Enslavement of Black Africans (Libya)

Paul Scully Excerpts

Monday 18th December 2017 Westminster Hall

[Paul Scully (Sutton and Cheam) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered e-petition 205476 relating to the enslavement of black Africans in Libya.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Walker. I would like to read the petition into the record. It reads:

“Put pressure on Libya to take action to stop enslavement of Black Africans.

CNN has released video footage of black Africans being sold into slavery in Libya. I am asking the UK government to put pressure on the Libyan government to take immediate action to stop these criminals from selling more people, to set current prisoners free, arrest the criminals and end this.”

I am delighted to welcome the petitioner, Constance Mbassi Manga, who has done a fantastic job in raising this issue and getting so many signatures in such a short space of time. I am delighted that she is able to join us today.

As of this morning, 265,272 people had signed the petition within only about three weeks of it going live, which is a real testament to people’s strength of feeling. It is interesting: the likes of Cara Delevingne, Naomi Campbell and Rihanna, and a whole load of rappers who are far too cool for me to even know who they are, have taken up this issue, put it on social media and shared it. All of that, including the petition system, is really part—not the end—of a campaign to make people aware of the horrific things going on in another part of the world that they might otherwise not have been aware of at all. Hopefully, as well as raising awareness, we can start to effect change.

It was international Human Rights Day a week last Sunday. A number of us were out and about, raising issues; I was talking about the situation that the Rohingya Muslim community face in Burma, the Tamils, the Ahmadiyya Muslims and a number of other issues that are close to me and to my constituents, given the various diaspora groups in my constituency. Only a week later, we are talking about something that we thought had long since passed. When the Prime Minister was Home Secretary, she brought in the Modern Slavery Act 2015—a fantastic achievement—which recognised that slavery still existed in hidden pockets of this country. However, this is not hidden; it is absolutely brazen and out-and-out across parts of Libya and its migrant routes. It has to stop.

I was chatting to the Minister a little while ago—I do not know if he will remember this—and we shared the view that when people believe that another group of people are subhuman, there is no depth to which they will not stoop in their treatment of them; they are treated worse than animals. People started being aware of this situation when the International Organisation for Migration started to hear stories and went to document people’s experiences, write reports and share what those voices were saying. However, it was only when CNN covered the issue a few weeks ago that it really came to the public’s wider awareness.

I want to read one piece of documented evidence from the IOM to illustrate what is happening. One of the operations officers in Niger reported on the rescue of a Senegalese migrant. He referred to him as SC, to protect his identity. SC was returning to his home after being held captive for months.

“According to SC’s testimony, while he was trying to travel north through the Sahara, he arrived in Agadez, Niger, where he was told he would have to pay 200,000 CFA—about $320—to continue north towards Libya. A trafficker provided him with accommodation until the day of his departure, which was to be by pick-up truck.

The journey—over two days of travelling—through the desert was relatively smooth for this group. IOM has often heard from other migrants on this route who report seeing the remains of others abandoned by their drivers—and of trucks ransacked by bandits who siphon away their fuel.

SC’s fate was different. When his pick-up reached Sabha in south-western Libya, the driver insisted that he hadn’t been paid by the trafficker, and that he was transporting the migrants to a parking area where SC witnessed a slave market taking place. ‘Sub-Saharan migrants were being sold and bought by Libyans, with the support of Ghanaians and Nigerians who work for them’”,

the IOM reported.

[John Howell (Henley) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech. He mentioned Nigeria; when I visited it as the Prime Minister’s trade envoy, I had a discussion about this problem. We all agreed that if we did not help to get sub-Saharan Africa right, the catastrophe waiting to happen in Europe would be colossal, as more and more Nigerians put themselves in the hands of unscrupulous traffickers on the way to Libya and the Mediterranean coast. Does he agree that that is a realistic view of the situation?

