Sea rescue operations are again under the spotlight after the insane efforts deployed by the Italian authorities to prevent the landing of survivors out of the waters by the ships of three non -governmental organizations, including Doctors Without Borders (MSF ), and the political-diplomatic bargaining that followed.
These difficulties are part of the context of years of harassment vis-à-vis migrants and those who help them, repeated lies against the latter, in particular on their alleged complicity with the smugglers, as well as the dismantling of the rescue system in the Mediterranean.
To these accusations, we answer: Excuse us to bother you by not letting them drown! There is a sacred indecency to accuse our organizations of promoting crossings while European states, France and Italy in mind, have continued to promote, by supporting the Libyan coast guards, a system of refoulement and detention based entirely on violence. For the year 2022 alone, more than 17,000 people – men, women, children – were thus brought back to Libya and often imprisoned in detention centers where they are subject to multiple abuses and deprivation.
Accomplices of these crimes
Now, who are these “Libyan coast guards” if not a disparate assembly of arms militias, simple politico-military entrepreneurs of violence? These groups, whose porosity with networks that organize human trafficking is widely demonstrated, receive financial support from the European Union and Italy, and are dubbed by all European governments. In reality, you are the first accomplices of these crimes.
Once brought back to detention centers, intercepted people will mostly be subjected to atrocious blackmail: staying locked up in these foul cages for months again or paying a ransom to be released; or resolve to integrate the program of “voluntary feedback” in their country of origin, organized by International organization of migration .
Only a few will eventually benefit from the protection of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, which will not protect them from violence and detention, but will be the first step, for a very low number of ‘between them, towards a possible relocation to a European country.
“What do they return to Africa”? But, in reality, nowhere within the French and European authorities this policy is not debated! More than twenty-five thousand people have died in the Mediterranean since 2014, and almost two thousand for the year 2022 alone. Again, no debate within the French and European authorities, less questioning.
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