Date: Sat, 14 Nov 2015 00:27:28 +0100
Libyans in smuggling port of Zuwara plead for help from EU as they bury hundreds in unmarked mass graves
8:31AM GMT 13 Nov 2015
Watch two Videos below:
1. The Libyan beach where migrants lie in unmarked mass graves
At first glance, nothing on the beach near the Libyan port of Abu Kammash hints at the horrors that lie beneath.
It has the same litter-strewn dunes that run for miles along the coast, and to the untutored eye, the row of gentle, unmarked bumps in the sand could easily be caused by the eddying of the sea breeze.
Instead, it is other senses that give the game away - the occasional sickly-sweet smell on the nose, and the sixth sense of our driver, which had warned him never to visit the place again.
"Coming here makes me remember everything that happened that night," said Abujaila Idrissi. "There were bodies scattered everywhere, men and women, children. I feel a chill just looking at the beach now. It was a true disaster, not something you can easily forget."
The disaster that still haunts Mr Idrissi took place in late August, when one of the rickety people-smuggling boats that ply their trade from Libya's lawless coastline sank with 450 people on board.
Over the next few days, more than 180 bodies washed up onshore, bringing them back to the same isolated stretch of beach that should have marked their final step towards Europe.
Such was the scale of the calamity that Mr Idrissi and other officials in the nearby town of Zuwara, 20 miles down the coast, had neither enough vehicles to transport the bodies, nor a morgue big enough to store them in.
As such, they took the tough but pragmatic decision to bury them there and then amid the sand dunes, before the sea-bloated corpses rotted even more in the summer heat.
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The plan is to turn it into a proper cemetery, but in the ungoverned chaos of post-Gaddafi Libya, even the dead must wait their turn.
Right now, the mass grave is completely unmarked, its occupants' final resting place no easier to detect than if they had sunk to the bottom of the seabed.
The same soft sand that made the grave relatively easy to dig had also shifted in the wind since the officials’ last visit, leaving part of a human rib cage exposed.
Such is the pitiful ending that every migrant risks when they use the services of Libya's people smugglers, whose thriving industry will be under the spotlight today (WEDS) as European leaders hold a major summit in Malta to discuss the Mediterranean migrant crisis.
While the spotlight in recent months has mainly on the influx of Syrians from the east, the summit will focus on migration from Africa, which accounts for around 80,000 of the 250,000 new arrivals in Europe this year alone.
And to the discomfort of officials in Zuwara, it will not just be Libya that is singled out as a people-smuggling hotspot, but their own home town specifically.
Zuwara, which lies around 60 miles west of Tripoli, has been a bootlegging haven for centuries, thanks partly to historic links that local Amazigh tribes have to traders on the old Saharan trade routes stretching as far south as Niger.
The trade routes have long been a much-needed livelihood for the Amazigh, whose distinctive language and culture was banned during Col Gaddafi's time.
People-smuggling haven
Today, though, an industry that used to focus mainly on contraband goods has seen human cargo become one of its biggest growth sectors, despite the very clear dangers.
August's tragedy was one of several this year in which ships from Zuwara have sunk with huge loss of life on board, and with the eyes of the world now on the migrant crisis, the town has earned a notoriety that it never had when merely smuggling tobacco, alcohol or even guns.
That, though, may now also prove to be the West's best hope for turning the situation around. Fed up with the damage to their reputation - which is also see as an affront to Amazigh national pride - local officials are now fighting back against the smugglers, who have enjoyed impunity until now.
As the Telegraph reported last month, a group of volunteer policemen, known as the Masked Men of Zuwara, has begun raids on local people-smuggling gangs, arresting a gang from Abu Kammash in connection with the August sinking, and forcing others to relocate elsewhere along the coast.
The Zuwaran mayoralty, meanwhile, are pleading for help from the outside world to deal with the problem, which has overwhelmed their ability to cope.
"The whole world now blames Zuwara for this situation, but we are being left on our own to deal with it," said Fathi Ben Khalifa, the president for the International Congress of the Amazigh, who wants his people recognised for reasons other than people smuggling. "I have had meetings with European officials and offered our help, but so far nobody has taken it up."
Such comments are stark contrast the long-standing consensus in Europe that most Libyans are happy to simply turn a blind eye to the people smuggling on their doorstep.
Grim task
Then again, most Libyans have not seen its grim aftermath in the way that Sadiq Nanis, the deputy mayor of Zuwara, has done.
As head of the city's crisis management committee, he has supervised the collection of some 650 bodies from Zuwara's coastline in the last 18 months alone - a task that he says is slowly destroying what faith in humanity he ever had.
Part beachcomber, part undertaker, Mr Nanis and his team scour Zuwara's shores whenever there is a report of a sunken smuggling vessel, doing their best to collect and identify the bodies and give them a dignified burial.
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"They don't all come in at once - when we had the incident back in August, it took two weeks for all 186 bodies to wash up," he said. "The feeling you get when you deal with them is unspeakable. But you also feel anger, especially when you are dealing with children or women, or those whose bodies are decayed by the sea. You feel they have been cheated of life."
The team must also try to identify the bodies as well, which is seldom easy given the lack of clues that are left behind. Many of the migrants have no identity papers in the first place, and by the time their bodies wash up on the beach, they are often so decayed that their faces are unrecognisable.
The team take a DNA sample from each one, and then compile a file of anything distinctive, such as jewellery or scraps of clothing, or whether the skin looks African or Asian. Sometimes, a passenger may even have kept a name and number of a next of kin to call in the event that they drown.
The information is all compiled into a grisly database that Mr Nanis keeps at offices in town, where he now regularly fields calls from all over the world from families searching for their loved ones.
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"When you hear their voices on the phone, it is impossible to explain how it feels," he said.
Harrowing though it is, the accounts of men like Mr Nanis should be music to ears of European leaders, in as much as it proves that there are at least some willing partners in Libya to collaborate with in the fight against people-smuggling.
Pleas ignored
Yet despite much rhetoric among European diplomats about the solution to the problem "lying in Libya", there has been little progress on the ground.
The country has spent the last year in an on-off civil war between two rival governments, who both rejected the terms of a UN peace deal last month, and in the absence of a single authority for Europe to deal with, cooperation is officially on hold.
An intelligence cell set up by Europol in April, tasked with gathering intelligence on Mediterreanan people smuggling gangs, has made no contact with the Libyans so far.
And while Mr Nanis's colleague on the town council, Basem Dhan, has held meetings with European ambassadors in neighbouring Tunis, requests for help with boats, vehicles, and protective overalls have so far fallen on deaf ears. Protocol, he says, is prevailing over pragmatism.
"If Europe wants this problem to stop then they need to deal with local governments in towns like Zuwara," he said. "The moment we decided we wanted this problem to stop, it cut by 90 per cent, and it's all down to self-help. Imagine what we could do if we had some help."