Libya’s chaos has turned it into a lucrative magnet attracting migrants desperate to make the dangerous sea voyage to Europe. With no central authority to stop it, business is booming, with smugglers charging ever more as demand goes up, then using the profits to buy larger boats and heavier weapons to ensure no one dares touch them.
It’s a vicious cycle that only translates into more tragedies at sea.
With each rickety boat that sets off from Libya’s coast, traffickers rake in hundreds of thousands of dollars. So assured are they of their impunity that they operate openly. Many even use Facebook to advertise their services to migrants desperate to flee war, repression and poverty in the Middle East and Africa.
They are well armed and often work with powerful militias in Libya that control territory and hold political power.
One coast guard officer in Sabratha, a Libyan coastal city that is a main launch point for smugglers’ boats headed to Europe, said his small force can do little to stop them. Recently, he heard about a vessel about to leave but refused to send his men to halt it.
“This would be suicidal,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation from the powerful traffickers. “When you see smugglers with anti-aircraft guns mounted on pickup trucks on the beach, and you have an automatic rifle, what are you going to do?”
If any one factor explains the dramatic jump in illegal crossings into Europe, it’s Libya’s turmoil since the 2011 civil war that ousted longtime dictator Moammar Gadhafi.
In the past year, Libya’s descent into anarchy has only accelerated. The country has been plagued by multiple armed militias since Gadhafi’s ouster and death, but since 2014 what little political structure Libya had has collapsed.
There are two rival governments, neither with any real authority, and each fighting the other. Local militias hold sway around the country, some of them with hard-line Islamist ideologies.
The Islamic State group has emerged as a strong and brutal force, with control of at least two cities along the central and eastern parts of the Mediterranean coast and a presence in many others. Over the weekend, it issued a video showing the mass beheading of dozens of African migrants, mostly Ethiopian and Eritrean Christians who were abducted as they tried to make it to the coast.
In the chaos, smuggling has “become an organized crime, with cross border mafias in possession of weapons, information and technology,” said the head of an independent agency that studies human trafficking and tries to help migrants in Sabratha.
Extensive cross-border smuggling networks organize different legs of the journey: First from the migrants’ home country to the Libyan border, then from the border to a jumping-off point on the coast, then onto boats for the Mediterranean crossing.
“We call the Mediterranean Sea ‘the graveyard,’” said the agency director, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation from smugglers.
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