Manipulated migration: Libya
under the west power
Lampedusa in Hamburg case-study
Zhenqi Liu
Martina Fraternali
Sara Sousa
1
Table of contents
Introduction………………………………………………………………………………...p.1
Methodology……………………………………………………………………………….p.5
Ethical and practical problems…………………………………………………..p.9
Theory……………………………………………………………………………………….p.11
World-system theory………………………………………………………………p.11
Libya as a semi-peripheral country………………………………………………p.16
Can Libya be a core country?.......................................................................p.17
Libya’s dependence on the West………………………………………………..p.20
The case of Libya………………………………………………………………………….p.25
Introduction…………………………………………………………………………p.25
Independence of Libya, the discovery of massive oil reserves and the European
pressure to curb migration flows………………………………………………………...p.25
The Qaddafi revolution……………………………………………………………p.27
Confrontation with the US and sanctions from the international community..p.29
Libya’s compensation and wholesale privatization…………………………….p.32
Bilateral border control and tightened market…………………………………..p.33
Anti-Qaddafi uprising and the war………………………………………………..p.35
Aftermath of the War………………………………………………………………p.40
European migration legislation…………………………………………………………..p.42
Frontex……………………………………………………………………………..p.44
EURODAC and EUBAM………………………………………………………….p.44
Analysis……………………………………………………………………………………..p.48
2
Migration to Libya…………………………………………………………………p.48
Libya – a transit country?.................................................................p.48
Refugees and migrants in Libya………………………………………..p.53
Leaving Libya…………………………………………………………….p.58
The war period……………………………………………………………………p.59
Life in Europe…………………………………………………………………....p.62
Semi-peripheral Libya…………………………………………………….…….p.67
Conclusions……………………………………………………………………………...p.70
List of references………………………………………………………………………..p.73
3
Introduction
We are recognized as refugees from a war in which the European countries
have participated and yet they act as if we do not exist. But if we show up
and make visible our situation, you want to deport us. (…) It is painful, after
we were able to stabilize our lives in Libya to have to fight again for survival –
in the countries that call themselves democracies.
This statement represents clearly how Lampedusa in Hamburg refugees
perceive Europe. Lampedusa in Hamburg is a movement created in March
2013 as a response to the end of the Italian program – Emergency North Africa1
– which included 22.000 refugees fled from the Libyan war. 300 of them
eventually arrived in Hamburg in March 2013. According to the Dublin
Regulation, people who were granted refugee status cannot live or work in a
different Schengen country from the one that they first arrived. However,
Lampedusa in Hamburg has been challenging this regulation, asking for the
right of free movement within Europe.
“The group ‘Lampedusa in Hamburg’ is united by a common fate: they are all
from different countries, have gone at different times and from different
existential reasons to Libya. There they have lived and worked – even fighting
between rebel groups and government forces”2. The refugees made a proposal
to the city senate in order to be recognized as a homogenous group fled from
war, according to the article 23 of the German residential act3. Accomplishing
this would mean a valid residence and work permit for all of them, within the
German territory. “We did not survive the NATO war in Libya to die on the
streets of Hamburg.”4 In their view, NATO is responsible for having forced them
out of Libya and for now leaving them on the streets of Europe without any
1
This program started after the Libya war broke out, in 2011, when thousands of people fled the
country and arrived to shore of Italy. The Italian government declared the humanitarian emergency and
through the program, accommodated those who were granted refugee status. The program was a
temporary measurement and in February 28th 2013 ended.
2
This statement can be retrieved from the website: http://lampedusahamburg.info/informationen/hintergrund/
3
They, however, are not recognized by the Hamburg Senate as a homogeneous group because don’t
come from the same country, but from different nations in the sub-Saharan Africa.
4
This statement can be retrieved from the website: https://libcom.org/news/lampedusa-hamburgrefugee-protests-escalate-update-recent-weeks-protest-25102013.
4
future. First of all NATO intervened in the war with the stated intent of freeing
Libyans from the Gaddafi’s dictatorship, and now Europe is impeding them from
starting a new life due to its strict migration regulations.
The primary contact with people involved in this movement motivated the
scope of the project, namely telling the stories of those people and of million
others who are victims of wars caused by the Western countries and who, at the
same time, see their lives as refugees limited by draconian international and
national laws. scope of the project. Most existing literatures concentrate the
study of migration on receiving countries, “but it is not possible to do so
exclusively” , because “many countries are both sending and receiving
countries for different types of migrants, or are in the process of transition from
the one type to the other”(Castles, 2009, p.2), especially true in the case of
Libya. Moreover, western intervention through NATO forces adds another
dimension of Libya’s migratory flows: it fueled the transition of Libya’s own
situation and its power relations with the interests of Western capital in the
name of “international community” (Campbell, 2011). However, the advocates
of liberal interventions kept “silence when African migrant workers in Libya were
being butchered by elements from the National Transitional Council (NTC)”
(p.66). Consequently, we decided not to concentrate on the current situation of
Libya´s refugees in Europe but to trace back to their previous lives in Libya.
After all, “Migration, development and international relations are closely linked”
(Castles, 2009,p.2).
Our approach introduces a new perspective because it describes migration
not in Europe, the land of arrival, but from the point of departure, Libya. As a
result, the problem formulation of this study is:
How economic and socio-political relations of power affect migration flows to
Europe: The case study of Libya and of the 'Emergency North Africa' in the
stories of the refugees of Lampedusa in Hamburg.
The economic situation of Libya coupled with international socio-political power
relations with the West had created a unique setting. Oil and gas foreign
companies have been exploiting Libyan reserves while European states have
singularly dealt with the Libyan government in order to stop migration flows.
5
Italy has been the only country which signed bilateral agreements with the
Libyan authorities since 2000. Positioning us in this setting, the aim was to
analyze its consequences on migrant flows to Europe. To support our idea,
narrative/biographical interviews of Lampedusa in Hamburg refugees were
conducted, whose main focus was the conditions under which they have lived in
Libya, from a social and working point of view. The voices of the refugees
helped us to have a direct insight into the economic life of Libya and how the
intersection between economic and power relation interests have forced them to
leave the country and face perilous travel to escape.
What the research aimed at showing is that the European immigration
policies tell a different story about the motives of the intense flows of refugees
within European borders. The continuous use of words such as ‘emergency’
and the tightening of regulations over migration suggest a scenario in which
Europe is attacked by those flows of people and has to deal with the issue in
any way possible. “Italy has declared migration emergencies almost every year
for the past 10 years” (Perkowski, 2012)5; however, the situation is far more
complex and the Libya case displays of it. The powerful influence that Western
countries has exercised over Libya, especially regarding the oil and gas fields
exploitation pictures a situation in which NATO had to intervene into the Libyan
civil war in order to defend the economic interests of its member states. After
having achieved its primary goal, namely overthrowing Qaddafi’s regime, NATO
and Europe are very much present in the process of rebuilding the country,
providing expertise and capitals through programs such as UNSMIL and
EUBAM. But a problem arose: the militias who fought against Qaddafi have now
taken control of some areas of the country, and especially strategic areas in
which the production of oil was concentrated, such as Cyrenaica. Those armed
groups do not recognize the central government and the international
community as well as major oil and gas companies are really worried about the
critical situation that has been created. For example, the CEO of ENI “Paolo
Scaroni reiterated to the Prime Minister (of Libya) the importance of Libya to
5
The whole article can be retrieved from:
http://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/nina-perkowski/migration-in-italy-%E2%80%98state-ofemergency%E2%80%99
6
Italy’s gas supply security, and as a strategic country for ENI’s activities. Mr
Scaroni expressed the hope that Libya will continue on its path towards stability
and security”6
Besides all these issues, however, the situation of the refugees has been left in
the shadow.
To clearly approach our problem we divided the paper into six chapters:
introduction, methodology, theory, history, analysis and conclusion. Since our
report follows a deductive approach, we start by presenting the background
theories which will be applied in the history and analysis chapters. The
methodology describes the process of our practical steps, from the secondary
data collection and analysis to the fieldwork research in Hamburg. The analysis,
which includes the history of Libya and the interviews of the witnesses of the
war, illustrates the convergence of the theory with the research findings. In the
conclusion section, we summarize the discoveries and its relevance to the
academia.
6
The whole article can be retrieved from
http://www.libya-businessnews.com/2014/03/10/eni-boss-meets-with-ali-zeidan/
7
1. Methodology
During and after the Libyan war many words have been dedicated to the
description of a country on the other side of the Mediterranean but in many
ways so closed to ‘Fortress Europe’. Our research tried to look at the Libyan
situation post and after-war within a different framework: Europe and its
draconian policies of immigration are not the only factors to blame, but an entire
and more composite scenario needs to be considered, involving economic and
political powers and the way these have directly or indirectly been able to affect
the flow of migration that arrived to Europe during and after the Libyan war in
2011 producing what at that time was termed by Italian authorities the
‘Emergency North-Africa’.
To approach our problem was primarily necessary to reflect on the research
strategy. Since we began with a theory (from various readings on the subject)
we came out with a hypothesis that evolved to data collection and sub
consequent results/findings: in this sense, we followed deductive pattern to
theory process and approach. In our project, that meant to use the worldsystem theory, in which we associated Libya to a semi-peripheral country. Thus,
after collecting data on the same topic, we reached results that shown how our
theory applied.
Concerning our type of research, we decided to follow a mixed methods
research – “This term is widely used nowadays to refer to research that
combines methods associated with both quantitative and qualitative research”
(Bryman, 2012, p. 37).
This project can be divided in two parts: the first focusing more on the
theoretical and historical background of Libya where we took hold of the ‘setting’
by collecting secondary data; the second part consisting of
qualitative/ethographic research making use of interviews with the refugees,
where the aim was mainly to get a view of individual cases in a specific social
reality and context.
Before further explanation, some epistemological and ontological
considerations need to be exposed and clarified in this chapter. We first used
8
critical realism to approach our problem, by doing a categorized descriptive data
collection of all the history and facts related to the Libyan situation. However, as
Bryman explains, “realists argue that the scientist´s conceptualization is simply
a ways of knowing that reality” (2012, p. 29), this meaning, that we do not try to
explain the problem with the fixed and total reality but only a perspective
created through the reading of different literature. Even more, critical realism
was also the approach we had through our experience in fieldwork. In this
sense, we learned and explored this social reality but with the notion that these
observations were just one perspective of it, namely the lived experience of the
refugee. We also combined it with a phenomenology approach because,
especially in this case, it was essential to know how our LiHH (Lampedusa in
Hamburg) interviewees made sense of the world, observing at close their
opinions and conditions.
From an ontological point of view, we used a social constructivist perspective
“that asserts that social phenomena and their meanings are continually being
accomplished by social actors, (…) not only produced through social interaction
but they are in constant state of revision” (Bryman, 2012, p. 33). The case study
of ‘Lampedusa in Hamburg’ demonstrates that refugees have interpreted their
current situation in Germany according to the experiences that they went
through in Libya before, during and after the war.
Returning to our two topics of research, in the quantitative approach we used
the method of secondary analysis. Collecting new data on historical facts or on
Libyan refugees would be almost impossible for student researchers with limited
monetary and time resources. For that reason we chose to read literature that
gave us information about the history of Libya, literature about Qaddafi (pro and
cons positions) as well as different articles concerning: our main theory and the
contemporary critics of it, migration in Libya as well as diverse online material
about the more current events concerning Libya and the LiHH.
Through this secondary data we could understand the reality in which our
problem is placed and create a new individual interpretation. However, the
secondary analysis lacks a refugees’ perspective. For that reason, our casestudy is based on a qualitative methods in order to support the secondary data.
9
In our fieldwork experience we combined participant observation and interviews
as the most adequate methods for our objectives. ( isn’t this clear enough on
how both parts complete each other?)
The quantitative component of the project was dedicated to the description
of the Libyan context and how this has changed over the years, focusing
especially on the last years of the Qaddafi’s era until the post-war situation. This
is because migrant flows and their lives changed dramatically due to the war
and subsequent west intervention which helped to over-thrown Qaddafi´s
regime.
Much has been written before the fall and killing of Muammar Qaddafi7,
which has been useful to reconstruct his figure and the policies characterizing
his years at power and the economic and of international relations in the period
1969-2011. Libya was placed in a particular socioeconomic and geostrategic
position into the chess board of international powers since the discovery of oil
reserves underneath its territory and this influences the country developments
and international role both before and after the 2011 war. However, the events
that occurred during and after the 2011 and which led to the defeat, ousting and
killing of Qaddafi remain much less known, particularly to the public opinion.
The international attention has emphasized, during the fights, the role of militia
groups and the foreign armies, but what was happening within the territory,
regarding both the conflict, the interests involved and the population is still
largely left in the shadow.
Given the no-fly zone and the impossibility of going back to their country of
origin in sub-Saharan Africa, many Africans were forced to flee and shipped to
the Italian shores, seeking for refuge in Europe.
As the Libyan war broke out, the European debate concentrated especially
on the ‘invasion’ of refugees fleeing the Libya conflict, who had to be added to
the numerous others who escaped the upheavals of the Arab Spring. "WE
MUST not allow Libya to become another Afghanistan just next door to us,”
declared Italy's interior minister, Roberto Maroni, at the end of a European
ministerial meeting in Brussels yesterday (February 25th)” (Economist, 25th of
7
St.John 2012, McKinney 2011, Boyle 2013
10
May, 2011). “Defense Minister Ignazio La Russa of Italy has warned Europe to
prepare for migrations on a “biblical scale” as a result of the unrest” (Kanter and
Dempsey, 24th of February, 2011). The situation was unbearable and the
international community, especially Europe, decided to become part of the
reconstruction project of the country, in order to sponsor tight migration control
and preserve the economic interests that were still much alive in Libya.
The literature which we have looked at in this project, concerned especially two
aspects: the economic interests of the West and of other countries into the
Libyan territory and the international relations that have been built up before
and after the war, with the major objective of providing a comprehensible
background in which the lives of migrants would be fitted into. We wanted to
demonstrate how economic interests and power relations affect the lives of
migrants, and specially, in the aftermath of the war.
Our second step of the research consisted in supporting the theory with a
concrete case-study, represented by the Lampedusa in Hamburg group (see
here p.1 Introduction). For this connection, we resorted to participant
observation and interviews. During the three days we stayed in Hamburg (7-9
May 2014), we had the opportunity to explore the places and observe some of
the activities that the Lampedusa in Hamburg group is involved in. The “tent”,
where the group meets and provides information to the visitors, which is located
outside the Hamburg main station, is where dozens of LiHH refugees gather,
provide information, sell merchandise (badges, t-shirts, bags,..) and make their
struggle public; the social center B5, at Birgittenstrasse 5 in St.Pauli is another
of the locations which hosts some refugees for a temporary situation. More
important than the locations were the observations of their precarious living
conditions and the conversations with some members of the group. In these we
tried to gain their trust and to present ourselves as listeners of their cause
instead of researchers focused on results. The conclusions from our
observations helped us to see how the situation is complicated and how the
refugees want to talk and share with us their life experience, but always with
two main barriers: the language (most of the refugees we encountered felt most
comfortable talking in French) and the sensitive topic of war.
11
The interviews were conducted between 7th and 9th of May 2014. Some of
the African migrants we interviewed had lived in Libya for many years, in some
cases even more than 10 years (interviewee N.). Several of them worked for
foreign European or Libyan companies. Our respondents are only from subSaharan countries and have worked in Libya in order to escape from poor
situations in their homelands.
The five interviewees are all members of the group ‘Lampedusa in Hamburg’.
Since their precarious situation in the German city, with crowded places to live
and without space for privacy, the interviews were not an easy task, especially
because biographical story interviews require time to be completed, and the use
of technological device to record them needed a quite environment.
We chose to use semi-structured interviews with a narrative component
because our major interest was to analyze the lives of migrants of ‘Lampedusa
in Hamburg’ in Libya: their work experiences, the relation with the local
population and the company, what happened during the war and what they
have been experiencing during the raise of the conflict. The narrative interview
approach allowed us to unfold the major events of this specific period of their
lives. It was not a fully biographical “life history” approach (Bryman, 2012, p.
