Some imprisoned migrants state that they were forced to join pro-Gaddafi forces, but never participated in any actual killing. Others attest they were not involved in the war at all, and were only arrested because of their foreign appearance. The difficulty in validating both accusations and defenses is compounded by the absence of a judicial system.

Rights organizations as well as journalists are permitted access to prisons, and their reports have pressured the interim national government (NTC) to monitor these facilities more closely. The NTC formed a stabilization committee which, according to one report, has substantially improved conditions in at least one prison. Videos of some prisons in Libya can be found here and here.

But no matter the quality of captivity, the detention centers continue to hold the potential for serious human rights abuses. Under international law, arbitrary arrest and indefinite imprisonment are only permissible – temporarily – in cases of national emergency. But as the war in Libya subsides, the less excuses for these violations exist. Without an institutionalized legal system, migrants face a particularly uncertain fate.

Though most prisons hold Libyans as well as foreigners, migrants generally do not have the benefit of local family and friends to lobby on their behalves. Some prison officials argue that detaining migrants may be in the best interest of their safety until the rule of law and proper police forces are realized, as suspicion towards foreigners remains widespread. The association of migrants with pro-Gaddafi mercenaries triggered arbitrary imprisonments, as well as summary executions, from the uprising’s early days. But such suggestions only fuel migrants’ fear of arrest, preventing many from even venturing outside alone.

The U.N. stresses that the new Libyan government needs to reign in detention centers run by autonomous brigades and to effect standards of treatment that hold prison guards accountable. Some prisons have begun to free those who can prove their innocence, demonstrating that the NTC can facilitate the release of migrants even without the development of a wider judicial system. Such expeditious legal resolutions are essential to reversing the pro-Gaddafi stigma plaguing migrants, as well as to upholding the values of liberty and equality promulgated by the revolution.

As we have blogged before, black African migrants have been the target of attacks by anti-Gaddafi forces on suspicion of being mercenaries for the regime since the conflict in Libya began. Recent reports suggest that the danger for migrants from Subsaharan African countries has intensified since the Gaddafi regime lost control of Tripoli, with rebels turning their wrath against those suspected of being mercenaries. Dozens of migrants are being held in a prison in the Suq al Jouma neighbourhood of Tripoli, according to the New York Times and Time magazine.

Libya had previously been very welcoming to migrants from elsewhere in Africa,  but the line between regime soldier and dark-skinned southerner or migrant worker has become blurred in the midst of the conflict, writes Time‘s Abigail Hauslohner in Tripoli.

Hauslohner visits a camp outside Tripoli and examines the background in depth:

The displaced mostly hail from countries across West Africa, like Nigeria, Ghana and Sierra Leone. Many have lived in Libya for years — even decades — and carry the legal papers to prove it. Their presence is rooted in Gaddafi’s legacy of fostering close relationships with fellow African regimes and recruiting loyalists from among their citizens. But for a man who often sought to portray himself as a leader of the continent, Gaddafi may have done more to divide his country’s future than to encourage tolerance and respect.

It’s popular knowledge among the predominantly Arab and Berber rebel ranks here that Gaddafi funded questionable African warlords and armies, even as his own population struggled. And at his home in Tripoli’s Bab al-Aziziyah compound, rebels hold up old pictures of Gaddafi posing with African children dressed in fatigues as further evidence of their former ruler’s betrayal.

His alleged mercenaries — particularly the men who populated the fearsome Khamis Brigade, which was used to assault the rebels over the course of their six-month revolt — often came from the southern town of Sabha or the neighboring countries of Mali, Niger and Chad. The foreigners were alleged to receive benefits and even fast-track residency in exchange for their services as loyalists and fighters — a practice, whether real or exaggerated, that has fueled deep tribal, ethnic and geographic mistrust.

Anti-Gaddafi forces are currently holding Subsaharan Africans captive in a building in central Tripoli:

More than 120 other suspects — most of them foreign Africans — are being held at a school in central Tripoli, in the absence of a functioning government or justice system. There are rumors of other ad hoc prisons. And a guard, Jamal Mohamed, is sure the captives are snipers. “Polisario,” he adds, referring to a resistance movement in Western Sahara, from which Gaddafi allegedly recruited. Some of the captives have been punched in the eyes or nurse bandaged wounds sustained during fighting. Many were apprehended during battles in Gaddafi-stronghold neighborhoods. At least two admit to being members of the regime’s forces.

But many others say they were captured by accident or targeted out of racism or xenophobia. Abou Bakr from Niger says he had merely gone outside to look for water but lived in the wrong neighborhood, one where rebels happened to be searching for loyalists.

