually involves the enslavement of the person who is often threatened that if they do not comply their family back home will suffer, here the family is called to save the migrant who is trapped and tortured to extort ransom. According to the Rome declaration crimes against humanity include imprisonment, torture, rape, enslavement, and murder, all of which respondents discussed occurring on a systematic basis towards migrants. The situation in between and the acts of kidnapping, extortion, rape and murder, can arguably be characterised as a crime against humanity. This has been debated in the international arena with UN Secretary-General António Guterres55
https://edition.cnn.com/2017/11/20/africa/un-secretary-general-libya-slave-auctions/index.html
stating that the slave auctions in Libya may amount to crimes against humanity and calling on states to adopt the UN Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime and its protocol on human trafficking (Roth 2017). In June 2019 a case has been brought to the International Criminal Court accusing the EU of crimes against humanity for the suffering and death of migrants (Gotev 2019). If considered as a crime against humanity, this obliges states to the responsibility to protect; under which states are obliged to act, meaning that internationally states should take action to collectively protect migrants in Libya. This would be a fundamental shift from the current approach of sending migrants back to Libya, to one of international protection for the crimes against humanity that they have suffered.
These observations raise a number of policy and research questions, notably what are the rights for (irregular) migrants or asylum seekers who fall victims of a crime against humanity upon arrival in a country where they seek asylum? In other words, we need to consider the moral and international law obligations of the countries of arrival towards the survivors. And we need to integrate into our international protection system the notion of a transit place or space where a smuggled migrant can be converted into a victim of trafficking or of a crime against humanity. In the event of a European Asylum system reform that is being discussed at the time of writing (June 2018) and given the multiplicity of not only migration but also asylum categories that exist in the different EU member states (see Scheel and Ustek-Spilda 2018), there is scope for introducing provisions for protection for migrants who suffered persecution while in transit and whose return to their country of origin would put them in conditions of further vulnerability. In line with Crawley and Skleparis (2018) our study points to the ways in which migration becomes forced migration en route and propose that asylum claims at destination, in the EU, should consider not only the situation back home that gave origin to the migration but also the hardship endured en route and events that took place during the journey which can raise a claim for international protection. Such a situation should be clearly codified in the European asylum system to cover for the cases of migrants who are victims of crimes against humanity.
A final concern that arises from this study is the extent to which international action related to irregular migration and asylum governance tolerates or even gives rise to such international “states of exception” which are considered to be part of “the price to pay” for controlling irregular migration towards Europe. The Italian ministry operations in Libya and the accords with militia groups (albeit not with the Toubou) in summer 2017 which led to a significant decrease of arrivals from Libya to Italy in fall and winter 2017 beg the uncomfortable question of how such actions, justified to be necessary and legitimate given the chaotic situation in Libya, tend to normalise the ways in which neoliberal capitalism creates states and places of exception (Mitchell 2006).
Acknowledgements
This research was funded by a Rubicon grant of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) and the research was conducted at the Global Governance Programme, European University Institute. The authors express gratitude to the Comune di Milano, Fondazione L’Albero della Vita and Fondazione Progetto Arca onlus for supporting and assisting in this research. Many thanks to Milena Belloni and Simon McMahon for offering valuable comments on an earlier draft and to Yordanos Mehari for excellent research and translation assistance. This research was conducted while based at the European University Institute.