488), because the main focus was posed on the last years of their lives, namely
just before the Libyan war, during and in the immediate aftermath. The main
objective was, through their stories, to draw a picture of their relations with the
international powers which were operating in Libya and the economic assets of
the country, in which many of them were implicated as workers. The narration of
their lives allowed us to look at these plots of power relations from a different
perspective, which is often forgotten, but which can widen our understanding of
the migration flows and the reasons behind them.
1.1 Ethical and practical problems
While working on this project some considerations and obstacles arose.
Since part of our work was based on secondary data, ethical problems were not
a concern. The only detail worth pointing out was the strategy we, as a group,
used to deal with all the sources. Since the amount of literature needed was
12
demanding and we had limited time, we divided some data between group
members. Inevitably, we made a selection of the literature both pro and antiQaddafi.
Our main problems during this project were hindrance throughout the
fieldwork experience.
The first concerns the anonymity in our interviews. Although all of the
interviewees show no concern on exposing their names, it was our choice, as
researchers, not to use that personal information, especially regarding a
sensitive situation that addresses political and traumatic experiences. Since the
relevance of their names is inexistent, we decided to name the interviewees by
the first letter of their names.
The second apprehension was related to the language in which we conducted
the interviews. Our main idea was to interview in English so all members of the
group could translate them and because the meaning of their ideas would
remain intact. Even though a great number of refugees talked English, the
majority felt more comfortable in French and Italian (all of them learned the
language during their stay in Italy between 2011.2013). Four of our interviewees
made the effort and shared their thoughts in English, while one of them
preferred to do it in Italian since we offered that option. Our main goal here was
to make them the most at ease as possible a since it is a very emotional topic.
In order to illustrate our research with the case-study of Lampedusa in
Hamburg, a fieldwork trip was necessary. With a limited budget and some
distance from Aalborg to Hamburg, we decided to stay for 3 days of
ethnographic work. A longer stay could have brought us closer to the LiHH
group and resulted on more primary data but since our aim was to use the
interviews just as a support method.
The last difficulty regarded the selection of the interviewees. As understandable,
some members were not willing to share their stories with us. As a matter of
fact, the only requirements we asked for were the ability of speaking either
English or Italian, and a work experience in Libya.
13
2. Theory
2.1 World-system theory
One of the descriptions of the term ‘development’ is based on the idea of a
world subdivided in Western developed countries and the underdeveloped
‘others’. The association between development and modernization was
established in a Western context where the two concepts are consequential:
modernization implies development, and vice versa. “For Lerner modernization
is ‘the social process of which development is the economic component”
(Bernstein, 1971, p.141), whereas some regard modernization as a
“transformation of culture” (Idem). Modernization in this sense is understood to
be a convergence of characteristics that have been reached by the Western
countries over years of development, but that all the traditional (culturally
speaking) nations will gradually achieve, in the scholarly vision in the aftermath
of the WWII. Lately the concept has been expanded and now it is also
associated with notions of human rights and democratization. Karl Marx
indicates the bourgeoisie as the fuel of democratic transition; “similarly, Moore,
in his study of major western democracies, and Soboul, in his analysis of the
French Revolution, stressed the role of the middle class in the transformation”
(Arat, 1988, p.21). Finally, even Max Weber with his theory of the Protestantism
and Tockqueville with the concept of voluntary association as the basis of
democracy (Arat, 1988)
From a Western point of view the idea of itself as the highest representative
in terms of modernization is still valid and much present. The theorists argued
that the development consists of ‘stages’ and, thus, the only difference between
the Western world and the so-called ‘others’ is that the latter has not reached
the same stage of development of the former yet. Non-Western states, in order
to reach the same level of development of the Western nations rapidly, have to
follow the economic stage that the latter had been going through. When it
happens, the gap between underdeveloped and developed will be filled.
In this context the primary source of analysis of the social sciences and of the
modernization approach were the nation-states, which were considered a
combination of social norms, economies and political systems. As a matter of
14
fact, countries could be evaluated according to the similarities and diversity in
these areas. In the immediate post- WWII years, the influential work by the
historian Fernand Braudel, whose positions were explained in his book on The
Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the age of Philip II (Braudel,
1949), described the economic and political aspects of the Mediterranean
region. This region, though divided between boundaries and despite all
differences within, is described as being a single region to explore and
described in its complexity and in the interdependence of its singular parts.
Braudel expanded in this way the level of investigation to an entire area, rather
than singular nation-states. However, it was the new-developed World-system
theory – or how Wallerstein calls it, analysis – that sought to switch the study
towards a global scale.
These theoretical approaches centered on single nation states and on a
singular path of development towards modernization were questioned by antidiscrimination and decolonization movements that broke out between the
1960s-70s. According to scholar Immanuel Wallerstein, as expressed in a
interview to Theory Talks8 (Wallerstein, 2008), the “world revolution of 1968”
(Wallerstein, 2008) has been the moment in which the concept of nation-states
and all the modernization theories related could be finally questioned and
challenged. From that moment people around the globe arose because they
realized that the promises of development of the society and of the system as a
whole had not brought the expected fruit: the gap between rich and poor nations
had remained the same or even increased (Wallerstein, 2004), and all the leftwing movements/parties which had pledged these changes provoked disillusion
among the population.
The Dependency theory was the first critical response to the modernization
approach. It was adopted and developed by Samir Amin (1976), which also
highly influenced Wallerstein´s positions and work. The authors basically
affirmed that underdeveloped countries were not able to purchase anymore
manufactures from the developed ones despite that they provided the latter with
8
The full interview can be retrieved from
http://www.theory-talks.org/2008/08/theory-talk-13.html
15
raw materials9. Even though the Dependency theory was primarily explored in
the Latin America context, it was Samir Amin who adapted the theory to the
Islamic world context. Both Amin and Wallestein’s theories share the vision of a
world-system economy which can be studied as a whole, without looking at the
single states.
The world-system in Wallerstein and Samir Amin´s perspective is a combination
of mechanisms that aims at redistributing the surplus value gained from the
periphery to the core areas through a mechanism called “unequal development”
(Samin, 1976) of the poor areas of the periphery compared to the rich ones at
the center. The world-system does not need “a single political system” (1976,
p.230) because the economy, which represents the core of the system, can be
adopted by any political structure: “the only totalities that exist or have
historically existed are mini-systems and world-systems, and in the nineteenth
and twentieth century there has been only one-world system in existence, the
capitalist world-economy” (1974, p.390). The current capitalist system is a
world-economic system with the unique characteristic of having encompassed
the entire globe and being spread in all its corners, in states and regions where
political structures are totally diverse: “The new world is capitalist: it defines and
recognizes itself according to the characteristics of this mode of production”
(Amin, 1988, p. 155). It is precisely in this context that our case study of Libya
can be placed. Looking in-depth at Libyan history, Qaddafi’s primary idea was
to exit the capitalist world-system and follow a different path from the other
Western countries, but as Wallerstein theory explains, the capitalist economic
system is widespread nowadays all around the world and there are economic
interests that cannot be simply dismissed. In Libya especially those interests
were related to oil, gas and construction, resources much desired in the modern
world.
All the world-systems that came before, e.g the feudal system, “were highly
unstable structures which tended either to be converted into empires or to
disintegrate” (Wallerstein, 1976, p.230). The strength of capitalism derives
9
A further Marxist approach to this theory has been given by the work of Paul Raban in 1957: The
political economy of growth.
16
exactly from its peculiarity of having been flourishing for 500 years without
creating a world-empire with a fixed political structure. Empires rise and fall over
the years, but this world-system economy does not. “The capitalist strata
formed a class that survived and gained droit de cite, but did not yet triumph in
the political arena” (Wallerstein, 1976, p.233). If the system was formed by
states with similar political systems, the disparities between them, which are the
core of capitalism, would not occur.
We take the defining characteristic of a social system to be the existence
within it of a division of labour, such that the various sectors or areas within are
dependent upon economic exchange with others for the smooth and continuous
provisioning of the needs of the area. Such economic exchange can clearly
exist without a common political structure and even more obviously without
sharing the same culture (Wallerstein, 1974, p.390).
The division of labour does not simply refer to the type of occupation, but to a
geographical division:
The range of economic tasks is not evenly distributed throughout the worldsystem. It is a function of the social organization of work, one which
magnifies and legitimizes the ability of some groups within the system to
exploit the labour of others, that is, to receive a larger share of surplus (Idem,
1976, p.230)
Who benefits and exploits the others’ labour are the core capitalist-states in the
West, which have a strong state-machinery, whereas
underdeveloped/developing areas do not. As a matter of fact, “once we get a
difference in the strength of the state-machinery, we get the operation of
‘unequal exchange’ which is enforced by strong states on weak ones, by core
states on peripheral areas” (Wallerstein, 1974, p. 401). The core states
appropriate the surplus-value of the entire world economy, while exploiting the
labour and the resources of the peripheral areas. The endless expansion of the
core areas and semi-periphery is always accompanied by a weakening of the
political and economic position of the periphery. Therefore, in Wallerstein´s
approach (1976), the world is essentially divided into three typologies of
countries: the core, the semi-peripheral and peripheral countries. For instance,
17
in the 17th century the core countries were the North-West European nations,
the periphery was composed by Eastern and the Western hemisphere of
Europe; and semi-periphery the Mediterranean Europe.
This is where the world-system theory differs from the Dependency theory.
Even considering Dependency theory as a theoretical starting point, it lacks one
of the main world-system ideas: the existence of semi-peripheral countries.
According to our interpretation of theory, Libya, before the 2011 war, might have
been considered a semi-peripheral country.
Amin´s approach only looked at center and peripheral countries, in where the
second group depends on an extreme level on the first economically and
politically powerful group of countries. Contrary to modernization idea, not all
countries can develop in the same way because both groups are needed to
balance the world economics: “unequal development” (Amin, 1976). When the
big economic interests of the West had the chance to overthrow the Libyan
government, justifying the intervention with a rhetoric of human rights and
democracy, the modernization theory is demonstrated to be partly ineligible
from our perspective. Since the moment that Qaddafi tried to raise Libya up and
transform it into a core country, the U.S. and U.N., with the excuse of lack of
human rights, imposed sanctions and halted the transformation.
Semi-periphery countries such as Libya are, in turn, doomed to remain in the
same position. Non-Western countries, even following similar economic paths,
cannot reach the level of the core countries. The distinction drawn by
Wallerstein between core, semi-periphery and periphery has to be maintained,
in order to let the capitalist system and the consequent surplus value robbery to
work.
As a matter of fact, Wallerstein explored how semi-peripheral countries make
the capitalist world economy work smoothly (1974, p. 403). Semi-peripheral
states were once core or peripheral ones whose power decreased or increased
during the years. Their main role in the system is to avoid the insurgence of the
periphery ones against the core nations. The semi-periphery is both exploited
and exploiter and has a major interests in maintaining the status quo (Idem,
18
p.405). Libya case in this sense is different, and can be regarded a semiperiphery willing to change the status quo, but without success.
The strengthening of the state-machineries in core areas has its direct
counterpart in the decline of the state-machineries in peripheral areas…the
strength of the state-machinery in core states is a function of the weakness of
the other state-machineries. Hence intervention of outsiders via war,
subversion, and diplomacy is the lot of peripheral states (Idem, p.403).
The submissive and underdeveloped condition of the peripheral areas is not a
temporary passage from an earlier stage of development to a later one as was
described in the modernization theory, but rather a permanent one. They are
doomed to remain in this submissive situation because of their relation with
developed nations: “it is rather the result of being involved in the world-economy
as a peripheral, raw material producing area” (Wallerstein, 1976, p.392).
2.2 Libya as a semi-peripheral country
Libya is the example of this theoretical approach: once a peripheral country,
it turned to be a semi-periphery after the discovery of oil fields underneath its
territory in 1959 and, especially, the revolution which occurred in 1969 by
Qaddafi. “Being nearly sulfur-free, Libyan oil is even more valued for its
extremely high quality” (McKinney, 1970, p. 232). From then on, Libya
developed its own economy: U.S. and European companies immediately tried
to enter the new developing market of oil and banking in Libya. The
collaboration was necessary and profitable for both parties: “in order to develop
its hydrocarbon resources, Libya had to remain on friendly terms with the West
to encourage exploration and investment as well as to gain access to the
technicians and technology of Western oil companies” (St.John, 2011, p.43) On
the other hand, the West was similarly bounded to Libya because of its urgent
and high need of hydrocarbons.
However, Gaddafi, soon after his revolution in 1969, brought changes into these
sectors. “He reportedly channeled early oil wealth into national free health care
and education” (McKinney, 2012, p. 461). Although Libya in the 1970s was one
of the only two country belonging to OPEC not to nationalize foreign oil
19
company properties – but instead offered partnership (Joffè, 2001, p.78) -, its
Leader aimed at transforming Libya and the whole Africa into an independent
region from the Western lucrative interests. “He has tended to regard Libya not
as the sufficient unit of community, but as a base from which to export his
revolution to the Arab world and even beyond” (Hinnebusch, 1984, p.60).
Libya, in Qaddafi’s view, should have been a socialist state, because socialism
was the only political form that could solve the economic problems of the world.
He strongly “condemned both communism and capitalism, the former as a
monopoly of state ownership and the latter as a monopoly of individuals and
companies” (St.John, 2011, p.56).
Libya began to employ the African workforce coming from the sub-Saharan
regions: Qaddafi invited several African states to send people to Libya.
With all the listed characteristics, Libya can be considered a semi-peripheral
country, according to Wallerstein’s definition.
2.3 Can Libya be a core country?
According to our understanding of the world-system theory, Gaddafi’s goal
was to transform Libya into a core country. However, Libya should not be a core
country according to the specific meaning given to the term by the world-system
theory, which looks at core areas under the rule of a global capitalist economy,
but rather a socialist country, which does not comply with the exploitative global
capitalist system.
In order to achieve its objective he started and/or proposed several grand
projects (McKinney, 2012):
-
A shared currency in all the Muslim and African countries, called Gold Dinar
which would have challenged the supremacy of US dollar and euro;
-
Independent pan-African financial institutions such as the Libyan
Investment Authority and the Libyan Foreign Bank;
-
The first Africa satellite network called the Regional African Satellite
Communication Organization (RASCOM);
-
A wealth redistribution project funded by the profits coming from oil exports
and other national profitable sectors;
20
-
Nationalization of the Libyan oil “to better control prices by the increase and
decrease in production” (McKinney, 2012, p. 232);
-
Free education for everyone from elementary school up to university and
post-graduate studies both in Libya and abroad;
-
Interest-free housing loans;
-
Free lands for farmers.
Despite all the grand projects listed above and “a number of large-scale
infrastructure development projects such as highways, railways, air and
seaports and telecommunication, as well as the efforts to diversify the economy
and encourage private sector participation, the extensive controls of prices,
credit, trade and foreign exchange have constrained the growth” (Kerr & Cantu,
2012, p. 92).
Furthermore, much of the country’s income over the years has been lost to
waste, corruption, conventional armaments purchases, and attempts to develop
weapons of mass destruction, as well as to large donations made to developing
countries in attempts to increase Gaddafi’s influence in Africa and elsewhere 10.
Although oil revenues and a small population have given Libya one of the
highest per capita GDPs in Africa, the government’s mismanagement of the
economy has led to high inflation and increased import prices. These factors
resulted in a decline in the standard of living from the late 1990s through 2003,
especially for lower and middle income strata of the Libyan society (Kerr et al,
2012, p. 92).
In addition, the revolution that he aspired to accomplish did not happen due to
the alienation of “big and strategic sectors of the upper and middle strata”
(Hinnebrusch, 1984, p.71) who saw themselves attacked by his socialist
reforms.
