![]() ![]() So if, under Gaddafi, the country was a destination for economic migrants, it has reverted to something from the mercantile era, with Arabs trafficking in black bodies. Nominally under control of one of two competing, interim governments, the centers are in fact controlled by militias, according to human rights activists. “And detention centers serve as distribution points.” It’s a market where migrants are bought and sold on a daily basis,” Contreras says. Read More: Inside the Libyan Detention Centers Where Humanity Ceases to Exist They are vulnerable both to their controllers and to militiamen who stop them at a checkpoint and deliver them to detention centers that double as clearing houses. Perhaps 60 percent end up staying, often as indentured servants earning their way out of detention centers or passage on a boat. official told him that 3 million migrants have come into the country. If the number sounds large, Contreras says one U.N. At one point, the photographer arranged to meet a convoy carrying 1,500 migrants at a pass in Libya’s border. If you’re a Syrian Arab who speaks the language, you’re definitely better off.”Ĭontreras, supported by the Carmignac Photojournalism Award, spent weeks in the country’s lawless south, cultivating contacts with the desert tribes that move the migrants from neighboring Niger via “unofficial routes”-including the dry river beds that double as smuggler’s roads, according to a May study for West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center. “Dark skinned people in general face discrimination. ![]() “I’ve seen very widespread racism and xenophobia in Libya,” says Hanan Salah, senior Libya researcher for Human Rights Watch. The business of moving humans has overtaken goods smuggling in Libya since 2011. The smugglers they pay to bring them north are part of an interlocking network frequently extending all the way to the coast. West Africans typically migrate for economic reasons, setting off from Senegal, Nigeria, Ivory Coast. Those journeys begin at home, typically in West Africa (though in recent months, a third of African migrants arriving in Italy began their journey in the Horn of Africa, many fleeing political persecution in Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia or Sudan). For more than a third, their journey took more than six months. Half of migrants who reach southern Italy report having been held against their will inside Libya-often for ransom, according to a new study by the International Organization for Migration, released Oct. But that’s often only after months, even years in the purgatory of Libya. Eventually, many will be placed on a boat pointed toward Europe. ![]() They show despondent men and women confined in warehouses, prisons and courtyards, migrants reduced to chattel and sold from smuggler to militia to trafficker, and back again -and often paying for the privilege. 31 print edition of TIME, and in the LightBox photo gallery online at. Images of Contreras’ discovery appear in the Oct. ![]()
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