Tripoli is a racially diverse city, with skin colors ranging from pale to very dark — largely because Gaddafi encouraged such integration. And the Libyan rebels display the same diversity among their ranks. But a latent racism festers, along with the hazy rules that only locals seem to understand that distinguish between “good” black people from “bad.” The logic follows the lines of Gaddafi’s uneven favors, which even in Tripoli often served personal ambitions more than the public good (full story here)

According to this report in the New York Times, suspicion of black Africans is now endemic:

Many Tripoli residents — including some local rebel leaders — now often use the Arabic word for “mercenaries” or “foreign fighters” as a catchall term to refer to any member of the city’s large underclass of African migrant workers – link

Shweyga Mullah was working for Hannibal, Qaddafi’s son, and his wife, Aline. Aline Skaf is a Lebanese actress born in 1980 in Sebaal in Lebanon.

This is the report from CNN’s Dan Rivers, in Tripoli:

As we were about to leave, one of the staff told us there was a nanny who worked for Hannibal Gadhafi who might speak to us. He said she’d been burnt by Hannibal’s wife, Aline.

I thought he meant perhaps a cigarette stubbed out on her arm. Nothing prepared me for the moment I walked into the room to see Shweyga Mullah.

At first I thought she was wearing a hat and something over her face. Then the awful realization dawned that her entire scalp and face were covered in red wounds and scabs, a mosaic of injuries that rendered her face into a grotesque patchwork.

Even though the burns were inflicted three months ago, she was clearly still in considerable pain. But she told us her story calmly.

She’d been the nanny to Hannibal’s little son and daughter.

The 30-year-old came to Libya from her native Ethiopia a year ago. At first things seemed OK, but then six months into her employment she said she was burned by Aline.

Three months later the same thing happened again, this time much more seriously.

In soft tones, she explained how Aline lost her temper when her daughter wouldn’t stop crying and Mullah refused to beat the child.

“She took me to a bathroom. She tied my hands behind my back, and tied my feet. She taped my mouth, and she started pouring the boiling water on my head like this,” she said, imitating the vessel of scalding hot water being poured over her head.

She peeled back the garment draped carefully over her body. Her chest, torso and legs are all mottled with scars — some old, some still red, raw and weeping. As she spoke, clear liquid oozed from one nasty open wound on her head.

After one attack, “There were maggots coming out of my head, because she had hidden me, and no one had seen me,” Mullah said.

Eventually, a guard found her and took her to a hospital, where she received some treatment.

But when Aline Gadhafi found out about the kind actions of her co-worker, he was threatened with imprisonment, if he dared to help her again.

“When she did all this to me, for three days, she wouldn’t let me sleep,” Mullah said. “I stood outside in the cold, with no food. She would say to staff, ‘If anyone gives her food, I’ll do the same to you.’ I had no water — nothing.”

Her colleague, a man from Bangladesh who didn’t want to give his name, says he was also regularly beaten and slashed with knives. He corroborated Mullah’s account and says the family’s dogs were treated considerably better than the staff.

Mullah was forced to watch as the dogs ate and she was left to go hungry, he said.

Link to story

Migrant workers have been among the hidden victims of the Libyan conflict. We have heard reports of Subsaharan African migrants being targeted and even killed by rebels on suspicion of being mercenaries, and of international companies abandoning low-paid migrant workers to fend for themselves when the conflict broke out.

However, Shweygah’s case stands out because of the sheer cold-blooded brutality of one human being to another.

Some figures on labour migration exist in Nepal, but data is patchy and does not take into account the huge numbers of Nepalis who migrate to the Middle East and East Asia through unofficial/illegal channels.

We often receive requests from readers and journalists asking for data on migrant labourers in the Middle East. The problem is that very little data has been compiled by sending countries, and that the figures which exist are unreliable at best. We see the Nepali government’s move to prepare a database of migrant workers as a step in the right direction, and hope that they will pay adequate attention to the groups of people that are most likely to migrate through unofficial channels, especially women traveling illegally to the Middle East to work as housemaids.

Below is an extract from an article in the Himalayan Times by Leknath Pandey:

Yesterday, Chief Secretary Madhav Prasad Ghimire called Foreign Secretary Dr Madan Kumar Bhattarai and Labour Secretary Dinesh Hari Adhikari, among others, at his office and directed them to prepare a database of Nepali migrant workers immediately.

“During rescue efforts in Libya, we spent a lot of time locating our people,” said an official of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MoFA), who attended yesterday’s meeting. “We faced a similar ordeal in Japan.”

The meeting formed a taskforce for database preparation with MoFA Joint-Secretary Dhananjaya Jha and Purna Chandra Bhattarai, Joint Secretary of the Ministry of Labour and Transport Management (MoLTM), as members.