In fact, Qaddafi was extremely critical of both the communist and capitalist
systems ruling respectively the Soviet Union and the United States, though
10
His main goal was to reduce the influence of Israel and oppose the Western interests ad influence in
Africa. He built up relations with Uganda, supporting the country when it was invaded by Tanzania in
1972; Chad and several others. “The Libyan diplomatic offensive gained momentum, particularly in the
largely Muslim states on the southern edge of the Sahara, and, by early 1974, Libya had largely achieved
its central goal in Africa, a sharp reduction in Israeli influence, with Libya often supplanting it” (St.John,
2011, p.120)
21
“Libya for years maintained close commercial ties with the West, selling most of
its oil to Europe or the United States and using the proceeds to purchase
Western technology. Qaddafi was also critical of the Soviet Union, especially
the atheist aspect of communist..nevertheless Libya purchased soviet
technology” (St.John, 2011, p.52). The Leader “did not challenge the emerging
capitalist sector of the economy” (Hinnebrusch, 1984, p.62) but rather created a
mixed economy encouraging local entepreneurship and private investments:
“the fact that all enterprises are nationalized in these countries [semi-periphery]
does not make the participation of these enterprises in the world-economy one
that does not conform to the mode of operation of a capitalist market-system”
(Wallerstein, 1974, p. 413). Libya remained strongly linked to a capitalistic mode
of production and power relations, even though its leader had tried to overcome
this world-system.
Furthermore, “the opposition of powerful established interests” (Hinnebrusch,
1984, p.60) was another pivotal factor that halted the revolutionary project of
Qaddafi. The NATO military expedition was “was to disrupt an emerging pattern
of independence and a network of collaboration that could facilitate increased
African self-reliance which was at odds with the geostrategic and political
economic ambition of extra-continental powers” (Forte, chapter 1, 2012). As
Sirte symbolizes the revival of a pan-African ideology, the city was entirely
destroyed during the war, suggesting the failure of this ideal. As a matter of fact,
a month before Gaddafi was killed, “investments funds benefitting Libya’s
African partners were blocked, bt the production of oil and natural gas for
European consumption was enabled” (Idem, 2012).
As Samir Amin said about the main motif of Libya´s failure, “Libya has never
truly existed as a nation” (2011, p. 25). According to the author, Gaddafi was
only trying to please the West, submitting to every demand of Washington and
NATO. A manipulated and uncontrolled political situation does not constitute the
base for a strong nation, and Gaddafi with his unpredictability (Amin, 2011)
destroyed any chance of Libya to become a core country. Even at the present
22
time, to Amin, Libya is a peripheral country11 that will remain in this status until a
very unlikely and resilient socialist revolution, like most Arab world countries “The United States and Europe seek in the Arab world a repetition of what
happened in Mali, Indonesia, and the Philippines: to change everything in order
that nothing changes!” (2011, p. 26). The core countries will always manipulate
the peripheral ones through supporting popular revolutionist movements to “get
rid” of the dictators and then setting up a government easily commanded (Amin,
2011).
Overall, considering all the reasons mentioned, Libya cannot be considered
neither a core country nor a socialist one due to the failure of Gaddafi’s projects
and its weak state-machinery, as Wallerstein would define it.
2.4 Libya’s dependence on the West
The mismanagement of African states after their decolonization is a
considerably recurrent topic in the literature12 which tries to propose that a recolonization of the country would bring positive effects.
Colonialism laid the seeds of the intellectual and material development in
Africans. It brought enlightenment where there was ignorance...Formal
education and modern medicine were brought to people who had limited
understanding or control of their physical environment. The introduction of
modern communications, exportable agricultural crops and some new
industries provided a foundation for economic development...Africa is in
political and economic turmoil today, defenders of the imperialism say,
because it failed to take advantage of its inheritance from colonial rule..It
was, they summarise, Africa’s inadequacies that made colonisation
necessary and the outcome of post-independence self-rule suggests that the
withdrawal by the colonial powers was premature (Obadina, 2000, p.2)
In the Libyan case, after the war, the dependency position of the country to
Western influence is well emphasized by the words of David Cameron in the
opening speech at the London Conference on Libya, the 29th of March 2011:
11
Amin´s Dependency theory places Libya as a peripheral country (the author does not recognize semiperipheral).
12
Pfaff 1995, Mazrui 1994, Lewis 2009 et al.
23
“The Libyan people cannot reach that future on their own...we must help the
Libyan people plan for their future after the conflict is over” (Forte, Introduction,
2012).
Although generally scholars agree on the damages that colonization provoked
in Africa, “given the nature of both the development challenge in sub-Saharan
Africa and the quality of governance in the region, as unpalatable as it may
seem, neo-colonialism could actually be a desirable factor in positively pushing
the frontiers of current levels of socio-economic and political development in the
region” (Ngomba, 2011, p.10)13. A scenario that call for the definite end of neocolonialist is “significantly illusionary” (Idem, p.5). In this context the intervention
of NATO in Libya, though wanted by some strata of the Libyan population, is the
symptom of the belief that the “our” intervention and actions will benefit “them”
(Forte, Introduction, 2012).
The influence that ex-colonial powers continue to exercise upon ex-colonies
are several: the first one is the economic interdependence of two states. In the
Libyan case, the north African country has been economically dealing with the
ex-homeland Italy and to, generally speaking, the West and emerging countries.
In the aftermath of the coup, “Libya respected American expertise and desired
continued access to American technology…and several thousand Libyans
continued to study at American colleges and universities” (St.John, 2011,
p.118). Moreover, ENI, the biggest Italian energy company, has been making
profits in Libya since the discovery of the oil reserves, in 1959, and is still today
the largest international company in the North African country14 (Libya-business
news, 10 March 2014).
After Qaddafi was overthown thanks to NATO intervention into the civil war, UE
and UN have immediately positioned themselves as supporters of the new
democratic transition and offered help and million of euro in programs. Through
this assistance, “these ‘donor countries or agencies’ arguably appropriate a
certain level of leverage in their dealings with these countries (Libya) and it is at
13
Ngomba’s “The (un) desirability of neo-colonialism and the development challenge in Africa” can be
retrieved from:
http://www.aefjn.be/index.php/home.html
14
The entire article can be retrieved from
http://www.libya-businessnews.com/2014/03/10/eni-boss-meets-with-ali-zeidan/
24
the level of ‘making use’ of their acquired (deserved?) leverage that sparks of
neo-colonialism are exhibited and related charges levied” (Ngomba, 2011, p.7).
Here lies the second typology of influence, the financing of the peripheral
country which, as a result, will be always in debt.
The third typology of influence works through the use of prominent personalities
who are related to the West. “Neocolonialist is not about Western agency, but
also of local collaborators and upholders of Western powers” (Forte,
Introducion, 2012). A clear example of it is the actual president of Ivory Coast,
Aassane Outtara, who
is married to a Frenchwoman and he has spent much of his professional life
working for the International Monetary Fund where he even became a deputy
managing director of IMF. So he is what the Gambian government has called
‘Western Neo colonialist sponsored agents in Africa’ who are likely to ‘owe
allegiance only to themselves and their Western Masters (Ngomba, 2011,
p.5)
The concept is known in some of the academic literature as bourgeoisie
comprador, which
in essence embodies or internalizes the basic theoretical problem of the
peripheral political economy: economic activity oriented primarily for the
benefit of the other. By strict definition, compradors are native agents or
partners of foreign investors who operate in some form in the local economy.
However, in the theoretical context of assessing the possibilities for the local
industrial development, compradors represent forces that hinder change. As
“agents of foreign imperialism, they act “against the interest of the national
economy” (Vitalis, 1990, p.291)
In ex-colonies and Third world countries the bourgeoisie comprador usually
replaces the national bourgeosie, which “history has shown..is not capable, in
our era, of achieving what it achieved elsewhere, in Europe, North America and
Japan in the nineteenth century” (Amin, 1987, p.1144). The developed states
are a model for the underdeveloped ones and that is the reason why the
comprador class of Third world countries arises and follows the Western model
of development, contributing, as a result, to their underdevelopment.
25
The level of the influence of the core countries is “not only in terms of national
economic planning, finances and technology, but also in terms of consumption,
culture and the ideology of everyday life” (Amin, 1987, p.1146-7).
The Libyan bourgeoisie comprador emerged from a particularly favorable
context in which
The bureaucracy was extremely wasteful, the development effort was
excessively dependent on foreign manpower, and massive urbanization
fuelled consumption demands and further eroded indigenous agriculture.
State capitalism stimulated , not a productive Libyan entrepreneurship, but
middleman ventures between the state and foreign contractors, an explosion
of import commerce, and absentee agriculture dependent on imported
labour. Non-productive state employment mushroomed. Libyans were
becoming a non-productive, dependent leisure class and a new comprador
bourgeoisie , swelled by exorbitant profits, was in formation (Hinnebrusch,
1984, p.69).
In fact, both former prime ministers elected in the post-Gaddafi’s era, Mustafa
Abushagur and Ali Zeidan, have lived years in western countries, the former in
the US and the latter in Geneva, and it is likely that they have assimilated the
Western culture and have been influenced by it during their governmental
period. In addition, many members of Lampedusa in Hamburg and some of the
interviewee cited in this project worked for years in foreign companies operating
in Libya. Athough the initial difficulties in dealing with the new-born Qaddafi
government, the profits that they made were incredible. Libya needed their
expertise and facilities in order to exploit its own oil reserves, thus this created a
balanced relationship between the two parties, that, as the Libyan history
shows, has never remained on Libya’s side for long.
The critical approach we employed, which sees Libya being a semiperipheral country that tried to differentiate itself from the capitalist system, is
useful to analyze Qaddafi’s role and its continuos change of policy regarding oil,
gas and international relations. The interests of the West in Libya were
powerful, thus, after an attempt to nationalize and redistribute to the Libyan
population, the respond, mainly from the U.S. and UN, left Qaddafi without
26
choice. Furthermore, the weak bureaucratic and administrative machine, the
strong dependence on oil as the only reserve of income for the state, put Libya
in the position of relying heavily on the West and its economic power. While
Western nations need the Libyan oil and gas, at the same time they push and
keep Libya down because they do not want to be left apart in this profitable
market.
27
3. The case of Libya
Describing the history of a single nation might be imagined to be a simple
process of facts and names. On the contrary, in our portray of Libyan history we
tried to dip from different sources, in order to give a more variegate and
complex scenario in which the Qaddafi’s figure and the 2001 war are seen from
an ordinary point of view. Therefore, the main focus of the chapter is posed on
the characterization of the economic and politican interests that were much
present within Libya during the Qaddafi government and how these have been
shaping Libyan internal policies and international relations, until the culmination
of the 2011 war, which determined a definite end of Qaddafi and his ideology.
3.1 Introduction
Especially during the last 80 years, Libya has passed through various
historical developments worth mentioning. Libya´s changing historical periods
and developments need here to be clarified and underlined in order to better
comprehend the more recent situation and events on this country , the situation
of migration flows and refugees’ current conditions.
In retrospect, the following milestones comprised and resume the pre-2011 war
history of Libya: 1) the discovery of massive oil reserves; 2) Qaddafi socialist
revolution; 3) confrontation with the U.S.; 4) sanctions from international
communities; 5) Libya’s compensation and wholesale privatization 6) bilateral
border control and tightened market.
3.2 Independence of Libya, the discovery of massive oil reserves and the
European pressure to curb migration flows
After years of colonization, before under Italy (1910-1947) and subsequently
France and Britain, Libya finally declared its independence in 1951 and
proclaimed itself as a constitutional and hereditary monarchy under King Idris.
From then on, it became “the first country to achieve independence through the
United Nations and one of the former European possessions in Africa to gain
independence” (Kerr & Cantu, 2012, p.87). Despite its independence,
throughout the first decade of a new beginning, Libya was an agricultural-
28
centered barren country, lacking natural resources, capital and skilled labor.
“Upward of 80 percent of the labour force was engaged in agricultural or animal
husbandry…Moreover, the industrial sector offered even less potential than
agriculture” (St. John, 2013, p.38). Facing internal challenges, Libya “rested
heavily on the income and developmental assistance generated by American
and British bases in the country” (Idem, p. 41). According to the Petroleum Law
of 1955 and “attractive terms of the new law”, the monarchy managed to
engage oil companies into the territory by assuring to base their future decisions
on commercial rather than political considerations. As a result, these initiatives
lowered the level of political risk in Libya compared to elsewhere, but increased
the country dependence on foreign support and interests. Even “military coups
after independence were led by men trained in British military schools and staff
colleges, though the regimes had no intention of accepting British influence”
(Oakes, 2012, p.129).
In 1959, significant oil reserves were discovered in the North African country
and “the subsequent income from petroleum sales enabled what had been one
of the world’s poorest countries to become extremely wealthy, as measured by
per capita GDP” (Kerr & Cantu, 2012, p.87). Additional to its high-quality oil,
Libya was advantaged over its African and Middle Eastern competitors for low
transportation costs thanks to a closer location to European markets. In 1962,
Libya joined the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) (St.
John, 2013).
“Following the discovery of oil, Libya developed into a classic example of a
rentier state, one in which the economic rent derived from the sale of a single
resource, often hydrocarbons, enables the state to act as the distributor of this
rent in the form of education, housing, and other social services” (Idem, p. 83).
The exploitation of Libyan oil deposits by the monarchy proved paradoxically in
that it freed Libya from one form of dependence, the income from military
bases, only to replace it with another. In order to develop its hydrocarbon
resources, Libya had to remain on friendly terms with the West to encourage
exploration and investment as well as to gain access to the technicians and
technology of Western oil companies. (Idem, p. 43)
29
On the other hand, the West was similarly bounded to Libya because of its
urgent and high need of hydrocarbons. Britain and Italy, for instance, comprised
their political relation with Qaddafi’s regime in exchange for oil concessions. In
August 2009, the British government freed Abdelbaset al-Meghrahi, the
convicted Lockerbie bomber, while, in 2008, Berlusconi handed over $5 billion
as an apology for Italian colonialism. “In his characteristic bluntness, Berlusconi
said he apologized so that Italy would get ‘less illegal immigrants and more oil”
(Prashad, 2012, p.132)
3.3 The Qaddafi revolution
For the oil companies, “the honeymoon ended in December 1969” (St. John,
p.88), when Mu’ammar Abu Minyar al-Qaddafi, by then a 28-year-old army
officer overthrew the monarch of King Idris and claimed in power. On the other
hand, as Boyle (2013) defends, one can say that “before the Qaddafi coup
against King Idris the Libyan people lived in a situation of dire poverty. Qaddafi
completely reversed this situation” (p.85). He accomplished this improvement
firstly by “attacking the old social order and calling for radical change in the
socioeconomic and political system” (idem, p.50). Secondly, drastic changes
occurred in the agreements between Libya and western oil companies. Qaddafi
“changed the geopolitics of oil forever” by nationalizing most oil companies in
Libya with Occidental as the role model and” the other Arab oil-producing states
soon followed suit”(idem, p.88). The measure undermined especially the most
vulnerable companies which did not have oil resources outside Libya:
“Occidental conceded a majority of profits to Libya, ending the traditional 50:50
split and introducing a new ration of 55 percent of the producing state and 45
percent for the oil company” (idem, p.88). Libya consecutively nationalized BP’s
oil concessions, including the Sarir field shared with Bunker Hunt, withdrew
Libya’s sterling balances in London and imposed a partial oil boycott which was
supported by other Arab states, doubling the posted price of oil.
Politically, Qaddafi tried to impose the revolutionary goals of freedom,
socialism, and unity from top down, while criticizing both communism and
capitalism, “the former as a monopoly of state ownership and the latter as a
30
monopoly of individuals and companies” (idem, p.56), and maintaining a hostile
foreign policy. In 1973, Qaddafi declared a “cultural revolution” which led to
government control of schools, universities, hospitals and workplaces (Oakes,
2012). In the 1970s, Libya claimed leadership of Arab and African revolutionary
forces and the people’s bureaus, aided by Libyan religious, political,
educational, and business institutions overseas, attempted to export Qaddafi’s
revolutionary philosophy abroad (Kerr & Cantu, 2012).