[Paul Scully]

I understand my hon. Friend’s expertise and knowledge of the area and totally agree with him. There is a real risk. We can tackle the atrocities of the slave trade in Libya, and Libya’s power vacuum, but ultimately the biggest threat to that part of the world and many others is migration—and not necessarily just migration through conflict. Economic reasons, climate reasons and any number of other reasons are moving such a mass of people, which causes other situations.

[Royston Smith (Southampton, Itchen) (Con)]

On the power vacuum in Libya, the UK Government continue to support the Government of national accord, yet we hear that these things are becoming very much worse. Would it not be right for the UK to consider whether the Government of national accord are perhaps not the answer?

[Paul Scully]

I am grateful for the intervention. I will be interested to hear from the Minister on we can do to work towards democratic elections, and to create a mainstream Government in Libya, which clearly has not had one for many years. It is only by having a mainstream, democratically elected Government that we will be able to have a long-term view, whichever party makes up that Government. It will not necessarily be for us to pick a horse, run the country or tell it what to do, but we can help support it. We can work with the African Union and a local offering to help Libya create its own destiny and future, which hopefully will be much safer and a lot more secure.

Let me get back to SC. He was bought, and then brought to his first prison. The IOM said it was

“a private home where more than 100 migrants were held as hostages. He said the kidnappers made the migrants call their families back home, and often suffered beatings while on the phone so that their family members could hear them being tortured. In order to be released from this first house, SC was asked to pay…about $480…which he couldn’t raise. He was then ‘bought’ by another Libyan, who brought him to a bigger house—where a new price was set for his release…about $970…to be paid via Western Union or MoneyGram to someone called ‘Alhadji Balde’, said to be in Ghana.

SC managed to get some money from his family via mobile phone and then agreed to work as an interpreter for the kidnappers, to avoid further beatings. He described dreadful sanitary conditions, and food offered only once per day. Some migrants who couldn’t pay were reportedly killed, or left to starve to death.

SC told IOM that when somebody died or was released, kidnappers returned to the market to ‘buy’ more migrants to replace them. Women, too, were ‘bought’ by private individuals—Libyans, according to this witness—and brought to homes where they were forced to be sex slaves.”

It was Nima Elbagir and CNN’s groundbreaking report, and those pictures, that really brought the situation home to so many people in the west. CNN heard from its contact that two auctions were going on at the same time. Some people in the Libyan Government would say that those things happen only sporadically, but on this occasion there were two at the same time, and the one that was filmed was an overflow auction, because there were so many people to be sold. There was also a big buyer in town wanting to buy people—that is what I said: “buy people”—as commodities or merchandise, to work on farms. It is atrocious, and while I am speaking I am reflecting on the words I use. That episode brought the matter home. Officers from the International Organisation for Migration said:

“What we know is that migrants who fall into the hands of smugglers face systematic malnutrition, sexual abuse and even murder. Last year we learned 14 migrants died in a single month in one of those locations, just from disease and malnutrition. We are hearing about mass graves in the desert.”

The total population of migrants in Libya, based on estimates provided by embassies, is about 750,000, mainly coming from Egypt, Niger, Sudan, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Syria and Mali. Previously, under the Gaddafi regime, there were about 1.1 million; I think that that was the estimate. They were predominantly there as cheap labour. Of the 750,000 who are there now, about 450,000 at least do not see Libya as their final destination. They see it as being on a migration route to Europe and beyond. Those are the people in connection houses, who have been trafficked. They are the people who are beaten and whipped with wires—hundreds of thousands of people. They experience extreme insecurity in Libya, including arbitrary arrest by non-state actors, detention for indefinite periods of time, bonded labour, harassment and general exploitation.

There were other pictures on CNN of not the auction but the detention centres. That aspect of the matter is of huge concern, and I want to ask the Minister for his views. The people held there share small mattresses, and are effectively in a cage. That brings me back to what I said when I began my speech: they are treated worse than animals. How can we have reached a situation where that is anywhere close to the case?