Executive Director of the Foreign Employment Promotion Board (FEPB) Sthaneshwor Devkota admitted neither government nor outsourcing agencies have complete and credible statistics on the Nepalis working in the Gulf. “With half the migrant workers undocumented, we are finding it hard to compile their data,” said Devkota. Women working in the Gulf are mostly undocumented, as most of them fly to the region as domestic workers through illegal channels. The official channel is MoLTM and Department of Foreign Employment Department (DoFE). DoFE has record of only 23,000 women of 2,00,000 believed to be working in the Gulf.

The government is monitoring Nepalis working in Gulf countries amid protests in Bahrain, Oman and Saudi Arabia. With martial law imposed in Bahrain, migrant workers’ troubles have increased.

Foreign Secretary Bhattarai said the taskforce will collect details of the Nepalis and store it in a website. “The record will be helpful in rescuing migrant workers during emergencies,” said Dr Bhattarai.

Full story here.

Trapped in Tripoli

On a warm afternoon on March 1, I found myself talking to a group of migrant workers returning from the troubled country of Libya.

While reporting on this topic, I realized how slow and inept our government machinery is. On Sunday evening, I was listening to Saja Sawal (common question), a popular BBC radio program. In the program, the government officials claimed they were doing everything to rescue the stranded migrant workers. They also admitted that they heard only recently about the 150 Nepalis trapped in Tripoli. (This is happening when the Indian foreign secretary Nirupama Rao is assuring her countrymen through twitter on the evacuation efforts.)

But my friend Debendra Bhattarai of Kantipur has written about a nursing professor seeking evacuation in Tripoli. BBC Nepali radio has reported about the Nepali migrant workers’ plight in the Libyan capital. One Surya Mohan Sapkota sounded desperate when he said that no one had contacted them while they were stranded at the airport.

This forced me to recall the conversation I had with the migrant workers at the Kathmandu airport. That afternoon, as the preparation for Shivaratri festival in nearby Pashupati was in full swing,  I rushed to the edge of the arrival section where Chandra Bahadur Rinjali, dressed in a combat jacket and wearing a baseball cap, agreed to talk about his Libyan nightmare.

The 38-year-old worked at Won Construction, a South Korean company, for nearly two years. But for the grueling work, all he earned was 200 US dollars a month!

From his narration, a bleak picture of the war-torn North African country emerged. “On February 12, a group of armed Libyans barged into our camps and put it on fire. We fled to a nearby mosque. We stayed there for a few days,” said Rinjali, a native of Syangja district.

But typical to the Nepali culture, many migrant workers joined the conversation and they answered my questions that were directed at Rinjali. One even prodded me to raise his grievances hoping that it would prompt the government to act. There was anger and frustration among the returnees.

They said the locals provided them with food and blankets. But the food was very scarce; they had to share a loaf of bread among four. “Water was also scarce. We would satiate our thirst with just a few drops of water,” Rinjali recalled.

He said they kept eating salt because they had heard that their forefathers in the villages would survive for several days by eating salt (this could not be independently verified!).

“We did not lose hope. We waited for someone to rescue us because the situation was worsening each day,” Rinjali, who seemed a little jaded but happy to be back, told me.

How did it all begin? I asked him. He said first the agitating local people started to hurl stones at them at their work place i.e. a construction site.

But even their camps were not spared. The protesters arrived at their camps and ordered to leave asap.

They said the unfamiliar language made it all the more difficult to understand what was going on. To make matters worse, the regime had cut off the outgoing phone calls (an eerie echo of Nepal’s February 1 takeover).

They said what they saw left them shocked. Rinjali described a country literally burning. “Government buildings were put on fire. The town was under flames even as we left Darnah (eastern Libya),” said the father of four.

From the restive town of Darnah, the group of 562 workers (total 3,000 Nepali migrant workers in Libya) boarded a trailer and arrived in Alexandria, a border town in Egypt, spending three days there.

“I felt a huge respite when we crossed the border. We were finally in a safe place,” Rinjali said.

“It dawned on me that life is precious; money is nothing. If you can live, you can earn. I’ll spend a few days in home. Then only I’ll think about what to do next,” he said.

[Migrant workers] often work in a climate of institutional racism, not only from locals but from other migrants further up the food chain. Treated with disdain. Summoned and dismissed by a click of the fingers.
…
The demands of the protesters across the region are about the rights of citizens. I have not heard any protester rooting for the Bangladeshis, Keralites and Indonesians. No calls for labour laws to be adhered to, health and safety standards to be enforced, and for physical abuse to be punished with the full force of the law. Most of the time, these workers do not protest because they fear for their jobs. Their embassies might complain and provide what practical help they can, but they have little diplomatic and practical leverage, apart from barring their people from working in the region. But the effect of such measures is to damage the home economies.