Initially his main focus was the Arab states of North Africa and Middle East:
Qaddafi’s main ambition was to create strong ties between those nations, linked
by the Islamic religion. After years of attempts, however, Qaddafi understood
that those countries were not interested at all in his project, and thus his
interests switched toward sub-Saharan Africa (Forte, 2012). From the
WikiLeaks cables America seemed really worried about the role that Qaddafi
was acquiring in Africa at that time, in fact “Libya led by Gaddafi was also a
major source of aid and investment in numerous African countries” (Idem). It
invested mainly in infrastructure and agriculture, constructing mosques,
hospitals, schools. Qaddafi’s investments in Africa are estimated to be around
150 billion dollar. Notably, after he was release from his imprisonment Feb 11,
1990, Nelson Mandela met with Qaddafi who supported his fight against
Apartheid by training ANC fighters and funding their education abroad15.
From 1969 to around 1973, however, the Revolutionary Command Council
(RCC)16 not only encouraged but actually subsidized indigenous capitalism.
Throughout this period, Qaddafi stressed his respect for private ownership and
carefully differentiated between domestic (characterized as bad only when they
were exploitative) and foreign capitalists (subject to severe regulation).
Consequently, “domestic capitalism flourished and substantial private fortunes
were accumulated in a period in which the regime officially advocated a socialist
system” (St. John, 2013, p.90-91).
By the end of the 1970s, a serious recession plagued Libya due to its
socialist revolution that considerably changed long-standing economic and
15
Article retrieved from: http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/05-01-2014/126547mandela_gaddafi-0/
16
After the coup, RCC was the ruling body of Libya, from 1969 to 1977.
31
social structures. Oil-dominated economy drained manpower from farmland to
urban areas and eventually led to declining global oil prices and Libyan exports
reduced. In response, the regime imported large numbers of expatriate workers
to remedy the agricultural sector. Besides the failure in economic revolution, the
ideal way of direct democracy based on Qaddafi’s Green Book17 was also
haunted by the enemies of democracy, apathy and bureaucracy. “In Libya,
these ills were exacerbated by the huge distances people were required to
travel to attend the various conferences. Frustration occurred and local issues
were constantly raised but rarely resolved” (Oakes, 2012, p.137). All these
setbacks forced Libya and Qaddafi to slow down some ambitious development
projects “which would have led to a greater diversification of the economy
because the regime refused to curtail military expenditures even as the
revenues dropped” (Idem, p.96). Libya had to cut public expenditure, expelled
foreign workers and postponed payment to foreign contractors and some grand
projects such as the Sirte fertilizer complex, the Misrata steel works and the
Great Manmade River18 had to be delayed.
3.4 Confrontation with the US and sanctions from the international community
The wealth redistribution was externally viewed as threats by the US, the EU
and objected internally by some officials such as Mahmoud Jibril, who was
selected to transform the Libyan economy by Saif Al-Islam Qaddafi but strongly
influenced by the advice from western society. “Mahmoud wanted to downsize
the Libyan government and lay off a large segment of the public sector, but in
exchange increase government regulations in Libya” (McKinney, 2011, p.212).
In the 1980s, Libya was confronted with bitter economic sanctions out of
previous hostile diplomacy toward the West. This hostile relationship started
with the shift of American administration that prioritized the international
17
It is a book written by Qaddafi himself, which was published in English in 1976. In the three volumes
of it, Qaddafi explores the reasons of his policies and justifies them. The first volume explains why the
form of direct democracy is the best form of government. In the second, resuming from his Third
Universal Theory, he explains his idea of socialism; while in the third one he addresses certain strata of
the society such as minorities, women and black people.
18
The project was inaugurated in 1983 and involved an investment of 3.3 billion dollar for the 1,900 km
pipeline that would carry two million cubic meter of water per day and irrigate 180,000 hectares of land
in Benghazi and Sirte. The aim was to revitalize industrial and agricultural activities.
32
terrorism above the human rights issue. “In January of 1981, the Reagan
administration forthrightly proclaimed its intention to replace president Carter’s
purported emphasis on human rights with a war against international terrorism
as the keystone of its foreign policy” (Boyle, 2013, p.38). However,
We must never forget that the overwhelming majority of terrorist acts – whether
in number or in terms of sheer human and material destructiveness – have
been committed by strong state against weak states, as well as by all
governments against their own citizens. (Idem, p.40)
In other words, according to Boyle19, America needs to recognize responsibility
for crimes against humanity and not to exclusively blame “weaker” countries.
“Until that time, Americans will continue to become targets of attack by these
frustrated and aggrieved individuals throughout the Middle East and the
Mediterranean” (Idem, p.42). Consequently, president Reagan “ordered that all
economic transactions between the United States and Libya essentially be
terminated and a freeze of Libyan assets held in the United States as well as
Libyan assets held in subsidiaries of U.S. banks located abroad”(Idem, p.45).
In 1982, The United States banned the imports of Libyan oil and prohibited the
export of oil and gas machinery to Libya, and three years later it ordered
American oil companies out of Libya. Exxon and Mobil had already pulled out of
Libya in 1981 and 1982, respectively, claiming that their ventures were no
longer profitable (St. John, 2013, p. 95-6).
As a matter of fact, in 1984, UK broke off diplomatic relations with Libya after a
British policewoman was shot dead outside the Libyan embassy in London
while anti-Qaddafi protests were taking place20. But surprisingly, US intervention
did not expectedly reduce Libya’s military expenditures while “its main effect
was to increase sales to European markets” instead (Idem, p.96). In fact,
European states had little involvement in the dispute between U.S. and Libya.
They would take only minimal gestures in support of the U.S. position…they
would not actively support America in its “war against international terrorism”
19
Boyle is clearly a Qaddafi supporter and friend (as mentioned several times throughout his book),
thus, his position, ideas and theory should be referred to with caution in order not to be misinterpreted
by the reader
20
Available in: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-13755445
33
primarily because of economic motivations was simply unwarranted...The main
reason was simply because of their good faith belief that America’s approach
was fatally flawed (Boyle, 2013, p.91)
Nevertheless, that involvement changed later on, especially during the recent
war period when “the United Nations became an accomplice to, and an aid
and abettor of, U.S./NATO international crime against Libya and the Libyans
during 2011 and beyond” (Idem, p.188)
In 1992, UN imposed sanctions on Libya in an effort to force it to hand over for
trial two of its citizens suspected of involvement the 1988 bombing of Pan Am
flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland and passed UN Security Council resolutions
(UNSCRs) obliging Libya to fulfill requirements related to the bombing before
sanctions could be lifted. Qaddafi initially refused to comply with these
requirements, leading to Libya’s political and economic isolation for most of the
1990s (Kerr & Cantu, 2012) In the second half of 1999, Libya launched fresh
initiatives in Africa and Europe, followed by surrendering the two Libyans
suspected to had been involved with the bombing for trial before a Scottish
court in the Netherlands. In 1999, UN sanctions were suspended and Libya’s
diplomatic relations with UK restored21. By 2000, Libya had reestablished ties
with a large number of states, ending its commercial and diplomatic isolation via
open investment opportunities and a strong emphasis on agriculture, tourism,
and trade (Kerr & Cantu, 2012; St. John, 2013). Two years later, Libya and the
U.S. announced that the countries had held talks to mend relations derived from
all the hostility caused by the U.S. accusations of Libya sponsored terrorism like
the Lockerbie bombing case. Libya signed the UN deal accepting responsibility
and compensating the family victims with 2.7 billion dollars (St.John, 2013).
Consequently, UN lifted the sanctions (McKinney, 2011). Even though Libya
took responsibility, there are still some uncertainty about the facts since the
U.S. was extremely focused on accusing Libya: “the United States and the
United Kingdom were never interested in obtaining justice or truth when it came
to the Lockerbie bombing and its victims” (Boyle, 2013, p.119). These sanctions
seem to serve as a political strategy rather than humanitarian ones. Besides
21
Available in: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-13755445
34
Lockerbie incidents, the U.S. also criticized Qaddafi’s plans concerning women
rights as a mean to justify sub consequent actions. Even though it can be
argued and susceptible to interpretation, the Green Book proclaims to consider
women and men as equal: “Women were free and empowered to do anything
they wanted all over the country…Qaddafi decreed that women are equal to
men..I doubt very seriously that the 2011 US/NATO war will advance the cause
of women in Libya” (Boyle, 2013, p.12).
By the end of the year 2003, Libya disposed weapons of mass destruction
(WMD) and Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), and in exchange, the
International arms embargo was lifted (Kerr & Cantu, 2012).
Gaddafi was going to buy his way into elite circles. Some call it being “in bed
with the west”, but one might still see this as an alternative route of what
Reagan administration officials called a “diplomacy of subversion”. Indeed
Obama seems to have understood it in that matter, refusing at every possible
instance any state visit with Gaddafi (Forte, 2012, chapter 2).
Despite the diplomacy change, Qaddafi continued to criticize the West for
having given Libya little in return though all the concessions it made: “Libya, in
fact, continued to remain on the U.S. list of “state sponsors of terrorism” (Forte,
2012, chapter 2).
3.5 Libya’s compensation and wholesale privatization
In 2003, Libya was elected chairman of the UN Human Rights Commission.
The US and Human rights groups opposed this decision, but the UN decided to
do so, because it believed that if the state were to be appointed chairman,
changes in their Human Rights policies would be enhanced.22 At the same time,
Qaddafi “called for a wholesale privatization of hydrocarbon industry and
pledged to bring Libya into the World Trade Organization (WTO)” (St. John,
2013, p.101-3). This economic policy shift can be illustrated by the Western
Libya Gas Project (WLGP) – major project activated by Libya to exploit its
natural gas fields. The project moved the gas from the offshore platform to
22
Article available in:
www.milanmun.it/DATA/bacheca/file/The%20Respect%20Of%20Human%20Rights%20in%20Libya.pdf
35
onshore near the Algeria’s border and was expected to provide the 30 percent
of Italian’s needs. The Green Stream pipeline made possible the connection
between Libya and Sicily, and then distributed the gas throughout Europe (St.
John, 2013).
Continuing in its humanitarian improvement, in 2004 January, Libya agreed to
compensate the victims of 1986 Berlin nightclub bombing with 35 million dollars.
Once again, the U.S. repaid by ending the economic sanctions.
In August 2004, Libya announced a new round of EPSAs which offered
enhanced incentives for oil and gas exploration in an open, competitive bidding
environment…The high level of interest in Libyan oil development was due in
part to the fact that only 25 percent of the country had been explored to this
point (St. John, p.105).
Libya´s auction of oil and gas exploration licenses interested several U.S.
(mostly Occidental, Amerada Hess and Texaco) and international oil companies
to return to Libya after 20 years of absence. When the oil prices started
declining, around 2007/8, Qaddafi threatened to nationalize the industry,
arguing that the oil-producing states should maximize revenues from their key
resource. This “empty” (was never expected to happen) threat worked and
contracts with ENI, Occidental, Total and Repsol reduced “their oil take from as
much as 49 percent to less than half that amount” (St. John, 2013, p.108).
In the meanwhile, WikiLeaks published US diplomatic cables involving Libya
relations. In which the US, France, England and Italy were “accomplices” of
Qaddafi who collaborated with him, armed him and supported him in order to
protect the oil interests. This support was meant to prevent Qaddafi from
nationalizing the oil and jeopardizing their own interests (McKinney, 2011).
3.6 Bilateral border control and tightened market
Libya entered a new phase, after compensating all victims of terrorism, in
where it had the highest Human Development Index in Africa and the highest
Gross Domestic Production (GDP) in Africa (McKinney, 2011, p. 591).
“Using the removal of sanction as an incentive, the European Union exerted
some pressure on Libya to cooperate with it in intercepting African migrants
36
before they reached EU states” (Forte, 2012, chapter 3). It is not in fact a
coincidence that the same day the sanctions were lifted, the European Union
decided to deal with Libya regarding the immigration concern. In May 2009, Italy
and Libya launched controversial joint naval patrols with the purpose of
intercepting and returning immigrating Libyans that tried to cross the
Mediterranean to Italy. Shortly after, Qaddafi visited Italy formalizing the trading
between the two countries. The history of the deal between Italy and Libya
starts in 2000 with an agreement which aimed at fighting terrorism, organized
criminality, drug traffic and illegal migration. However, only in May 2009 an
operative agreement was reached. The protocol consisted in joint naval
operations under the training of the Italian forces and with technology provided
by Italy (Battista, 2011). The agreement describes the modalities in which illegal
migrants can be sent back to Libya if found heading to Italy. This specific part of
it raised question about the legality of the actions described because, according
to the Geneva Convention of 1951, the refoulement practice violates the human
rights of people who seek refuge. This agreement can be justified by Europe´s
fear that many Africans could enter Europe through Libya. Meanwhile, many
reports condemned the treatment of Libya to the migrants sent back at that
time. Libya was once again (but more strongly) associated with lack of Human
rights 23:
September 2006 was a huge date for Human Rights in Libya. “Human rights
Watch” accuses Libya of abusing the human rights of African Migrants trying to
enter the EU by forcibly repatriating them. Some of the migrants face possible
persecution or torture at home, according to the report. This was the first case
where the Countries Policy on Human rights was actually argued.24
For years Libya had permitted sub-Saharan African workers to cross its borders
to work and study in the country, since it depended heavily on the work of
migrants for the economic growth, especially in sectors such as agriculture and
construction.
23
An example of this was when Sarkozy refused to meet with Qaddafi because of Human Rights issues,
after a profitable agreement between Libya and France. This deal was immediately criticized by some
European countries and later Sarkozy denied the deal and referred to it as “negotiations”.
24
Cited from: http://edition.cnn.com/2013/09/20/world/libya-civil-war-fast-facts/
37
After Qaddafi’s policy towards the Middle Easter countries failed, his attention
turned to Africa and in the attempt of collecting consensus, he invited Africans
to come to Libya for working (De Haas, 2008). However, in 2000 “the Libyan
economy had to deal with the presence of 1.5 million foreign workers, while
200,000 Libyans were unemployed” (Forte, 2012, chapter 3). In September
2000 Libyans, tired of the situation, launched “pogroms” (Idem, 2012) against
black Africans and killed many of them. According to some diplomats, “at least
150 people were killed, 16 of them Libyans”25.
Entering an instable period for Libya, in 2010 the UNHCR was expelled “due to
their operational work on refugees and Human Rights. This was a major issue
because it was the first case of a major UN agency expelled from a country.”26
Nonetheless, Libya collaborated with the European Union by signing an
agreement designed to slow illegal immigration. Libya played a crucial role in
slowing down the flow of illegal African immigrants to Europe.
3.7 Anti-Qaddafi uprising and the war
Libyan foundamentalists Muslims had always been a strong opponent group
to Qaddafi’s change. Qaddafi’s foremost opponents had always been Libya’s
Muslim fundamentalists who detested him for (1) his secular-nationalist rule
deliberately modeled upon his hero and role model, Egypt’s Gamal Abdel
Nasser; (2) his liberation and empowerment of Libyan women; and (3)
Qaddafi’s Green Book that tried to carve-out a third way between capitalism and
communism that was consistent with Islam, but which they nevertheless
considered to be heretical. For the most part, Libyans constitute a moderate
Sunni Muslim population. Yet, in order to overthrow Qaddafi in 2011, the U.S.
and NATO states worked hand-in glove with Libyan and imported foreign
Muslim fundamentalists including members of Al Qaeda and Salafists (Boyle,
2013,p.13).
25
The whole article can be retrieved from
http://www.economist.com/node/392844
26
Article available in:
www.milanmun.it/DATA/bacheca/file/The%20Respect%20Of%20Human%20Rights%20in%20Libya.pdf
38
In the beginning of the year of 2011 Libya was one of the many countries
involved in the Arab spring protests, starting with a series of peaceful protests.