The 450,000 people who come through Libya, seeing it as part of their migration route, go to the north coast, to a crossing point, pay another trafficker to get them into a boat, and go predominantly to Italy—to Lampedusa, a small island that simply cannot cope. I went, as a member of the Council of Europe, to Lesbos, to see some of the hotspots there where the Syrian refugees come from. There were a number of north Africans there and some were protesting and throwing things at the bus I was on, wondering why the Syrians were getting preferential treatment. Having seen what they go through to get there, it is possible to understand their concern.

We need to look at how the Italy-Libya deal is framed. I understand that it is a bilateral arrangement supported by the EU, but that it is being contested in the Libyan courts by human rights organisations based in Libya. I want to ask the Minister how robust the memorandum of understanding between the countries is, when there are reports of Libyan coastguards taking bribes to release migrants to traffickers. A second question leads on from that. The Department for International Development is doing fantastic work, as it tends to do. It is a world leader in the aid and support it gives. However, it is supporting more than 20,000 emergency interventions, involving healthcare, psycho-social support, hygiene kits and safe shelter. Can we be sure that we have robust accountability, to ensure that any support we give is not being fed into and supporting the cycle of trafficking, and that it is focused absolutely on the things I have specified?

It is good to hear that the IOM has managed to up its repatriation flights. The target originally was for 1,000 people a month to be taken back to their place of origin; that has gone up, and it is expected that 15,000 people will be repatriated to their original country this month alone. That is a good sign of the direction in which things are going.

I wonder whether DFID can get involved, either directly or through leverage of support from elsewhere, in trying to get accurate numbers. Together with the power vacuum, a problem that hampers what is being done is the fact that no one really knows the extent of the problem. There is work using various methodologies, but there is more to be done to get accuracy. Can we, for example, build up a phone network so that families from around the relevant part of sub-Saharan Africa can report in and talk about their loved ones—where they are, what has happened, the last time they saw them, and so on—so that we can begin to get more accurate figures?

Of course the UK Government will have a competing agenda. We want accountability, clearly, but as my hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Itchen (Royston Smith) says, there is a need for stability and preparation for elections; we need to give support on the route towards elections, to get rid of the power vacuum. It is only a question of enforcement—everyone knows that slavery is illegal already, and there is nothing to be done to change the rule, but someone is needed on the ground to arrest the people in question and hold them to account, bringing them to court and applying the full force of the law to them. If, for any number of reasons, there is no one on the ground to do that at the moment, it will not happen.

[Royston Smith]

Slavery these days is completely different from the way people would have imagined it some years ago. Many of the people who are trafficked get themselves to the traffickers to get somewhere else. Should we be looking at the possibility of DFID or others educating people in their country, village or town of origin, so that they do not embark on the journey in the first place? Does my hon. Friend agree that that would be helpful?

[Paul Scully]

I absolutely agree, because it is a matter of pull factors, and stopping people having to make the choice to migrate over such a treacherous route. They have so far to go: there are human traffickers; people may just be ditched at the side of the road as I have described, or sold out of a bus in the back of a car park, and then sold on again and beaten with wires; they may then be on the Mediterranean on a boat—and the technique used with those small boats is that as soon as a navy cutter comes to the rescue, they are deliberately capsized to tip the people in the water. The rescuers have to pluck them out of the water; they cannot just pull the boat somewhere. To return to the Greek example, while I was there I met a Yazidi Christian—someone on a different migrant route—with a 10-day-old child. They had gone through that whole process. How the child, who by then was aged three months, was still alive, I shall never know. Those are the most treacherous circumstances, so anything that can be done to stop the migration in the first place must be the only course of action.

[John Howell]

I want to pick up on the previous intervention. I think that there is a huge role for British companies in educating people in their country. I went to see Unilever in Nigeria; it has eradicated modern slavery from its whole supply chain, and that has had a big effect in the effort to convince Nigerians that they should stay and make something of themselves in their own country. Unless we do that, we shall run into a lot of problems.

