In Libya’s vast southern desert, three men have resumed what they call their “taxi service.”
The passengers aren’t tourists or locals. They are mostly young men from neighbouring African countries desperate to cross the border and head north toward Europe. And with each ride paying $180 to $250 even as coronavirus wreaks havoc on some of the world’s poorest people, it’s a business that’s still proving as lucrative as ever.
“We don’t reduce our fees because those who want to migrate have no other choice,” said one smuggler based near Sebha, a city in Libya’s southwest, 770 kilometres (480 miles) by road from the war-torn capital of Tripoli.
Migration through Libya eased during the height of the pandemic after governments locked down and closed frontiers to curb the spread of the deadly virus. As African economies crater because of disruptions to supply chains and farming, violence and food insecurity are increasing—and traffickers say people are on the move again. The alarm has already gone off in the European Union.
The EU has invested heavily in keeping arrivals at bay since 2015, when more than a million people mostly fleeing Middle East war zones sought safety. It’s paid Turkey to house refugees and given money to the Libyan coastguard. But the political damage has lasted as anti-immigrant populists gained succour across the continent.
Back then, the influx came on the heels of a debt crisis that crippled Greece, the EU’s gateway to the east, and the country is still struggling to cope. This time, the coronavirus has put Italy, the main destination for people crossing from Libya, in the spotlight as Europe’s soft economic underbelly.
In April, the Italian government declared its ports “unsafe” due to the pandemic and said it wouldn’t authorise the landing of rescue boats until the end of the emergency.
“In Brussels, the impact of Covid in Africa is something they know they need to address,” said Camille Le Coz, a policy analyst at Migration Policy Institute Europe. “The European Commission is preparing for different scenarios. The last migration and refugee crisis in 2015 taught them they need to plan in advance.”
Europe is facing its biggest financial hit since World War II as the virus ripped through the continent and governments confined people to their homes. The U.K., Italy, Spain and France have recorded the most deaths after the U.S. But they also have the money. In Africa, where casualty rates are lower, it’s a matter of surviving the economic fallout.
On the edge of the Sahara, the south of Libya is bristling with foreign mercenaries and jihadist groups, and illicit trading of everything from weapons to gold. Those in the business of trafficking humans said they are mostly seeing people from neighbouring Chad, Sudan and Niger because the trip costs less. But they are also seeing some trekking from further afield, such as Eritrea, Ghana, Mali and Nigeria.
The three Libyan smugglers interviewed for this story were in their late 30s and early 40s, and hail from the country’s south. They spoke on the condition of anonymity.
People paying to transit Libya “feel that once they reach Europe, their lives will be better than it is in their countries, where their salaries and income is weak,’’ said one trafficker. “In the world and in stable countries, especially Europe, the situation is good,” said another. “They have this belief that their arrival means that they will never go to bed hungry.”
One of the men said he recently received a phone call from a contact outside Libya who hadn’t been in touch for a long time. After the conversation, he now expects the numbers of new migrants crossing into Libya to increase once tighter border controls in central African countries are loosened.
The drivers said they were busiest in the summers of 2015 and 2016, when they made about 30 trips carrying 20 passengers each time. Last summer, they did only two trips as European efforts to thwart irregular migration started to bear fruit. But the trend is upwards again.There were 2,800 arrivals in Europe from the central Mediterranean route between Jan. 1 and April 5 this year, five times more than in the same period of 2019, according to EU border agency Frontex. Many of them would have already been stuck in Libya.
SOURCE: Yahoo