Yet according to Prashad(2012), NATO brought up the issue of “Arab spring” so
as to justify its intervention in Libya, as “they provided the best fog for the
conversion of the previously peaceful Arab Spring into a military conflict” (p.90) .
15 February marked the beginning of the Libyan war. It started with violent
protests in Benghazi that rapidly spread to other cities, leading clashes between
security forces and rebels, pro and anti-Qaddafi groups. In spite of the threats,
Qaddafi insisted in not quitting and remained in control of Tripoli. The next big
development of the war Libya occurred at the end of February, when the
National Transitional Council (NTC) was created with the objective of
representing a political movement that the world could recognize as in
opposition to Qaddafi. The Council obtained the recognition of the Western
world as a legitimate government. The political control of the leadership faction
of the NTC was firmly in the hands of two neoliberal reformers, both of whom
had previously worked in Qaddafi’s regime. One of them was Mahmoud Jibril,
the lead neoliberal "reformer" in the Qaddafi regime, closely with Saif al-Islam
on the privatization of Libya. The other was Ali Abd al-Aziz al-Isawi who was
Qaddafi’s Director General for the Ownership expansion program (privatization
fund), and then later Secretary of the Committee for Economy, Trade and
Investment. They are labeled as “America’s Libyans”(Prashad, 2012, p.202).
The Council obtained the recognition of the Western world as a legitimate
government. Neither NATO nor the NTC was interested in the humanity of
Africans. These forces were interested in removing Gaddafi from power, and
having to negotiate with the African Union was seen as a minor
irritation. (Campbell, 2012, p.244)
It is also important to note that NTC held an ambiguous attitude toward NATO
interventions. For example, on February 27, Abdul Hafiz Ghoga, the NTC’s
spokesperson announced in Benghazi, “We are completely against foreign
intervention. The rest of Libya will be liberated by the people and Qaddafi’s
security forces will be eliminated by the people of Libya” (Idem, p.180).
Nevertheless, Benghazi called for intervention only after March 10, when
39
France recognized the NTC. (..) NATO intervention strengthened NTC’s own
hand among the rebels, and marginalized the more patriotic and anti-imperialist
among them. In that sense, “the NATO intervention was an essential part of the
attempt to hijack the Libyan rebellion” (Idem, p.180).
After the United Nations Security Council Resolution 197327, NATO’s
intervention became legitimate in the war. Although the official purpose of the
intervention was to save lives and free the Libyan population, controversy arose
toward its military actions, especially in Sirte. “The problem was that UN aid
workers were not permitted to enter Sirte, “for security reasons”. Somebody
must have been restricting their movements in particular, especially as
journalists entered Sirte. Those who supposedly claimed the right to protect
civilians were blocking food and medical supplies [from them]” (Forte, 2012,
chapter 2). Besides Libyan civilians, during and after the war black Libyans and
African migrant workers were hunted down and executed because they were
considered mercenaries of Qaddafi. But, in fact, “NATO’s bombings ceased
immediately on the same day (of Qaddafi’s murder), and within days the
operation as a whole was formally ended. Meanwhile the new regime continues
to threaten civilians seen as pro-Gaddafi with arbitrary detention, abduction,
ethnic cleansing, torture, and outright execution” (Idem).
At the same time, several control measures started to be imposed on Libya:
the U.S. and the European Union froze Qaddafi´s assets and imposed an arms
embargo; NATO began a 24 hour air surveillance of Libya; the EU imposes
sanctions on the Libyan Investment Authority.28 These are perfect examples on
how the developed and powerful countries controlled smaller and more
vulnerable countries so easily, despite all the previous “peaceful” agreements.
27
Resolution 1973 (2011) was adopted by UN with a vote of 10 in favour to none against, with 5
abstentions (Brazil, China, Germany, India, Russian Federation), the Council authorized Member States,
acting nationally or through regional organizations or arrangements, to take all necessary measures to
protect civilians under threat of attack in the country. It demanded an immediate ceasefire in Libya,
including an end to the current attacks against civilians, which it said might constitute “crimes against
humanity”, the Security Council imposed a ban on all flights in the country’s airspace — a no-fly zone —
and tightened sanctions on the Qadhafi regime and its supporters.
(http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2011/sc10200.doc.htm )
28
Available in: http://edition.cnn.com/2013/09/20/world/libya-civil-war-fast-facts/
40
In March, “the U.S. and allied forces against Qaddafi regime established an
initial no-fly zone over major cities and air bases near Libyan coast. The first
offensive operation was carried out by French aircraft striking armored units
near Benghazi” (Kerr & Cantu, 2012, p. 11). There were two main reasons why
the no-fly zone was instituted: first of all, the propaganda of the African
mercenaries who arrived flying to Libya to combat in Qaddafi’s forces enforced
the idea of airport as a dangerous hub. Secondly, the alleged suspicion that
Qaddafi was using his air forces for killing his own people. But the information
was not confirmed, according to the words of the U.S. Secretary of Defense,
Robert Gates, when asked. (Forte, 2012, chapter 5). Therefore, the ban of
aircraft did not apply to NATO and its allied flights in the name of humanitarian
assistance, medical and food supplies or evacuating foreign nationals from
Libya. The NATO operation not only aimed at a no-fly zone, but regime change
and foreign nationals residing in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya. “These
international strategists lost no time in pushing through the UN resolution,
because, in the midst of the capitalist crisis, Libya’s leader was threatening to
nationalize Western’s interests” (Campbell, 2012,p.134). In this instance,
“international community” evolved into a synonym for the interests of Western
capital.
While Qaddafi´s discourse focus on how the countries involved in the airstrikes
are terrorists, “the new Nazis” and promises a “long-drawn war”29, Obama´s
speech of March 28, 2011, addresses to the American public about the Libya
situation endorsed these positions: “Tonight, I can report that we have stopped
Gadhafi's deadly advance" and that the United States will "support the
aspirations of the Libyan people" as the "military effort ratchets down."30 Later
on, Qaddafi urged Obama to end the NATO bombing campaign.
In Sirte, Qaddafi’s home town and major hub of development, the population
fought against the NATO and rebel’s forces in order to protect the Leader.
“Many of those fighting the opposition militias were, like the militias, largely
composed of armed civilians..this also jeopardized the “humanitarian protection”
29
30
Cited from: http://edition.cnn.com/2013/09/20/world/libya-civil-war-fast-facts/
Cited from: http://edition.cnn.com/2013/09/20/world/libya-civil-war-fast-facts/
41
motive. If the UN and NATO could work to protect armed civilians supposedly
represented by the NTC, then why not the armed civilians of Sirte?” (Forte,
2012, chapter 1). The United Nation Security Council did not pass a resolution
or take actions regarding the brutal and indiscriminate murders of Sirte
population that happened during the conflict by rebels. Although the war in
Libya was publicized as a humanitarian intervention in order to save lives and
free the people of Libya, the words of Hillary Clinton on NBC 2011/3/27 seem to
contradict it:
Did Libya attack us? No. They did not attack us. Do they have a very critical
role in this region and do their neighbor two countries – you just mentioned
one, Egypt, the other Tunisia – that are going through these extraordinary
transformations and cannot afford to be destabilized by conflict on their
borders? Yes. Do they have a major influence on what goes on in Europe
because of everything from oil to immigration?...So, you know, let’s be fair
here. They didn’t attack us, but what they were doing and Gadhafi’s history
and the potential for the disruption and instability was very much in our
interests and seen by our European friends and our Arab partners as very
vital to their interests” (Forte, 2012, chapter 2).
As a demonstration of economic and geopolitical interests in the region it is
worth mentioning two episodes that occurred. During the war, the American
ambassador in Libya, Gene Cretz, had a conference call with 150 American
companies which hoped to do business in Libya after the war, particularly in the
infrastructure field. While, a week before Qaddafi was murdered, a delegation of
80 French companies arrived in Tripoli for a meeting with the NTC and, in the
meanwhile, the British defense minister urged British companies to do the
same, in order not to be left behind the newly opened profitable market (Forte,
2012, chapter 1). After strong NATO airstrikes hit several rebel vehicles and kill
rebel fighters and civilians, Italy became the third country, after France and
Qatar, to recognize the rebel Council as the legitimate international
representative of Libya.
Even though in April 2011, Qaddafi publically stated that he was ready to
negotiate a ceasefire (but without stepping down), NATO launched a missile
42
attack on a house in Tripoli, killing Qaddafi´s youngest son and three
grandchildren. The crowds responded by attacking the British and Italian
embassies in Tripoli. The Libya Contact group, constituted by the U.S, France,
Great Britain, Italy, Qatar, Kuwait and Jordan, played a major role in the war by
helping the rebels to overthrow Qaddafi. After the U.N. Human rights Council
alleged finding’s on evidence of war crimes against humanity committed by
Qaddafi´s forces the persecution against him increased exponentially. In June,
Qaddafi´s son, Saif al-Islam, announced that Libya was open to national
elections and his father would step down. But the Libyan opposition, NATO and
the U.S. rejected it. Qaddafi´s convictions were never seen to have
disappeared: "The strikes will be over and NATO will be defeated. Move always
forward to the challenge; pick up your weapons; go to the fight in order to
liberate Libya inch by inch from the traitors and from NATO. Be prepared to fight
if they hit the ground."31 After being captured by rebel forces in Sirte, Qaddafi
was killed in October 20th. Eight months of official war finished on the 23th
October. A week passed, the National Transitional Council elected Abdurrahim
El-Keib as acting prime minister. NATO secretary general announced the official
end of the mission in Libya marking the end of the war.
3.8 Aftermath of the War
With Qaddafi out of the way and the end of NATO´s intervention, one can
suppose that the violence and death rate would cease but the post-war
violence in Libya was and is still evident. Without an organized military, the
armed militias continued to attack Qaddafi´s supporters. The proliferation of
weapons from Qaddafi´s stock was an international concern, since it could fall
into the hand of al-Qaeda: there were "increasing concerns over the looting and
likely proliferation of these portable defense systems, as well as munitions and
mines, highlighting the potential risk to local and regional stability” (Sengupta &
Hughes, 2011). Adding to the Libyan already instable environment, thousands
of combatants from Mali and Niger that supported Qaddafi or the National
Transitional Council returned to their countries with innumerous weapons.
31
Cited from: http://edition.cnn.com/2013/09/20/world/libya-civil-war-fast-facts/
43
The National Transitional Council was dissolved and elections took place in July
2012, where Ali Zeidan was nominated Prime Minister. A month later, the power
passed to a General National Congress whose main concern is to organize an
assembly to write Libya´s new constitution. The Constitutional Declaration done
by the NTC will remain effective until the next constitution is finalized.
The instability of the Libyan situation can be represented by several episodes
that occurred over these 3 years after the war. First of all, Zeidan was forced to
leave the country in the early months of 2014 due to internal problems in his
coalition. Secondly, briefly before he fled, one of the several militia groups
which control territories of Libya loaded a boat with oil which belongs to a
reserve owned by an American company and shipped away. When it reached
international sea it was blocked by the American navy and forced to ship back
to the shore of Libya. This is the clear evidence of the weak government that
cannot even control the whole territory of the country. Although the precarious
situation that hit Libya, the initial temporary government NTC admitted that it
would carry on the policy of demonization and hunting of black illegal migrants,
who were thought to be responsible for criminal activities and having been
supporters of Qaddafi. In addition, before Qaddafi was deposed, Italy and NTC
signed an agreement about continuing the policy of patrols against illegal
immigration, causing, thus, many violations of human rights that have been
reported. (Forte, 2012)
In December 2011, with the same speed that European and US oil
companies rushed to Benghazi to shore up existing contracts or secure new
one, AFRICOM (the United States Africa Command) was equally interested
to play a role in rebuilding Libya’s army…AFRICOM would also be part of
developing Libya’s border security forces and women’s role in the
constitution, with training and equipment” (Idem, 2012, chapter 4).
Throughout the history, at the complex intersection of economic and political
powers in Libya, the ideas of third-world countries being backward and in need
of the West to develop are still persistent in the Western world. As Forte (2012)
admits, “We are the standard by which others are measured. We are what the
future of all humanity looks like. The absence of our institutions and values in
44
other societies is a measure of their inferiority. We should help them. We should
help them to become more like us” (Idem, conclusion chapter)
4. European migration legislation
According to the article 1(2) of the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of
Refugees, a refugee is an individual who
Owing a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion,
nationality, membership of a particular social group , or political opinion, is
outside the country of his nationality, and it is unable to or, owing to such fear, is
unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a
nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a
result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, in unwilling to return to
it32.
Libya has never signed the Geneva Convention and, furthermore, “given the
lack of distinction between refugees and migrants, even at legal level” (Hamood
,2006, p.14-15) the violation of human rights and protection of people in urgent
need were not accomplished by the Libyan authorities. All migrants coming to
Libya are defined as ‘economic migrants’.
On the other side of the Mediterranean, EU has been involved in the fight
against illegal migration for years. Since the Tampere Council in 199933 when
priorities regarding migratory policies were settled in terms of joint actions and
partnership, asylum policies, management of migration flows and patrolling, the
interventions of Europe in the matter have been various but mainly with the
same objectives. The Laeken Council in 2001 strengthened the idea of
combating illegal migration through cooperation, special trainings and the
creation of a European school for it34. Libya is a dangerous country in this
32
The entire text of the Convention can be retrieved from
http://www.unhcr.org/3b66c2aa10.html
33
During a special meeting regarding the area of freedom, security and justice in the European Union,
“one of the focal points of the Union’s work in the years ahead will be to strengthen the common
foreign and security policy, including developing a European security and defence policy”
(http://www.europarl.europa.eu/summits/tam_en.htm )
34
The Council reviewed the Tampere Declaration listening the failures, one of those the lack of a “true
common asylum and immigration policy (http://www.euractiv.com/future-eu/laeken-summit-
45
sense, because it is a hub for migrants coming from the sub-Saharan Africa,
who desire to cross the narrow strait of sea to reach Europe in search of refuge
or economic fortune. The West wants the Libyan resources, but not its people.
Therefore, several European countries stipulated bilateral agreements with third
countries, one of these cases is between Italy and Libya. From 2005, the
European Union declared that in all these singular agreements, the type of
collaboration has to include control of borders, contrast of irregular migration
and repatriation as priorities.
The collaboration between Libya and Italy regarding irregular migration
started in 2000. Libya at that time had not recovered yet its position on
international level, but Italy dealt individually with it. From that year, many
agreements followed, always pointing out the importance of joint actions
between the two countries. In December 2007 Italy and Libya adopted a
protocol whose aim was to put into practice the mutual cooperation signed
previously in 2004. Each partner had to intensify the collaboration. The protocol
expects the two states to do maritime patrols with boats provided by Italy, but
with a mixed crew of Italians and Libyans. The latter would have been trained
by the Italian counterpart. The main task was to patrol the Libyan coasts and
sea looking for unexpected boats, eventually carrying rescue operations.
Due to the scarce collaboration of the Libyan authorities, in 2008 Berlusconi and
Qaddafi signed the Benghazi Treaty in order to make operative all the previous
protocols and agreements. This time the patrol of Libyan shores was under the
control of Italian companies which have the technological competences to
succeed. Eventually, on the 6th of May 2009, for the first time, the operative
phase began and Libya agreed on receiving back illegal migrants found in
international and Italian sea.
From the declaration of Italian and Libyan authorities regarding the missions,
they were respecting the international law regarding human rights (Universal
Declaration of Human Rights) and the UN charts regarding refugees.
Unfortunately, Libya has not signed the UN Convention on refugees, and,
milestone-europe/article-117058 ); for this reason, justice and home affairs ministers were called to
make proposal on the matter of asylum and immigration in order to reach a common regulation.
46
furthermore, cases of refoulement, which are absolutely forbidden in the 1951
Refugee Convention, have been documented35. The Article 33 of the
Convention states clearly that the receiving states cannot expel or send back a
person without a previous and accurate checking, because lives can be at
risk36.