Unfortunately, the suffering and exploitation of migrant workers will remain as long as citizens focus on their own rights and as long as migrant workers continue to be systematically disempowered, making them hesitant about fighting for their own rights. All across the Middle East, migrant workers are prevented from forming labor unions, striking and are deprived of collective bargaining rights. Migrant workers can be deported easily, and they have in the past, for striking, getting sick or simply displeasing their sponsor. The Sponsorship system that regulates foreign labor in most Middle Eastern countries ties the legal status of the worker to his employer, making workers unable to protest their conditions, knowing they’ll surely lose their job and won’t be able to support their families back home.

Hossain Kabir, a Bangladeshi construction worker, told AFP that he had been trapped in a labour camp in the desert where he worked for a foreign engineering group. Kabir, who was working for a foreign engineering firm 400km outside Benghazi, was told that he would have to ‘find his own way out of the country’. He was part of a group of 17 left in the desert, which later split up.

“The protesters shoot people on sight, it’s not safe to go out. We don’t have food and money. We are almost starving. Nobody can imagine how dangerous the situation is,” he said.

Some of us tried to call our embassy (in Tripoli) for help, but they have not helped. Now they do not answer our phone calls” – Hosain Kabir

Full story here.

Human rights Watch released a press statement today calling for wealthier nations to pitch in with efforts to evacuate the tens of thousands of migrant workers stranded in Libya. Abandoned by their employers and unable to secure help from their embassies, these migrant workers are in an extremely dangerous position – especially since some Libyan protesters have launched indiscriminate attacks on Asian and African workers.

“Thousands upon thousands of foreign workers remain stuck in Benghazi, after being forced from their factories and losing their possessions in last week’s tumultuous events. The sub-Saharan African workers are in dire need of evacuation because of the threats they face in Libya” Peter Bouckaert, emergencies director at Human Rights Watch

Governments of developing countries in Asia, such as Bangladesh and the Philippines, are struggling to evacuate their nationals from Libya and have also called on wealthier nations to help bail out stranded workers.

Migrant workers who have been abandoned by their embassies and employers have also been unable to get any help from the employment brokers who brought them into the country.

“If you are going to migrate, how do you do it in a safe manner? Such as linking up with employment firms that are honest and reputable,” Jeff Johnson, Director of the ILO’s Philippine Office, told AFP, adding that recruitment brokers should also do their bit in times of crisis to see that workers are safely evacuated.

See full story here

The Libyan crisis has truly highlighted the disturbing tendency of the private sector to abnegate responsability for migrant workers.

According to OIM Director General William Lacy Swing:

“The situation of the migrants stuck inside Libya is extremely difficult, and we are deeply concerned about their plight …. We, therefore, urge donors to respond to the appeal quickly. This would allow IOM to assist and protect the migrant workers who have crossed borders amid great risk.”

Bangladesh, the Philippines, Nepal, India and Pakistan are among countries that have already approached the IOM for assistance evacuating their nationals from the Libyan crisis. Many labourers from the developing world work in the construction and oil industries in the North African country.

Full story here.

Since the third day of the Libyan uprising, when Qaddafi’s forces began using live ammo against protesters, reports have been coming out of Libya about African and other mercenaries being involved in the brutal repression of the revolutionaries. These reports have been confirmed by foreign media once they entered Libya via the Egyptian border. The public anger toward the mercenaries is now resulting in violence against all sub-Saharans by the revolutionaries.

Tens of thousands of sub-Saharan workers are employed in Libya, mostly in its oil sector. Enraged by the role of some sub-Saharan mercenaries, some anti-Qaddafi revolutionaries are targeting sub-Saharan Africans now, regardless of whether they’re armed or not. A worker in Tripoli from Sierra Leone reported to his friend: “All black Africans are becoming targets…. I write to inform you how deteriorating the condition in Tripoli is getting by the hour, especially for us Black Africans who have been threatened by violence accused of siding with the regime.”

One Turkish oil worker who managed to escape Libya described to the BBC a brutal lynching of several black Workers. “We left behind our friends from Chad. We left behind their bodies. We had 70 or 80 people from Chad working for our company. They cut them dead with pruning shears and axes, attacking them, saying “you’re providing troops for Qaddafi”. The Sudanese, the Chadians were massacred. We saw it ourselves.”

The massacre of anti-Qaddafi protesters by some sub-Saharan mercenaries, which has left over a thousand Libyans dead, does not justify in any way the indiscriminate targeting of black Africans. Those mercenaries should be arrested and tried. Lynching innocent workers for the color of their skin is a heinous act that does not help to bring any justice to the families of killed Libyan protesters.