[Paul Scully]

My hon. Friend makes a typically insightful point, and it is right to use some of our big companies working in the areas in question to provide education and secondary industries. As we move into looking at trade agreements with Africa but while we are also a member of the EU, we could seek tariff reduction as well. Obviously a big concern is tariffs on the least developed countries, but with the slightly better-off countries such as Nigeria, the “Everything but Arms” rules do not apply. They are charged a lot in tariffs on coffee and chocolate and similar things, and cannot build up the secondary industries that would help to develop gainful employment, so that people would have a stake in their own area and not feel the need to leave to find a better life.

I have talked about the Modern Slavery Act 2015, and it is nearly 200 years since the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 that William Wilberforce worked for. Only last year there was a remake of the seminal television programme of the book “Roots” by Alex Haley. I watched the original version, but the one I watched last year seemed to be of a time gone by. There have been other fantastic films about slavery that have also really hammered their point home, but they give the sense that “This happened so long ago; isn’t it wonderful that we have stamped it out?”—but we have not; that is the news. It is still going on every day.

I ask the Minister to answer my questions. Finally, what more we can do as a country to support Libya, improve conditions and ultimately end the need for detention camps there?

[Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Walker. As we heard in the extremely powerful opening remarks from the hon. Member for Sutton and Cheam (Paul Scully), there is incontrovertible evidence that slavery—that brutal and dehumanising exploitation—is taking place in Libya today.

As we know, modern slavery is shamefully common in our world and exists in our country. However, the images and words that have come out of Libya in recent weeks are shocking and have historical resonance: the victims are black Africans and the people who have enslaved them are not. The people who have been bought and sold in Libya have been violated in so many ways; they have experienced much violence and they have been betrayed and cheated at every step of their journey.

The personal stories make clear that the victims have paid, borrowing and scraping together money to start a journey to Europe because they believed an evil deception—but that was only the start of their exploitation. They are left utterly alone, terrified and without support in an unstable foreign country and under the control of people who care only about extracting every penny that they can from their “merchandise”. Foka, a Cameroonian, described the beatings he witnessed and endured at the hands of the traffickers, as he and others were cowed and forced to submit:

“There was torture like I’ve never seen. They hit you with wooden bats, with iron bars…They hang you from the ceiling by (your) arms and legs and then throw you down to the floor. They swing you and throw you against the wall, over and over again”.

Foka’s injuries were still visible when he made that statement.

The traffickers are not only exploiting young migrants through slave labour but making money from ransoms, as we have heard. Sometimes, to coerce a ransom payment, a migrant is forced to call a parent or relative and then beaten while the relative listens. The story of Victory, a young Nigerian man, is illustrative. First, he paid people smugglers, who lied and said they would get him to Europe. He then endured weeks of slave labour in Libya once he could no longer pay them, and he was then forced to find a ransom payment to set him free. His mother had to beg and borrow the money to save his life. Victory’s ransom was more than 1 million Nigerian naira, which would take 56 years to earn on the local minimum wage. Victory had already spent his life savings to pay the people who exploited him, and now his family may literally face a lifetime of debt while his exploiters continue to escape justice. 

As we have heard, Mohammed Abdiker, of the United Nations migration agency, said that migrants who fall into the hands of smugglers face

“systematic malnutrition, sexual abuse and even murder…14 migrants died in a single month in one of those locations, just from disease and malnutrition. We are hearing about mass graves in the desert.”

The UN estimates that there are anything from 700,000 to 1 million migrants currently in Libya, with 70% from sub-Saharan Africa. Evidence shows that 30% of adults and 40% of children have been forced to work against their will. That is a massive number. So many people enslaved—so many children.

