The Nation Newspaper

Tag: African migrants

  • African Migrants rejected by Italy were tortured, raped – UN

    African migrants rejected by Italy in a standoff with the European Union on Aug. 15, said they had been held by smugglers for up to two years in Libya and many had been beaten, tortured and raped, the UN said on Tuesday.

    The 150 migrants, mainly Eritreans and Somalis, were rescued in the Mediterranean but waited 10 days while
    Italy’s anti-immigrant government refused to let them disembark, until Ireland, Albania and the Vatican
    agreed to accept them.

    A further 27 unaccompanied minors and 13 people needing urgent hospital treatment had earlier been allowed ashore in Italy, whose government had threatened to cut funds to the European Union unless other states took in the migrants.

    The UN International Organisation for Migration (IOM) said its staff had gathered testimony from the migrants.

    All were malnourished and exhausted and said they had been held against their will in Libya for up to two years, IOM spokesman Joel Millman told a UN briefing in Geneva.

    “In Libya they complained that many had been beaten and tortured by smugglers and traffickers seeking ransom money from their families in their countries of origin,” he said.

    “Italian doctors who attended all the women … reported that many of them said they had been raped while in Libya.”

    He said IOM believed thousands of migrants were still being detained – held in safehouses or warehoused, but getting people to the shore had recently become more difficult because of violence in the west of the country.

    A drop in the value of the Libyan dinar had also made it more difficult for sub-Saharan Africans hoping to earn enough in Libya to fund their sea voyage to Europe, prompting the smugglers to look for other nationalities with more resources.

    Italian Interior Minister Salvini, who has led a popular crackdown against immigration since his government took office in June, has said he was under investigation by a Sicilian prosecutor for abuse of office, kidnapping and illegal arrest over the migrant standoff.

  • Rwanda, Uganda denies migrant deals with Israel

    Rwanda, Uganda denies migrant deals with Israel

    Rwanda and Uganda both on Friday said they had not struck any deal to take in African migrants from Israel under a scheme condemned by rights groups.

    Israel has said on Wednesday it would pay thousands of African migrants living illegally in the country to go home or to “third countries”, threatening them with jail if they are caught after the end of March.

    The Israeli government did not say where the refugees should go.

    However, rights groups including Hotline for Refugees and Migrants have said Uganda and Rwanda had agreed to take in migrants from Israel in the past.

    “Rwanda has no deal whatsoever with Israel to host any African migrant from that country,” Rwanda’s Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, Olivier Nduhungirehe, said.

    His Ugandan counterpart, Okello Oryem, echoed the message.

    “There is no written agreement or any form of agreement between the government of Uganda and Israeli government to accept refugees from Israel.

    Any suggestion to the contrary was fake news absolute rubbish,’’ Oryem told Reuters.

    The vast majority of migrants in Israel came from Eritrea and Sudan and many say they fled war and persecution as well as economic hardship, but Israel treats them as economic migrants.

    Rights groups have accused Israel of being slow to process African migrants’ asylum requests as a matter of policy and denying legitimate claims to the status.

  • EU leaders meet to curb African migration

    European Union leaders meet on Malta on Friday to endorse plans they hope can forestall a new wave of migrants sailing to Italy from Africa, but aware that anarchy in Libya means any quick fix is a long shot.

    British Prime Minister, Theresa May, will also attend, despite her plan to start negotiations by next month to take the United Kingdom out of the EU — a reminder that Britain, along with France, is one of the bloc’s two main military powers and a key aid donor in Africa, and that Brussels will go on cooperating with London long after Brexit.

    May also has a chance to brief her 27 peers on her visit last week to United States President, Donald Trump, whose backing for Brexit, doubts on free trade, barring of refugees and warmth toward Russia, all raise alarm in Europe.

    The British leader could get hostile reception from other EU leaders for rushing to embrace Trump, Reuters reported.

    A controversial agreement with Turkey last year halted an influx of refugees that had brought a million migrants into Germany via Greece.

    Now the EU has turned its attention to Italy, where a record 181,000 people arrived in 2016, most of them deemed to be seeking work and not in clear need of asylum from persecution.