4.1 Frontex
One of the more important programs that the European Union has devised in
order to manage its external borders is FRONTEX.
FRONTEX is a European agency for the management of the operative
cooperation to the external borders of the member states of EU. It was created
in 2004 and became operative in 2005. Its budget has been increasing over the
years, from 19,1 in 2006 to 118,1 million euro in 2011. Its major activities are
joint maritime, terrestrial and air actions at the frontiers. Besides the core
actions, it includes additionally training programs for border guardians, analysis
of risk areas and the development of fast and efficient technology. It
collaborates with EUROPOL, the EU anti-crime agency.
The agency and its activities are not transparent (Lunaria, 2013, p.22), and
many organizations have raised doubts about the respect of human rights
during the operations. For example, from 2011 FRONTEX can stipulate
agreements with third countries without the approval of the European
Commission and parliament. In its database of operation, from 2005 until 2012,
219 joint operations were listed, “but the number of interventions is surely
higher since, for example, the operations of forced repatriation performed in
2008 (15) and in 2009 (32) are not registered” (Idem, p.27).
4.2 EURODAC and EUBAM
Since 2003 EURODAC (European Dactyloscopy or fingerprint identification) has
been a system which permits the comparison of fingerprints of asylum
35
Vassallo, July 2010. The entire article can be retrieved from
http://fortresseurope.blogspot.dk/2010/07/litalia-finanzia-e-la-libia-deporta-gli.html
36
The entire text of the Convention can be retrieved from
http://www.unhcr.org/3b66c2aa10.html
47
applicants and certain groups of illegal immigrants. Its aim is to help in the
identification of the EU state responsible for the asylum application according to
the criteria set by the Dublin Convention. Furthermore, the system helps to
determine whether individual had already sought the asylum status and
eventually crossed illegally its borders.
During and in the immediate aftermath of the Libya war and all the others
Arab uprisings, the flow of refugees heading towards Europe increased, to the
point that Italy declared the state of emergency. EUBAM is the European
response to the Libya crisis and, as stated in the website’s factsheet,
a civilian Mission under the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP), to
support the Libyan authorities in improving and developing the security of the
country’s borders..EUBAM Libya supports the Libyan authorities in developing
border management and security at the country’s land, sea and air borders. It
does not carry out any executive functions and the Mission is to achieve its
objectives mainly through the transfer of know-how, not funds..The work is
carried out through advising, training, and mentoring Libyan counterparts in
strengthening the border services in accordance with the international
standards and best practices37.
The program was signed by European member states the 31st of January 2013,
after the insufficient results of many others programs, such as the Tripoli Action
Plan, which was signed the 12th of March 2012 between Libya and neighboring
countries (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Mauritania, Chad, Egypt, Mali, Niger and
Sudan) aiming at strengthening their border control with advanced technology.
The amount of bilateral agreements and programs set by EU to halt the
irregular migration demonstrates the extreme importance that the phenomenon
has gained recently. According to the words of the Lampedusa in Hamburg’s
interviewees, they did not have the intention to come to Europe, because their
lives were in Libya, where they could earn enough money to send remittances
back to their family. On the other hand, Europeans “don’t want me to go
forward. It’s like to lock me in the prison and lock the door. But Libya is not like
37
http://eeas.europa.eu/csdp/missions-and-operations/eubamlibya/pdf/factsheet_eubam_libya_en.pdf
48
that. Even though I was living in there, they would come and ask me if I have a
job. Work and get your money” (Interviewee J., 08-05-2014).
NATO, by intervening in the war, worsened it and people were forced to
escape. Italy, and now Hamburg and Germany in general, have been trying to
get rid of them because there is neither money nor facilities to accommodate
and welcome them all. NATO does not take the responsibility of its actions or
acknowledge that the current refugee crisis within Europe has been its fault.
“It’s called the pottery store rule: “you break it, you own it”. But it doesn’t just
apply to pots and mugs, but to nations..Western governments have resembled
the customer who walks away whistling, hoping no one has noticed the mess
left behind” (Jones, 24th March 2014, the Guardian)38
According to interviewee R., “They just come and destroy Libya. But they did
not think before intervening ‘we need to find some solution for the people living
in Libya’. Before to destroy the house you are supposed to know another place
to put him, you must find a solution for you to stay” (08-05-2014).
The influence of the international community over Libya does not stop at the
level of migration regulation and patrolling, but the United Nations, European
Union and other countries have been trying to raise their leverage on Libya
since the war ended. The reasons behind this can be several, but it is to
remember that Libya is still one of the major deposits of petroleum and natural
gas on earth, and the interests related to this market do not end with a war,
especially when the leaderships of the country is on its way of reconfiguration.
The 12th of March 2012 the United Nations Mission in Libya was approved,
whose major objectives were the assistance through the democratization
process by offering strategic and technical advice. At the beginning the Mission
was meant to last three months, but was prolonged several times on the Libyan
authority’s request.
In addition to this, Europe allocated several million of euro in long-term projects
for Libya. Just to give some example, 4.5 million were allocated in support of
the constitution writing and the development of a democratic and efficient public
38
The full article can be retrieved from
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/24/libya-disaster-shames-westerninterventionists
49
administration, while 8.5 million for health system and 4 million in protection of
vulnerable groups (women, kids, minorities) in order to meet their needs.
Finally, on the 29th of March 2011 after the London conference of Libya the
group called ‘Friends of Libya’ was created (at the beginning its name was
Contact Group). It comprises delegates from Arab League, European countries
as well as NATO and its main scope after the war is to support the democratic
transition of Libya.
50
5. Analysis
The analysis chapter is divided into four main sections: the first addresses
the migration flows towards Libya and the living and working conditions in the
country. It points out a major shift in the immigration policy of Libya: at the
turning of the century, the control at the border with sub-Saharan Africa was
tightened39. The Libyan lives of our interviewees can be placed in this period of
time. Although Libya is considered by many scholars a transit country40, for
some of the members of Lampedusa in Hamburg, it was the final destination:
many of them had stayed long in the country, had a nice place to live in, work
opportunities and good salaries.
The second part of our analysis focuses on the war consequences for the
migrant workers in Libya and subsequent influences on their survival in Europe
This section aims to reveal the narratives of the war and how (mostly foreign)
employers left the African worker behind when the war broke out, exposing
them to great risks as they were abused by the rebels who mistook them for
being Qaddafi’s “mercenaries”. The third section illustrates the comparison of
migrants’ living conditions in Libya with that in Germany and Italy, which justifies
their approval of Qaddafi’s projects and resentment toward NATO, or more
generally, Europe as a whole.
The fourth and final section concludes the analysis by drawing a connection
with the theories.
5.1 Migration to Libya
5.1.1 Libya - a transit country?
Western North Africa has been always highly differentiated from the rest of
the continent for its transitory migration component. Also entitled Maghreb
region41, this area is associated to a crossroad for migration to Europe, even
though such association can be over simplistic:
39
Coincidentally, the first agreement between Italy and Libya regarding the border control was set in
2000.
40
Boubakri, 2004; Hamood, 2006; Bredeloup & Pliez, 2011; De Haas 2008.
41
Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Libya and Mauritania.
51
Since the 1990s, the media have directed the public opinion to the thousands of
Southern Saharan Africans who take life threatening risks crossing the
Mediterranean Sea and Atlantic ocean. This image reflects reality, but only
partially so, for it leads one to believe that the crossing of it - the Sahara in the
hope of reaching Europe is the only and prearranged goal of the migrants. This
simplistic view is misleading because it erases the historical dimension of the
movement of people and its consequences. The Sahara is not merely a desert
to be crossed; it is an area that has been shaped for more than half a century
by the various migrant, trader or pastoral communities who have contributed to
its massive urbanization and economic development. There are tens of
thousands of these migrants who settled down more or less durably in these
new transit areas…where migrants seek employment, create new economic
activities, or develop new skills while working, studying or practicing other
tongues. (Bredeloup & Pliez, 2011, p. abstract)
The Maghreb region, besides being geographically close to Europe, “in
comparison with the majority of African countries even the North Africa looks
prosperous (…) and therefore a stepping stone to a better life. Thus, in recent
years, North African countries have attracted significant numbers of Africans
and also some Asian migrants” (Baldwin-Edwards, 2006, p. 316).
Libya, as one of the Maghreb countries, can also be described as a transit
country (Boubakri, 2004; Hamood, 2006; Bredeloup & Pliez, 2011, De Haas,
2008). A transit country can be defined as a country where migrants or
refugees, in this case Africans, pass and have a short-term stay with the aim of
reaching, in this case, Europe.
However, Libya was not always and not only a transit country, quite the
contrary. Before 2004, Libya represented, for the majority of migrants and
refugees, their chosen destination country.
Libya has a rather different history of migration policy in comparison to its
neighboring countries.
Owing to the development of its oil and an high per capita GDP, it was
always a destination country for labour migrants…the number and proportion
of immigrants in Libya is high: estimates range from 1.1-1.4 million up to 1.8
52
million, of which only 600,000 are legal workers...The majority of temporary
workers traditionally have come from Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco, although
more recent visa-free entry for all of Africa resulted also in large numbers of
sub-Saharan Africans. (Baldwin-Edwards, 2006, p. 313)
As explained in the previous chapter on Libyan history42, Libya started as a
small and poor country but in a decade changed the economic situation due to
the discovery of hydrocarbons.
From the early sixties, the petroleum industry came to dominate the whole
economy, developing swiftly and expanding widely. Libya (…) launch
ambitious programmes for economic and social development with its
newfound resources (…) thus to make Libya self-sufficient in food
production. (Hamood, 2006, p. 17)
This economic improvement combined with Qaddafi´s plans to unify Africans,
including an internal and external campaign encouraging Africans to work in
Libya, turned Libya in the most desired destination country in Africa. In 2004,
Libya had a large Maghrebi community: “200.000 Moroccans, 60.000 Tunisians,
20.000/30.000 Algerians” (Boubakri, 2004). “In many places in Sahara, in Kufra,
al-Qatrun and Sabha in Libya, entire sections of the city have been renamed as
«African neighborhoods»” (Bredeloup & Pliez, 2011, p.3).
Yet migrants in Libya coming from sub-Saharan countries were also in the
country looking for the best route to reach Europe. “Libya has a large illegal
immigrant population – of which a great part is sub-Saharan” (Edwards, 2006,
p. 319).
Many of the migrants ended up wanting to stay in Libya since there was work
and conditions at the time. Libya was among the biggest producing countries of
immigration: “2 to 2.5 million foreigners live there, i.e. 25 to 30% of the country’s
total population” (Boubakri, 2004, p. 2).
Hamood (2006) points to Libya´s transformation from a destination country to
a transit country. Multiple factors made Libya an ideal transit country: the events
happening in 200043; its ease to entry; geographical vicinity to the poorest and
42
43
The case of Libya, page 26
The case of Libya, page 35
53
most conflicted societies; recognition as a destination country; a long coast line
close to Italy and the islands; and, several developments in the field of irregular
migration in neighboring countries of Maghreb (most Morocco and Tunisia).
Libya was “a major arrival and transit zone for flows of people from the African
interior” (Boubakri, 2004, p.7). More important than the reasons why Libya was
a transit country are the reasons why it stopped being such an attractive
destination country.
First of all, Libyan law did not distinguished refugees from migrants.
Libya has effectively no immigration policy. There is no clear distinction
between legal and illegal immigrants, no asylum procedure of system of
protection for refugees, it has not ratified the Geneva Convention on refugees
and it does not recognize the UNHC. (Baldwin-Edwards, 2004, p. 319)
With a legal framework and official rhetoric that did not recognized the existence
of refugees on Libyan territory resulted in a “generalized category of ‘economic
migrants’” (Hamood, 2006, p.19). Refugees had no special treatment, no
national asylum legislation and no administrative structures to place them. Even
though there was no national law on this topic, some brief references of refugee
protection existed in Libyan legislation. Like article 11 of Libyan Constitution
Proclamation in 1969, in Qaddafi´s power, that prohibits extradition of political
refugees. Moreover, Libya as signatory to the OAU Refugee Convention,
applied a broad definition of refugees that obliges states parties to protect the
rights of refugees, including the principle of non-refoulement (Hamood, 2006).
One of the justifications from Libyan officials is that distinguishing refugees from
migrants would result in unfounded applications for asylum, leading to more
intense and undesired migration flows.
Another difficulty posed by Libya to refugees and migrants was all the
requirements of the law since the beginning of the 21st century44. According to
Hamood´s research (2006) foreigners needed a valid visa to enter, to reside
and to leave Libya and violating these could result in prison and a fine. They
also needed to carry 500 dinars to cover expenses while in Libya. A contract of
employment was also a requirement but there was some flexibility here by
44
Whereas, before that period, African workers could enter the country freely.
54
allowing them to obtain it after arrival. For some foreigners obtaining all the
documents was impossible. Libyan officials had mixed messages, as reported
in the media – some showing sympathy and recognizing the reasons of
foreigners, and others describing illegal immigration as an invasion that costs to
Libyans.
Migrants are often presented as causing wide-ranging problems in Libya related
to health, cultural norms, social relations, and the economic situation. They are
also portrayed as bringing about a degradation in the security situation.
(Hamood, 2006, p. 22)
Another method for the Libyan authorities while dealing with migrants was to
label them as migrants in transit, in that way justifying their expulsion from the
country.
There is a blurry frontier between migrants waiting for an opportunity to
continue their journey to Europe and those who settle down – even on a
temporary basis – in a foreign African town. Furthermore, public authorities
encourage such confusion through the media. During police round-us in
Tripoli, Benghazi and Sabha, several sub-Saharan workers who had been
mechanics, tailors and carpenters for many years were expelled from Libya
because they were mistaken for migrants in transit. (Bredeloup & Pliez, 2011,
p.6)
Furthermore, Libya was also a very restricting country towards international
organizations and NGOs intervention. Even though Libyan authorities did not
recognize UNHCR, a small office in Tripoli processed refugees’ applications.
Judging by the proportion of people who apply for asylum on arrival in Italy
having passed through Libya and by the accounts of those refugees and
asylum-seekers in Italy, it would indicate that the majority of people do not
apply for refugee status while in Libya. Rather, they wait until they reach the
EU or elsewhere before doing so, or remain in Libya without recognition of
their specific status as refugees as many do not conceive of applying for
asylum in Libya as a viable or safe option. (Hamood, 2006, p. 23)
55
Despite UNHCR’s attempts to have access to the refugees that were returned
to Libya (from Italy), these were detained and sent to their origin countries
(refoulement).
The only international aid agreement with Libya resulted in a one-year plan of
action (started in 2004) with IOM. It implied four main activities: enhancement of
three reception centers including health services; voluntary programs including
social and economic reintegration assistance; information campaigns in origin
and transit countries with information on risks of irregular migration; initiation of
dialogue between selected countries of origin, transit and destination. From all
these improvements, one key step was missing: ensuring refugee protection
(Hamood, 2006).
In conclusion, Libya, at the beginning of the new century, had major political
and humanitarian problems to foreigners. Even so, the main reason Libya lost
its destination status was due mainly to the decrease of labour offer, thus
resulting in Libya being a road to reach Europe.
Libyan economy no longer requires such a high supply of predominantly
unskilled labour. Information about the decline in the economy coupled with
difficult living conditions and a lack of adequate state protection for refugees
and migrants has filtered out to those thinking of migrating to or through
Libya. Thus, the majority of those interviewed did not present Libya as their
target destination but rather felt that they had little choice but to end up there.
This was either for lack of another place to go to or since they saw Libya as a
temporary stop along their route to the desired destination of Europe.
(Hamood, 2006, p. 28)
5.1.2 Refugees and migrants in Libya
Despite the difficulties mentioned above, there were numerous migrants and
refugees who wanted to work and live in Libya since earlier times. “During the
fifties and the sixties, new worker migrants from the most remote regions (…)
sought employment in the building industry, and on Libyan and Algerian oil
production sites” (Bredeloup & Pliez, 2011, p. 2).
