With the beginning of the new year we have returned to talk of Libya, a country that is still very unstable, a humanitarian crisis where nearly one and a half million people are in need of assistance, including thousands of minors.
With the beginning of the new year we have returned to talk of Libya and the internal instability that still grieves the country today, ten years after the deposition of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. In recent weeks, the formation of a new transitional executive is underway, headed by the interim Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibah. The new government will have the task of leading the country to the next national elections to be held on December 24, 2021. Political aspects and structural changes within the Libyan administration, however, cannot blind the international community to the continuing difficulties of life of the Libyan people and of the many migrants present in the country.
Libya is also being talked about for much more in recent weeks, which on the pages of newspapers are often reported as shipwrecks and deaths in the Mediterranean Sea. We talk about migrants: men, women and children, people who try to leave a country at war, after having crossed many other countries in inhuman conditions, to save their lives and to have the opportunity to hope in a country where the most basic human rights are freely expressed, respected, valued.
Migrants in Libya
An estimated 1.3 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance in Libya. Displaced families, refugee and migrant people are among the most vulnerable and at risk of security in a country that is internally divided by conflicting factions and inter-tribal differences. Of these 1.3 million, 348 thousand are minors, boys and girls who urgently need all kinds of support to be able to live in dignity. About 393,000 are internally displaced and more than 43,000 are refugees and asylum seekers who come mainly from sub-Saharan Africa. People, and often even unaccompanied minors, who face exhausting journeys, where the risk of not arriving at their destination, which is not Libya but Europe, is very high.
The story of Rashid and his encounter with INTERSOS
INTERSOS knows these people and these stories well. Since we started welcoming and training projects with migrant minors in Tripoli and Sebha, in central-southern Libya, in 2018, meeting people with a migration background has become a custom. Rashid is one of them, he is 17 and he comes from Sierra Leone. Like many of his peers, he has already known the pain, the fear, the emptiness that a loss leaves. His journey began many months before reaching Libya, the dangers and difficulties in crossing already highly unstable territories and at high risk of insecurity were many and talking about them often brings back very deep wounds. He spent days and nights in the desert, together with others who, like him, were trying to escape from poverty, conflicts, the absence of a future.
Asking questions about the past to a person who has above all disturbed images of that past, memories that cut one’s breath means exposing oneself to a suffering that cannot leave indifferent. “My life must go on”, Rashid tells us, he does it with strong conviction, a phrase he said while recounting one of the various episodes in which his own life was in danger. An attack by an armed group in the middle of the Sahel desert, the car he was traveling in surrounded by armed men, the fear that gripped him, the sense of duty in trying to protect his three younger brothers.
Arriving in Libya, Rashid was directed to the center for minors run by INTERSOS which takes the name of Baity, which means “my home”. Welcomed by our staff, Rashid has started a path of psychosocial support and education: resuming his studies with boys and girls of his age means putting together the pieces of the present and projecting oneself on a real future. Time in these cases will be essential care, it will take a long time to allow Rashid to believe in something in a still obscure moment, to understand that what he lived remains in his past and will not necessarily be his tomorrow.
The activities carried out by INTERSOS in Libya have never ended even in the most complex moments for the country in full political-social change as well as for the COVID-19 pandemic. During 2020 and until the end of January 2021, 1537 migrant boys and girls were followed in paths of protection in the center of Tripoli Baity and in Sabha, and 1073 of them also with activities related to informal education.