  • Italian coastguard rescue Nigerians, others in Mediterranean

    … 24 drowned

    At least 24 African migrants including two young Nigerians drowned on Monday in the Mediterranean Sea while trying to reach Europe aboard small Libyan boats.

    6,065 others including expectant Nigerian women and their families were rescued by several boats owned by the Italian coastguard and international charities, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and Save the Children.

    417 of the badly burnt survivors, including 92 children and 70 women, were mostly Nigerians and other West Africans.

    They were passengers on board four small, overcrowded dinghies which broke down about 20 miles from the Libyan coast while attempting to make the two-day journey to Italy without adequate fuel.

    About 94 of them barely alive – men, women (several pregnant) and children – saturated with fuel, burnt skin and falling from their limbs, were rescued by a ship, Dignity 1, operated by MSF.

    The migrants told British newspaper, The Times, that three hours into their journey from Western Libya, they heard a crack as one side of the overcrowded dinghy snapped, throwing 35 people into the sea.

    Two brothers aged four and five, they said, tumbled into the sea and were never found, while others grabbed jerry cans of spare fuel to keep them afloat in the water.

    Some emptied the cans to make them more buoyant thus spreading the fuel on and around those in the water.

    MSF rescue teams were alerted at 10:45am and the Dignity 1 was dispatched. It found a broken inflatable with six people missing and many others semi-conscious.

    A seven- month pregnant Nigerian woman, Joy, was rescued, coughing and sputtering blood as medical teams tried to save her life, while her semi-conscious sister, Lovett, lay on the vomit and faeces covered floor beside her.

    Lovett told The Times that she followed Joy into the boat to look after her.

  • Obasanjo rues youths’ ‘risky voyage’ to Europe

    Obasanjo rues youths’ ‘risky voyage’ to Europe

    Former President Olusegun Obasanjo on Monday expressed sadness at African youths’ desperation to get to Europe even at the expense of their lives.

    The ex-president also berated the European nations and their leaders for not doing anything to help the migrants that had reached the continent.

    Obasanjo, in a statement he issued in Abeokuta, Ogun State, urged the international community to rise up and find solution to the growing wave of African children leaving their continent for Europe to meet “uncertain future.”

    The statement reads: “it is a matter of considerable sadness for me when I witness the current wave of desperate youths risking their lives to travel to Europe and the futile efforts of the European countries to deal with those who have already set sail or have even reached shores of the European continent.

    “Sometime in September 2000, the ex-Libyan leader, Col. Muammar Ghaddafi, called me and brought to my attention, the presence in Libya of thousands of Nigerian illegal immigrants attempting to make their way to Europe.

    “These illegal immigrants almost entirely consisting of young men and women, who were prevented from using the facilities of Libya to sail to Europe, had constituted themselves into a menace.

    “Some of them were involved in crimes and anti-social activities such as credit card fraud, burglary, drug trafficking and even violent crimes such as armed robbery.

    “There was tension between the illegal immigrants and local Libyan communities resulting in the immigrants often being subjected to violent attacks.

    “I agreed with Ghaddafi on the need to take immediate action to repatriate the immigrants to Nigeria.  In this regard, I instructed the National Security Adviser to raise a team of officials from the security agencies to proceed to Libya to document all the illegal immigrants from Nigeria.

    “I also approved funds for an aircraft to be chartered to evacuate them to Nigeria. The team worked assiduously over a period of two months with the cooperation of their Libyan colleagues.

    “They travelled all over Libya and brought out to safety and provided protection to Nigerians who were in hiding for fear of attacks from local Libyan gangs.  A camp was provided by the Libyan authorities where the illegal immigrants were accommodated, provided with basic necessities and documented.

    “I also spoke to other West African leaders whose citizens had found their way to Libya and encouraged them to accept responsibility for the repatriation of their citizens back from Libya.

    “Those who lacked the capacity to effect the repatriation were assisted by Libya and Nigeria-Libya by providing additional aircraft and Nigeria by accepting the return to Nigeria of citizens of ECOWAS countries, who I then arranged to be transported to their countries from Lagos.”