56
According to the official statistics from European Commission of 2005, there
were 600.000 legal foreign workers in Libya45 at that time. That is the case of
our interviewees, members of the Lampedusa in Hamburg group. All
respondents ended up in Europe not by free choice46, their final destination was
always Libya.
My life in Libya was all very delicious. (Interviewee J., 08-05-14)
In Libya I find my life well and forget the problem.” “The Libyan revolution
forced in the direction to Europe, which we are not wishing to come. [The
interviewee indicated how they were happy in Libya] (Interviewee A., 08-0514)
When I came from Mali I looked for a job in Libya. The salary was good and I
sent money to my family (…) I was working in a Libyan factory…I have never
thought to come to Europe. In Libya I was doing my own life. (Interviewee
Mo., 09-05-14)
In at least two cases in our interviews47, even the exit from the origin country
was forced and Libya appeared as the best solution: “If someone is speaking
[human] rights in front of other people, they [the Togo government] can kill you,
or rape you. They took people to prison because of that… Even when you are
sleeping at home, they come and put [your house] on fire and shoot you
(Interviewee M., 07-05-2014). On reaching Libya, the interviewee felt like
“heaven”, because he no longer lived on the street and was well paid.
I left my country against my choice, because we had an election and our
former president died and the government put in power his son. We felt
betrayed by our leaders. So we explained our anger and demonstrated and
then came hunting (these) people. And if you did not escape they would put
in the jail or kill (…) In Libya I find my life well and forget the problem”.
(Interviewee A., 08-05-14)
45
Majority of the foreigners came from Egypt (around 323.000).
War consequences and Europe trip will be addressed further on the analysis.
47
Not all interviewees wanted to tell us why they left their origin country.
46
57
Since all our interviewees (and most of LiHH members) were from sub-Saharan
countries48, arriving in Libya was a complicated trip. The refugees and migrants
acknowledged the difficulty of the travel but the options were limited. As seen
from our interviews, push-factors from their origin country were mainly based on
political persecution, lack of human rights (like interviewee M.) and mostly the
absence of employment opportunities. Meanwhile, the pull factors to Libya were
mainly the possibility of financial improvement (“When we were there [Libya] we
were able to support ourselves, our family”, [interviewee A., 08-05-14]), and the
relative ease to access (at the time the majority of our interviewees went to
Libya).
All these factors influenced refugees and migrants to overcome the
dangerous component of the trip. While for some foreigners, like Egyptians, the
journey is simpler and straightforward, thousands of sub-Saharan Africans
cross the desert “in treacherous conditions, often facing starvation and thirst
leading to death” (Hamood, 2006, p. 43). The majority of travelers died in the
desert. As our interviewee M. told us, it took him almost two months walking
through the Saharan desert to Libya that is more than 5000 km away from
Togo, where he came from. Most people that went with him died on the way
due to lack of water and food. “Even if your brothers or sisters are dying, you
can only leave them and went on the journey by yourself. We all take care of
ourselves” (Interviewee M., 07-05-14). One another case was our interviewee
R. that was born in Cameroon but ran to Nigeria and from there to Algeria until
finally arrived in Libya in a truck with 63 people crossing the desert for 10 days.
But the hard journey does not finish there. “Libyan life is getting difficult.
Because they arrested us, they picked us up and put in prison. They life in
prison is difficult, many people were dying in there”.
As mentioned previously, Libyan authorities and Libyan law were obstacles
for the foreigners. Our interviewees went to Libya in the beginning of the
century (between 2004 and 2008), when the Human rights also became a major
issue in the country: “poor human rights protection” for all residing in the
country, even Libyans. “These violations, which take place in a context of near
48
Interviewees were from: Ghana, Cameroon, Togo, and Mali.
58
total impunity, include: arbitrary and unlawful detention, incommunicado
detention, torture and ill-treatment, unfair trials, and the death penalty”
(Hamood, 2006, p. 29).
In Hamood´s research, the majority of the sub-Saharan interviewees was
detained, deported and suffer torture because of their black skin color. In our
interviews, like the already mentioned R. experience, the welcoming in Libya
was not the easiest.
However, all our interviewees expressed a complex and well-thought opinion
about the welcoming by Libyan nationals. Even though interviewees recognized
an extreme racist Libyan society, they mainly appreciate the opportunities they
were given (as in opposite of their conditions at the present moment). Our
interviewees’ general appreciation of Libya must be carefully analyzed. To us,
their discourses were mainly influenced by their war experiences and the forced
trip to Europe. When they praise Libyan life and conditions they do so by
comparing it with the counterpart now in Hamburg (and in Europe in general).
Libyans were good people. I have been discriminated for the color of my skin.
I have been in prison for three months in Libya. It was very dangerous and
there were many Africans in there. (Interviewee Mo., 08-05-14);
For most Africans you see in Libya, we are coming there because of Qaddafi
authority asked to several African countries, they can come, we were
welcome there. You can enter and go. That’s why when the crisis started the
people assimilated us as mercenary, but that is not true. Qaddafi opened his
country to Africans. That’s why for most of us we don’t need to take a
visa49…The racism is in any part of the society and it depends how you are
approaching the people. When the black and the white have contact, as soon
as the contact come in between they fight because they don’t have same
ideology, but in Libya they are very good (…) As soon as you are leaving with
them they know you and it is ok. When you start to know each other it is
easier and you are welcome (Interviewee A., 08-05-14).
49
However, all foreigners needed documentation to enter Libya, as mentioned before. This interviewee
conditions were an exception and for that reason he did not pass by the long and complicated process,
since he entered Libya easily with already a contract to work in the Congo embassy as chief security.
59
The main (to some, the only) motive to make these refugees appreciated of
Libya was the employment opportunities. Interviewee J., to start with, worked
for a German construction company and he had a contract before even leaving
Ghana. The company also provided him accommodation. He did not have
relationships with Europeans, Americans and even Libyan colleagues but he
socialized better with the Libyans, “they are not like Europeans. Libyans are
more quite good than Europeans” (…) they (Libyans) would come and ask me if
I have a job. They give you food, money, everything. Walk and get you money”
(Interviewee J., 08-05-14).
Like interviewee J., interviewee A. came to Libya already with a job offer in the
embassy. “When we were there we were able to support ourselves, our family. I
had to help my family. (…) I worked in Congolese embassy and that’s the
opportunity Libya gives to foreigners to have more possibilities to wake. When
us sub-Saharans came to Libya, we finally find more easily a way to live a
normal live” (Interviewee A., 08-05-14).
To our interviewee R., the reality was quite different. He was forced out of his
country and from there he passed through different countries. For him, racism is
the main problem but the work offer is worth it.
Libyans don’t like our color. Nobody gives you money. But some are good
and some no good. There are so many jobs. (…) In Libya everything is free.
Just pay the house. Rent, light, water is free, gas is free (…) I worked a lot, I
worked in a restaurant, painter. Nobody can ask document, you can work
free. But the problem is that so many people hate our color. (…) I had some
Libyans friends. When I need to go out there were Libyans, they take stones
and throw at you.(Interviewee R., 08-05-14).
To another interviewee working in Libya was also a way to provide for his
family: “I came to help my family (…) I was working in a Libyan factory. There
were many Africans from different places, Mali, Ghana. The boss was Libya.
(…)The salary was good and I sent money to my family” (interviewee Mo., 0905-14).
60
Lastly, interviewee M. summarizes what all our interviewees (and several
members we had contact with in LiHH group) felt while in Libya: “heaven” - he
no longer lived on the street and was well paid (Interviewee M., 07-05-14).
5.1.3 Leaving Libya
As discussed in this chapter, Libya was mainly a transit country in the turning
of the century, however our interviewees did not choose to leave Libya. The war
of 2011 changed the phenomenon of exiting Libya in direction to Europe. And
before analyzing the conditions of our interviewees’ journey during the war, it is
necessary to note that immigration out of Libya was already an occurrence
chosen by many.
To those who reached Libya in order to achieve “the dream that is Europe”50,
the journey was still yet to be completed. The final step is the boat trip to reach
Europe: “The European Commission [2005: 48] estimates «approximately
15,000 migrants tried to reach the Italian coast illegally by crossing the
Mediterranean Sea»; however, it does not specify the period of time nor how
many of these people departed from Libya” (Hamood, 2006, p. 49).
In recent years, research has attested to four main sea routes operating
across the Mediterranean: from the Maghreb (I.e. Tunisia, Algeria and
Morocco) to the southern coast of Spain; from Turkey to Greece or Sicily;
from the south-eastern Adriatic coast to Italy; from Egypt and Tunisia to Sicily
or mainland Italy, sometimes via Malta. What is new is the addition of Libya
to this list as a main Mediterranean sea route to gain access to Italy and
thereby to mainland Europe. (Idem, p. 49)
Libya, then, came out as a new and relative easy route to reach Europe.
However, the journey was a business (for the smugglers who profited from it)
with serious difficulties.
The three main problems relating to the boat trip are: overcrowding, the poor
condition of the boat resulting in technical failures, and the lack of a
‘professional driver’. The boats seem to vary significantly in size and quality.
50
As said by one of the members of the LiHH group, during our participant observation in 8th May of
2014.
61
Small inflatable boats as well as large, old wooden fishing boats of differing
sizes are commonly used. Regardless of the type of boat, the prerogative of
the smuggler is to squeeze in as many passengers as possible into each
boat. The number of passengers per boat, as related in interviews, varies
between 20 and 199. (Idem, p. 51)
To sum up, the risk and dangers of the travel before the war were beyond
imagination, “however, their feelings of despair and frustration in their countries
of origin, transit or asylum, are such that they are willing to risk everything for a
chance, albeit slim, to reach Europe” (Hamood, 2006, p. 77). Libya represents a
viable location for short term residence for some foreigners. For others, the stay
is overshadowed by racism, risk of detention and ill-treatment and possible
deportation to their country of origin. These experiences push them to continue
the journey to a more secure place in Europe.
5.2 The war period
After the Libyan war broke out, few Africans were either informed of the
situation or offered any humanitarian assistance, as was promised in NATO’s
mission for legitimizing its intervention. “Despite the fact that Western and Asian
foreigners are being increasingly evacuated from the country, few African
embassies have started repatriating their citizens” (Bredeloup & Pliez, 2011,
p.14). Our interviews also shed lights on the helpless situation of African
migrants who were exposed to war crimes in Libya:
The German company I worked for proposed me not to go during the war,
saying that ’we will help you and protect you’, but when the war started we
did not see anybody. They just left us. The only way [left] to me to escape is
coming to Europe. (Interviewee J, 08-05-2014);
When the war started everyone was in really hard situation, we Africans,
mainly sub-Saharan because Westerns send planes and take their people.
[While] those Africans countries don’t have enough possibilities to move their
population direct by air to their own countries. We were in trap (Interviewee
A, 08-05-2014);
62
When the war started [there was] no place to go, they blocked all the roads. I
cannot go back home. Everybody [in the company] left but a [Libyan] soldier
helped me to a boat and saved me. (Interviewee R, 07-05-2014)
According to western propaganda, the Libyan “civil war” (Forte, 2012) was
waged against Qaddafi’s abuse of the civilians. But ironically, from the
perspective of migrants, it was Europeans who tramped on their lives during the
war while Libyans, or more likely, Qaddafi who took effort to help them out of
the life-threatening condition.
For me I was a chief security and I had to stand, the staff left and I there.
Later the Qaddafi’s regime sent the military to come and assist us, to make
the embassy secure. (Interviewee A, 08-05-2014);
Talking about the soldiers who took some people and brought them to boats,
they did not want you to be affected by the war, they said to leave the place,
that’s why I trusted them. They were Libyans. It is Qaddafi doing
it.(Interviewee J, 08-05-2014);
When the war started, the factory closed and I wanted to go back to Mali but
all the frontiers were closed. Soldiers came to my house in Tripoli and
brought me in a boat. They were pro-Qaddafi. I have not paid anything.
(Interviewee M, 09-05-2014)
On the one hand, given little concern of western companies in Libya to their
migrant employees’ life or death, most African migrants held suspicious view of
NATO’s “benevolent” purpose for “saving lives”, which planted in their head the
seeds of hatred even before they came to Europe. On the other hand, however,
Europe’s indifference towards African workers in contrast to the emergency aid
from pro-Qaddafi forces led Libyans, the rebels in particular, to regard subSaharan Africans as mercenaries, resulting in more jeopardized situation for
them: “many Libyan civilians tend to confuse the bulk of immigrants with those
militia members, because the Islamic Legions, a motley crew of mercenaries
recruited among immigrants, have history of wreaking havoc in Africa…[They]
are therefore trapped on Libyan soil” (Bredeloup & Pliez, 2006, p.14).
63
Reasonably, most African migrants in Libya firmly believe that the EU has to
be blamed for their losses at war and should thus compensate them with more
than just a grant of refugee status. Unfortunately, partly due to silence in media
coverage, the opposite mentality is still persistent among European
governments and some of its citizens. They tend to perceive refugees as
trouble-makers of their own, and are thus reluctant to channel national
resources into helping them.
Conventional narratives about migration and North Africa…ignore the
significance of Libya as a guest-worker country for the region. Such
approaches…focus upon illegal migration to Europe, advocate a policy of
‘root causes’ of migration which can be remedied with economic aid.
(Edwards, p.311-12)
Despite that there was also negative publicity associated with NATO (Campbell,
2012) in the period of Qaddafi’s death, French, British and the US politicians all
issued similar statements about the “historic victory” of NATO mission. Anders
Fogh Rasmussen, the NATO Secretary General, declared on October 31, 2011
the end of NATO intervention and gloated in his speech, “It’s great to be in free
Libya” (Idem, p.321). “In public, the NATO information department claimed that
‘the actions of NATO were in compliance with international law. But in private,
the NATO information operations experts wanted Western media to focus on
Gaddafi’s crimes.” (Idem, p.320) Mass media fed western audience with this
distorted image of democracy and freedom in Libya and thus distracted them
away from the truth of insecurity and bloodletting crimes during the “civil war”.
As a result, rumor spread over Europe that Libya war was now but an excuse
for African immigrants to be smuggled into their countries, leading to a strict
border control adopted in the Mediterranean. Worse still, Libyan authorities
could not afford adequate protection to the vast majority of refugees and
migrants in Libya because lack of distinction between them. “The irregular
status of many, both while en route to the European Union (EU) and when
based in Libya, leads to a heightened sense of vulnerability” (Hamood, 2006,
p.8).
64
At the harbor you can see thousands and thousands of people and if you
asked ‘what are you doing here?’ they would say ‘arrested, arrested’. When
NATO and allies decided to shoot a lot of missiles, Qaddafi [also] shot his
own missiles with people through the Mediterranean because Europe is
always scared of immigrants, [and] of refugees. (interviewee A, 08-05-2014)
Reports on the hunting of Qaddafi also eclipsed news about rebel attacks on
so-called "mercenaries", who were often dark-skinned migrant workers or some
hapless southern Libyans.
One rebel, Ahmed Bin Sabri showed The Independent's Kim Sengupta the
bodies of thirty men, hands tied behind their backs, bound and dumped on
the side of the road. "Come and see' he said, These are blacks, Africans,
hired by Gaddafi, mercenaries." Racism combined with a visceral hatred for
Qaddafi found its outlet on these dark-skinned soldiers and migrant workers.
"Any Libyan with a black skin accused of fighting for the old regime may have
a poor chance of survival," wrote Patrick Cockburn in late August. (Prashad,
2012, p.227)
On February 18, 2011, fifty “African mercenaries” and Libyan conspirators were
said to be executed by rebels in Al Bayda (Idem, 2012). “Statistics surrounding
deaths of irregular migrants are notoriously difficult to locate”(Hamood, 2006,
p.59). According to the Italian Ministry of the Interior, 500 people are thought to
die attempting to reach Italy by sea each year (Hamood, 2006). One of our
respondents claimed that he was arrested by the militias before he managed to
escape, “when the situation (conflicts) increased, even military were not secure,
neither me. So I left. It’s not [that] I left with my choice. I was arrested on the
streets because the escalation went high” (Interviewee A, 08-05-2014).
