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The young Eritrean woman was exhausted, famished and dehydrated after spending four days in March lost in the Mediterranean Sea. She had been on a fishing boat with nearly 300 African migrants, crammed so tightly that she couldn't move. But when Helen saw her rescuers, she couldn't help but feel a little worried. The last time she had seen an Italian military ship, things had not gone well.
Twenty years old and six months pregnant, Helen is one of the more than 22,000 people who have arrived in Italy by boat since unrest in Libya and Tunisia lifted restrictions on emigration, even as fighting and fear of economic chaos drove many to flee. She's also part of another group: those who have made the dangerous, difficult journey before, only to be turned back by those they thought would be their saviors.
From May 2009 until the beginning of the chaos in Libya, Italy outsourced its immigration control to Libya's dictator, Muammar Gaddafi. During that time, Italian ships intercepted at least 1,000 people and returned them to Libya. Many of them likely were political refugees whom Rome had an international obligation to accept. Helen's story and those of others interviewed by TIME last week provide a window into a European approach to immigration control in which some of the world's most vulnerable people were sent back to a brutal dictatorship with the knowledge that they would almost certainly be mistreated.
It was July 2009 when Helen and her fiancé first tried to cross the Mediterranean. (Like other immigrants quoted in this story, she asked to be referred to only by her first name.) The boat the smugglers had herded them onto had gotten lost and run out of gas. The 82 passengers had consumed all their food and water. Their Thuraya satellite phone had exhausted its batteries. "We were ready to die," recalled Helen. And then an Italian ship steamed into view.
At first, the migrants — mostly sub-Saharan Africans who had fled their own countries, crossed the Sahara and spent months in terrible conditions in Libya — thought they had made it to safety. They boarded the Italian vessel, accepted the water they were offered and settled in for what they thought would be a short trip. But elation soon turned to despair. Some noticed by the position of the sun that the ship had turned toward Libya. Terrified at the prospect of facing Gaddafi's brutal police, the Africans started screaming at the sailors. And that's when the beatings began.
According to the United Nations Refugee Agency, which documented the case, the passengers on Helen's boat included nine women and at least six children. Many of them would have qualified for some sort of international protection. Though the boat had been at sea for four days, the migrants weren't offered any food. According to Human Rights Watch, which also researched the event, the Italian sailors used clubs and cattle prods to force the migrants off their ship onto a Libyan boat.
Helen, who had never been detained before, was frightened by the thought of being handed over to the Libyans. "I spent all my time crying," she said. "They beat us all the way to prison." In Libya, the women were separated from the men and delivered to a notoriously dirty and overcrowded migrant-detention center in al-Zawiyah, a town southwest of Tripoli. According to Helen, about 100 people shared two toilets — holes in the ground with salt-water taps — one of which was often closed. Some of the detainees had children with them. Others were pregnant. Food was rice or pasta in a light broth, "only something to put in your mouth to stay alive," said Helen. And the beatings were constant. "The Libyans never see a black person as human," said Helen. "They don't see you as a person who might be hungry, who might be thirsty, who might get tired."
After two months in al-Zawiyah, Helen was transferred to another center, in the coastal city of Misratah. The facility was a bit cleaner, there was a yard outside, and the women were reunited with their men. But the beatings continued. "It's not like they say, 'Get in line,' " she said. "They just start hitting you." And there was a risk of rape by their captors. "If they like a girl, they take her, hitting her, and bring her to their office," she said. Men who objected were beaten severely and bound. In 2009, Human Rights Watch interviewed a Somali man who recounted being hit with sticks, hung from his legs and subjected to electric shocks on his arms and stomach after he tried to intervene to stop a rape.
Other migrants interviewed last week told TIME of similar experiences in Libyan detention centers. Many said they had been beaten. One man displayed an arm he said he could no longer bend after it was broken at the Misratah detention center. Another, Tsegay, 48, said his ship of 24 migrants was stopped by an Italian vessel in July 2010. He said the sailors gave him milk to drink, after which he fell suddenly asleep. "We woke up to the beatings of the Libyans," he said. Held in a prison in a suburb of Tripoli, he was often taken out to be interrogated. "They wait until you start to heal, and then they beat you again," he said. But the only question they asked was, "Why did you leave Libya, knowing that there's an accord between us and Italy?" Tsegay, a Christian, said he was forced to pray in the Muslim fashion and repeatedly pressed to convert to Islam. "Whatever abuse a normal person gets, you get twice as much if you're Christian," he said.
According to Human Rights Watch and testimony by the migrants, the Libyan detention system was largely arbitrary, with sentencing largely determined by how crowded the jails were. "There's no process," said Helen, who was released in February 2010. "They just take you to prison without telling you anything, without taking you to a judge." Tsegay said he was held until after the fighting in Libya began, when he was suddenly released: "They opened all the doors to the prison and said, 'Bye. Everybody go!' " Both al-Zawiyah and Misratah then became rebel strongholds, pummeled by the regime.
In the end, Italy's deal with Gaddafi never really stopped the flow of migrants. It merely postponed it. For nearly two years, Italy's immigration reception centers were empty. Today, they're overflowing. And while the outsourcing to Libya contributed to a sharp drop in asylum claims last year, it did so only at a sharp cost to human rights. "The accord with Libya disproportionately penalized those seeking asylum," says Laura Boldrini, spokeswoman for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees and the author of a book on the Italian program. Of all those who arrived in Italy by boat in 2008 before the pushbacks began, nearly 40% were granted some sort of protection on humanitarian grounds.
According to Human Rights Watch, European countries have struck similar pushback accords with Turkey and Ukraine, where migrants suffer comparable abuse. "Europe has been very much wiling to look the other way and let these partners do the dirty work," says Bill Frelick, director of Human Rights Watch's refugee program. Helen's experience before arriving in Italy reflects to some extent the mistrust with which the European electorate views immigrants, but her treatment since is reflective of a better side of public opinion. When Italian authorities on the island of Lampedusa discovered that Helen was pregnant, they flew her and two other women by helicopter to Agriento, Sicily, to receive medical attention. Like many of the new arrivals, she's delighted to have finally arrived in a place where she can petition for safety. "We're so happy," she says. "It's like we've been born for the second time." Italy should listen to its better angels.
- Stephan Faris / Agriento