Date: Monday, 29 March 2021
CAIRO--At least 480 migrants were intercepted off Libya by local coast guard forces over the weekend, according to the United Nations’ International Organisation for Migration (IOM).
They are among the 4,500 people who have been brought back to Libya this year after attempting the dangerous Mediterranean Sea crossing to Europe, the IOM said in a tweet Sunday.
Photos posted by the feed showed workers distributing blankets to migrants after they arrived onshore, but the agency also voiced its objection to the treatment of migrants inside the war-torn country.
“We maintain that Libya is not a safe port,” it wrote.
It said that 310 migrants were brought back to shore on Saturday night and an additional 173 were returned on Sunday.
In the years since the 2011 NATO-backed uprising that ousted and killed longtime ruler Muammar Gadhafi, Libya has emerged as the dominant transit point for migrants fleeing war and poverty in Africa and the Middle East. Smugglers often pack desperate families into ill-equipped rubber boats that break down and founder on the perilous Central Mediterranean route.
People-smuggling has long been a lucrative business for militia groups in the west of the country, who also export heavily subsidised fuel illegally, in the main to Tunisia and Malta. Once migrants only risked the Mediterranean crossing in benign summer weather. However, in recent years, the people-smugglers have been launching their “customers” throughout the often stormy winter.
In recent years, the European Union has worked with Libya’s coast guard and other local groups to stem such dangerous sea crossings. Rights groups say those policies leave migrants at the mercy of armed groups or confined in squalid detention centres rife with abuses.
On January 19, a boat carrying migrants bound for Europe capsized in the Mediterranean off the coast of Libya and at least 43 people drowned. The tragedy marked the first maritime disaster in 2021 involving migrants seeking better lives in Europe. The IOM had cited survivors as saying that the dead were all men from West African nations.
The organisation’s Missing Migrants Project has confirmed the death or disappearances of nearly 2,300 people last year. This number is higher than in 2019 when 2,095 victims were recorded and slightly lower than in 2018 which saw 2,344 perish.
The number of migrants and asylum-seekers who reached Europe in 2020 is the lowest it has been in the past decade, according to a report released Friday by the IOM. But deaths and disappearances on sea routes remain alarmingly high with only a small fraction of bodies recovered and victims identified.
Of the 93,000 people who entered Europe irregularly last year, roughly 92% did so via the western, central and eastern Mediterranean, as well as through the Atlantic Ocean off West Africa to Spain’s Canary Islands, often on unseaworthy boats.
Arrivals in the Canaries, considered part of the Schengen area, increased by 750% last year. The numbers had already picked up before the pandemic following tougher border controls and interceptions on the Mediterranean by North African countries, but COVID-19 seems to have “acted as a multiplier of existing factors motivating migration on this route,” the report said.
It added that many migrants previously worked in sectors such as fishing and agriculture that have suffered greatly from the economic consequences of the pandemic.