5.3 Life in Europe
Unfortunately, even for African immigrants who survived the arduous voyage,
they have to deal with new frustrations- their nightmare of life struggle in Europe
was yet to come. As one of LiHH members put it, “We came here for a better
life only to find out we had to wake up from a sweet dream and face with the
miserable reality”. In our field trip to Hamburg, we took a visit to “the tent”, in
65
Steindamm 2, a shelter where most African refugees gathere, distribute
information and rest, located next to the central train station. The tent is only a
few square meters but almost packed with (approximately 15) people during the
day. It is open day and night and when we were there it was said to us that
more than 50 refugees take turns to sleep there at night, since other shelters
were shut down by the German government at the end of April, because the
municipality “winter program” (protecting refugees from the harsh winter) was
over. Inside the tent, there was water stored in a large plastic container, several
packages of plain bread, and electricity provided from 8.a.m. to 8 p.m. by the
pharmacy behind. After introducing ourselves to the refugees, we were treated
quite friendly and let to sit on their seats even though they themselves could
hardly move due to limited space (only four chairs and a trunk case for sitting).
Based on our observations, some of the local people are supportive to the LiHH
group and recently (May 1st) a group attempted to occupy a dismissed school
and to establish permanently a refgee welcome center in St.Pauli district for the
new and future refugees to come. We participated at one of the assemblies, but
got the impression that they are not well-organized and spend long hours
negotiating with the refugees instead of initiating specific actions to improve
their general well-being. Gradually, the migrants lost patience with either the
support group and local authorities after years of homeless life on streets in Italy
and Hamburg. Once again, their resentment grew towards current situations
especially when the topic of Libya was brought up.
See how we are living in Germany…They are not doing anything (Europe
and NATO), they just come and destroy Libya. But they did not think before
intervening we need to find some solutions for the people living in Libya.
Before to destroy the house you are supposed to know another place to put
him, you must find some solutions for you to stay. You are supposed to think
about our future before the war to kill Qaddafi, but they don’t think about us. I
spent 3 years in Italy and after the program they push everybody out. How
can you do it? (Interviewee R, 07-05-2014);
They (NATO) are the same people that were pushing the human rights,
democracy and then they went there to overthrow a legitimate government.
66
They said they wanted to save civilians, but now the civilians are here in their
country and they are not able to take care of them…When we came to Italy
we were 60,000 of people (and it) is nothing for Europe, but they are not able
to handle us. You see here in Hamburg, we are 300 and Hamburg does not
want to care of us. It (the European policy) is really disappointing.
(Interviewee A., 08-05-2014)
Our interviews confirm the scale of hypocrisy from the Western “humanitarian”
mission, considering EU’s ill treatment to African immigrants. There is also
evidence from a Western strategic report:
The tactical air campaign was initially shaped to protect civilian lives, in
accordance with the UN mandate. As such, it was a gradualist and coercive
approach, and not one that was designed to remove Qaddafi from power
rapidly. However, the latter goal appeared to be the implicit desire of the
main countries involved—France, Britain and the United States. (Campbell,
2012, p.212)
Compared with other refugees who had only negative experiences before
coming to Europe , it is even harder and more painful for those migrant workers
who used to earn their living in Libya to integrate into a hardly African-friendly
society. In spite of some local support, the homeless life in Europe constantly
reminds them of their “good old days” and in a way prevented them from
moving forward. The respondent J told us that “Libyans are not like Europeans.
Libyans are quite (better) than Europeans. Sure 100%.” (Interviewee J., 08-052014). Paradoxically, the groups that deserve most attention and assistance in
assimilation turn out to be the most neglected ones in the migration flow, solely
because their country of origins are not categorized as war-place emergency.
In fact, they were cornerstones in shaping Libya as a “semi-peripheral” country.
Migrants’ dependence on Libya’s booming economy on the one hand tied the
sub-Saharan African countries (peripheral countries), to the North African ones
and thus on the other hand exempted them from direct manipulation of the
west, accompanied by less insurgence against the core nations as a result.
Moreover, as a geographically attractive host country (bridging Europe and
Africa), Libya leveraged its oil interests with migration policy bound to European
67
border control. Nevertheless, respondent A told us that they were the first group
to be kicked out by Italy:
I did not receive any of the 500 Euros offered by the Italian government to
others who left the country later. They (the government) bought us ticket and
asked us ‘where do you want to go’. [We said]’Ok, now we stick together and
go to Hamburg’. They gave us 100 Euros for the travelling. Can you imagine?
I used that money for getting passport and changing from Munich to
Hamburg. On the 15th November 2013, the program [in Italy] closed and we
cannot go back to Italy because they have the same problems
(unemployment and crisis). They kicked us out. We are left behind by the
European policies. They (the German government) asked us to go back but if
we go back to Italy, where should we stay? That is the problem and this is
why we move to Hamburg. Some of the people understand, come close to us
and give us a shelter. But the government denied us and said it was Italy’s
problem but it was not true. (Interviewee A, 08-05-2014)
Although NATO had overthrown an authoritarian Libyan government, it failed to
replace the chaos with either economical or geographical security because the
war cut off the close ties between sub-Saharan African and North African
countries abruptly. Like most authoritarian populists, Qaddafi won great
popularity among migrant workers for his idea of wealth redistribution, but he
was never keen on the transfer of authority and decision-making to localities
who might then harness their newly provided wealth for the betterment of their
towns and villages (Prashad, 2012). “Instead, Qaddafi turned over the fruits of
social wealth to the people at the same time as his regime centralized the
mechanism for the redistribution of those fruits” (Idem, p.108). Fragile as they
were, Libya’s economic structure and social welfare system depended heavily
on the Qaddafi regime, which, when it collapsed, incurred a chain of reactions in
the whole African world.
Qaddafi helped so many countries in Africa, many Africans. Many Africans
travelled to Libya, but when you reached Libya you are free, nobody can ask
you permission to work. He has done a lot of things. When Qaddafi was alive
many people go to Libya. I cannot say Qaddafi is good or bad. He is not a
68
bad person. Even in Libya, you cannot see people living outside. Everybody
gets his own place to rest, everybody lives well in Libya. (Interviewee R, 0705-2014);
Libya comes from almost 10 years of sanctions. When the sanctions were
released Qaddafi tried to build pan-africanism but Westerners think that the
position Qaddafi takes was really strong and that tomorrow they would not
have any benefits and decide directly. That’s why already they tried to make
propaganda to weaken Qaddafi, that he was a criminal, terrorist. I am not
Qaddafi’s loyal, but I defend the actions he did for us. We are the reality.
(Interviewee A, 08-05-2014)
Now that Libya is no longer an attractive destination for sub-Saharan
immigrants, they invariably turn to Europe for help and thus “emergency” arose.
Moreover, “Libyan winter”(Prashad, 2012) caused a pan-African winter in terms
of economy since the war crippled several ongoing profitable projects, for
example, the LAP (Libyan African Investment Portfolio) established in 2007.
LAP announced the launch of a satellite which would have covered the entire
continent. In this way the communication through the Internet and voice as
well as educational services would have been provided with relatively low
cost. Having its own satellite, Africa did not need any more to pay 500 million
dollar for using Western one. But when the UN authorized intervention in
Libya it imposed an asset freeze on both the LIA and the LAP, and without
any explanation continued to freeze well past six months after NATO’s
bombing campaign ceased. (Forte, 2012, chapter 3)
In times of deteriorating economies, the wishful thinking of better lives in Europe
generated huge migration flows through Libya among sub-Saharan
Africans.“Since internal migration possibilities (in Africa) diminished with
worsening economies, and South labor migration options were reduced…,
‘migration for survival’ has emerged as a composite type” (Edwards, 2006,
p.315) after Libya was forced to end its role as a semi-peripheral country. Most
African countries fell back to its mire of corruption, thus widening the gap
between the rich and poor. According to one of our respondents, before the
69
outbreak of the war, he managed to send remittances back to Mali, supporting
his family with schooling and medical care. But when NATO started to
intervene, “soldiers attacked our house and stole our money”(Interviewee Mo.,
09-05-2014).“The impact of migrant remittances for sub-Sahara is now such
that … ‘all local development is based on emigration’ ” (Edwards, 2006, p.315).
In that sense, now that Libya ceases to support the sub-Saharan development
after the war, family concerns of African workers also affect their decisions to
migrate further to Europe.
5.4 Semi-peripheral Libya
Getting to know the number of migrant workers in Libya, the conditions and
experiences that some of these workers had in their time in Libya (through the
interviews) came to illustrate the theoretical assumptions of this report.
In a previous theoretical chapter, Libya was defined as a semi-peripheral
country in Wallerstein´s world-system theory. The semi-periphery status was
described as both exploited and exploiter country that has as main interest to
maintain a balance between the core countries and peripheral countries
(Wallerstein, 1974).
Libya was once a peripheral country, dependent on the resources and labour
force from other powerful countries. However, its geographical characteristics,
oil and other natural resources, made North Africa more interesting and useful
for core countries (mostly to Europe and U.S.) interests. “(…) there is not a
serious problem of brain-drain for any North African country; unfortunately, the
same cannot be said for much of the rest of Africa” (Edwards, 2004, p. 316).
While most Maghreb countries remained peripheral countries, Libya started to
gain to some extent autonomy after the discovery of oil fields. According to the
theory, Qaddafi was even trying to ascend Libya to a core country (independent
Pan-African, nationalization of Libyan oil, etc.).
The growth of Libya was undeniable. Libya´s improvement was strictly
influenced by its migration flows and vice-versa. In a first moment, Libya
became more resourceful and in a need for force labour, moment in which
innumerous migrant workers, especially from sub-Saharan countries, chose
70
Libya as the destination country. When the work force became obsolete, Libya
started marking some rules and impediments, slowing the migration down, or
turning these working migrants in transitory migrants. In a sense, Libya showed
to oscillate between open-door policy and expulsion periods according to the
international economic situation and the relations with neighboring countries
(Bredeloup & Pliez, 2011).
On the other hand, Libya was still dependent on U.S. and Europe´s interests.
Most of our interviewees worked for core countries’ companies (like so many
more from the LiHH did). The influence of these core countries on Libya was
already visible and they just turned clearer with the outbreak of the war. But still,
under Qaddafi´s power, Libya was still a powerful migrant-creator country that
had a strong influence over several sub-Saharan countries.
Libya being defined as a transit country can be relative compared with how
Libya is a semi-periphery. Libya became mainly a transit country due to its good
conditions, ease to enter and even the possibility of short-term stay to transform
in a longer stay since there was work opportunities. But it was the geographical
characteristic that made migrants and refugees aim to go to Libya in order to
achieve the real destination, the “dream” that is Europe. In a sense, the way
Libya is perceived in the matter of migration is similar to the role Libya has in
the world-system. Libya was not the destination that migrants searched for,
because that corresponds to the core countries (where the assumption is that
innumerous work and educational opportunities exist, where everyone relies on
security and human rights to protect them, and where the general quality of life
is superior). At the same time, Libya was not either the country from where
people tried to escape, that corresponds to the peripheral countries (where the
life conditions are unbearable and have a high number of immigrants).
Therefore, Libya was a transit country. Even though this is a very abstract
and relative comparison, this exemplifies how Libya has always been a
mediator, an intermediate between two opposite yet complementary
sides/realities. This mediator characteristic can also be seen in the political
history of Libya - Qaddafi´s plans that were sometimes oriented to a
nationalized and independent Libya, and other times oriented to follow the west
71
demands and interests. These Interests culminated in a war that would come to
transform Libya´s semi-peripheral status.
Since the end of the Libyan war in October 2011, Libya has been struggling
to maintain peace within its borders. Militias that have fought Qaddafi’s forces
do not recognize the central government and still control some regions. The oil
companies that once were operating in the country now are seeing their
possessions occupied by those militias and the production strives to come back
to the pre-war level. Moreover, many migrants who were employed in foreign
and local companies and participated in the economic growth, left the territory.
The current situation jeopardizes the semi-peripheral status of Libya, since its
resetting depends heavily on the West’s programs described above.
72
6. Conclusion
While most existing literatures investigate the influence of migration flow on
its receiving countries and recognize the issue as an “emergency”, especially in
Europe, our project takes an alternative route: it attempts to examine the
political and economic dynamics of departure country-Libya in our case-that
shaped such migration decisions in a global context.
Although Libya is considered by many scholars a transit country51, for the
majority of our interviewees in Hamburg, it used to be their final destinations,
where they enjoyed a great improvement in financial situation and life quality,
provided by decent jobs. Most of their jobs involve construction and oil oriented
work that is not only critical to Libyan economy but also cater to Western
interests. The refugees and migrants acknowledged the hardship of the
emigrating travel but when most our interviewees left their countries, it was
relatively easy for them to enter Libya, because not until the turning of the
century did Libya tighten its border control with sub-Saharan Africa. As a semiperipheral country at the time, Libya attracted countless sub-Saharan Africans
with its diplomatic hospitality towards migrant workers. In spite of the occasional
exposure to racism, most of them prioritize their concerns for work offer over
discrimination. Nevertheless, the “civil” war in Libya destroyed their previous life
“in heaven” and forced them to flee the country at all possibilities.
Meanwhile, they were left behind by the foreign employers when the war
broke out, hunted and abused by the rebels who mistook them for
“mercenaries”. According to them, however, they managed to escape mainly
with the support of pro-Qaddafi allies. As a result, their narratives on the war
were largely based on personal experiences, implying the hypocrisy of NATO
intervention in the name of human rights.
Unfortunately, after arriving in Europe from Libya, those immigrants
remained homeless and unemployed for years and the local governments
denied their basic rights for survival. There are almost 300 members of LiHH
and based on our observation, most of them have to sleep together at a quirky
little tent that can hardly accommodate 6 people in ordinary times. Worse still, to
51
Boubakri, 2004; Hamood, 2006; Bredeloup & Pliez, 2011, Haas, 2008
73
appease some local complaints, Hamburg authorities attempt to shut down
even B5, the only relatively spacious shelter for refugees to stay overnight.
Resentment towards NATO or more generally, Europe as a whole thus grew
among migrant workers due to Europeans’ hostile “welcome” and its sharp
contrast to previous living condition in Libya. Once again, their perception of the
war was reconfirmed by how they were treated as refugees in Europe.
Finally, beyond the country level, the European Union also played an
essential role in patrolling its borders, and in the aftermath of the Libyan war,
participated actively in the control of Libyan coastline, via launching a series of
programs such as FRONTEX and EURODAC.
As the power relations and economic interests develop over time between
Libya and the west, migration flow in Libya evolves accordingly, once under
control but exploded into chaos later and resulting in emergency at present.
Much has been debated on the current situation of refugees and immigrants but
the mechanism behind their life struggle was kept in shadow.
Concluding, our research aimed not only at providing a description of the
recent and current events before and after the Libyan war and its refugees, but
it is meant to bring more reflections about the role and the responsibilities of the
international community, especially composed by U.S. and Europe, into recent
wars, among which Libya is only the last one. Draconian immigration
legislations are the tip of the iceberg, because underneath it, an extensive
amount of economic and political interests are at play, which provide
justifications and, at the very end, create even more complications (see the
current situation of Libya and its government). The refugees of Lampedusa in
Hamburg and their struggle to survive within Fortress Europe are an example of
this intersection of powers.
The new Parliament that is going to be formed after the upcoming European
elections will have to deal with new demands for free movements within the
European borders presented by Lampedusa groups (and not only) and new
massive arrivals to the Southern Europe coasts caused by the Syrian war.
Moreover, there is a real and urgent necessity of new structural and
comprehensive policies to tackle with the refugees and migrants issue at its
74
root, namely the countries of origin, perhaps with development programs, rather
than short-sighted patrol regulations which do not reach the expected results.
Will be Europe and the International community as a whole willing to undertake
this major challenges?
75
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