A small blue boat with an outboard motor bobs on the waves of the open sea. It is crammed with 28 migrants — men, women and children — from Somalia, Bangladesh and Yemen. Across the horizon is the Libyan coast.
Sailors on a Libyan coast guard ship wave their arms. “Stop! Stop!” they shout in English.
The sailors prepare to throw a rope to the boat, but several men on board shout back, in Arabic: “We don’t want it.”
“You don’t want it?” asks one of the sailors. “You’ll die out here!”
After several attempts, the sailors manage to throw the rope on to the boat’s bow. A passenger throws it with an air of disdain into the water.
The sailors toss the rope again, and again the migrants throw it in the water.
They’ve paid hundreds of dollars — a huge fortune — for this leg of their perilous journey to the shores of southern Europe. It has cost them several thousand dollars to get to this point from their home countries. This is not how their odyssey was supposed to end.
Even slightly rough seas can sink small, crowded boats like this. No one aboard has a life vest.
Eventually a Libyan sailor dives into the sea, swims to the boat and attaches the rope. His comrades pull the boat alongside.
Reluctantly the migrants climb on board the Libyan Coast Guard ship. “This is worse than death,” laments a woman.
The sailors herd the migrants onto deck. Twenty-two of them are Somalian, five are Bangladeshi, and one is from Yemen. There is no love here between rescuer and rescued.
Abdel Samad, from Somalia, spent six years in Libya, saving up the money to pay traffickers to get to Europe.
“The Libyans thrash us,” he says. A Libyan sailor overhears Abdel Samad.
“You’re all cursing Libya, you animals!” he bellows in Arabic, adding in English, “Shut up!”
For him, patrolling the seas and stopping migrant boats is a job for which sympathy isn’t a requirement.
“I live near [Tripoli’s] international airport. It’s a war zone. But I didn’t run away like the migrants do,” he said.
Libya is a key transit point along the central Mediterranean route. Many who get stuck there are intercepted and detained by the Libyan Coast Guard, which is funded and trained by the European Union. The Coast Guard is under the control of the UN-recognized Government of National Accord (GNA), based in Tripoli. The EU has paid the GNA and its Coast Guard more than $250 million to stop migrants and refugees from crossing the Mediterranean.
Workers from the International Organization for Migration receive the migrants when the coast guard ship arrives in Tripoli later that night.
From there, they’re taken to a variety of GNA-run detention centers around Tripoli, including the Tariq al-Sikka center.
