What are the risks for the immigrants being deported back to Libya?

Milan, August 25th, 2009

The news reaching us from the Libyan prison of Ganfuda, ten kilometres from Benghazi, the second largest city in Libya, is tragic.

The prison is known by the detainees themselves as “the concentration camp” due to the terrible conditions inside the prison and the brutal treatment reserved for them by Colonel Gaddafi’s brutes. At the present time 537 people are being held in the camp: Somalis, Eritreans, Ethiopians, Nigerians, and refugees from Mali and Burkina Faso. All these people have fled from humanitarian disasters and were arrested for the “crime of being an illegal immigrant” which exists only in countries living under a dictatorial regime, and… in Italy, despite what the propaganda spread by the Italian institutions would have us believe in order to make racial law no. 94 appear more “acceptable”.

The conditions of the immigrants being detained in Libya - including those deported from Italy - are inhuman. In Ganfuda, (as in the prisons of Zlitan, Misratah and Sebha) human rights are non-existent, and inmates are given no opportunity to apply for international protection. This is because Libya has not undersigned the Geneva Convention or any other of the agreements that protect the rights of refugees.

In spite of this, and in spite of the reports of the UN High Commission for Refugees and the leading human rights organizations, the Italian Government has signed an anti-immigrant pact with the Libyan regime and is funding its concentration camps. The prisoners in Ganfuda were arrested in the Benghazi region.

In Libya too, innocent refugees can be detained for several months, and, like in the Italian Centres of Identification and Expulsion, many people attempt suicide or resort to self-destructive behaviour. TB, scabies and infections of all kinds have decimated the prison population. The prisoners are crowded into narrow cells without any room to move about in; they are underfed and undernourished and constantly subjected to humiliation and corporal punishment, including torture, mutilation and rape.

On August 9th, 2009, a group of about 300 prisoners exhausted by the terrible conditions chose to rebel - preferring death to life in jail. On a given signal, they started running towards the gate, forcing the police cordon, ignoring the blows from truncheons and guns. While some defended the rear, others climbed over the gates. Twenty prisoners were left lying on the ground lifeless, in a pool of blood. Others were brutally beaten, handcuffed and led back to their cells.

About a hundred prisoners managed to escape and they headed for Tripoli with the police on their heels. Because of the dramatic prison conditions, desperate acts have taken place in other Libyan jails, places overcrowded and transformed by the sadism of the prison guards into authentic circles of hell.