I would like the Government to outline what we are doing to stop the enslavement and sale of human beings in Libya and the trafficking of people towards the Mediterranean. I understand that France is to work with the UN’s sanctions committee for Libya to identify individuals or organisations involved in trading human beings. That committee can require UN member states to freeze assets owned or controlled by individuals on its list and can impose a travel ban. Does the Minister support that proposal, and will he work to ensure that that committee has all the information it needs?

Action against slave traders must be the priority; they have to be shut down. However, there is obviously a broader context. Large numbers of desperate people from sub-Saharan Africa are stuck in Libya. That was not their intended destination, and it is getting harder and harder for them to move on, partly because of the actions taken by our Government, in concert with many other European Governments, to make it harder for migrants to cross the Mediterranean.

Those actions have generally been taken with good intentions, motivated by a desire to shut down trafficking routes. However, shutting down the traffickers who run routes up and down the Mediterranean is clearly only half done at best; the terrible re-emergence of slavery in Libya is testament to and a consequence of that. If we want to reduce harm by closing those routes, that strategy cannot stop at the shores of north Africa—action needs to be taken in Libya and, equally, in countries to its south.

Social media is a critical tool for the perpetrators of modern slavery. It is how traffickers advertise, spread lies and recruit victims, and it enables them to run their amoral trade. Social media companies, whether they like it or not, have a role to play in disrupting this trade, and I hope the Minister will comment on any conversations he has had with those companies in his remarks.

[Paul Scully]

The hon. Lady rightly raises social media. However, does she agree that social media has also played a positive role in getting this petition out and this issue raised? The one caution I urge is that some of the photos doing the rounds to raise awareness of the slave trade are actually not related to the slave trade. It is important that, when we share photos, we share accurate photos, which is not always easy to do.

[Lyn Brown]

I am sure the hon. Gentleman is absolutely right: social media can play a very useful role in our society. However, we need to understand that it can be used by completely unscrupulous people to lure others into slavery and ultimately, possibly, to their deaths. Social media companies have to accept responsibility for what they do and find ways to help us to close down those traffickers.

The UN has understandably requested urgent funding—I presume the Government are considering that request—and 1,300 new resettlement places across the world for the most vulnerable African migrants in Libya. Niger has offered to take that number temporarily before the end of January, but a more permanent solution has to be found. The current situation is simply dire—so many people are vulnerable to slavery and all the abuses that go with it. Those people matter. African lives matter, and they need us to be their allies by taking action to end this today. This is not a situation that we can simply take note of and move on from.

Who these hope-filled, naïve, ambitious, desperate migrants were before they fell prey to the traffickers is no longer important. All are refugees now, needing help and a route out. We could and should do more to help them. I look forward to hearing from the Minister on how we plan to do just that.

--- Later in debate ---

[Paul Scully]

Thank you very much, Mr Walker, for calling me to wind up the debate, and I also thank the Minister for his typically comprehensive and open response to the questions that have been put to him today. It does not take experiments such as the Stanford prison experiment and other psychological research experiments to see how bestial people can be to other people. We need only look at Rwanda, the situation in parts of Rakhine state in Burma and obviously the slave trade that we are discussing here today to see such bestial behaviour happening every day.

I will also just say thanks again to Constance Mbassi Manga and the signatories to the petition; to the supporters who have raised the issue on social media to bring it to the public fore; and to Nima Elbagir from CNN and her team who, as we have heard, bravely reported this story. I spoke to Nima this morning and she is really fired up for following up the story, to make sure that some action comes out of it.

This has been a very good debate, and I will not go through what has been said, as I must be brief. I will just say that, although there have been calls on our time today from the main Chamber and elsewhere, we have hopefully done what we aimed to do, which was to tell the story of the people in Libya who are on the frontline and who are suffering. We must tell those human stories to raise the profile of the issue and to add depth to the coverage of it, so that we can try to find solutions. I very much thank everybody who has taken part in the debate today.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered e-petition 205476 relating to the enslavement of black Africans in Libya.