THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER6, 2021 41
plement the action, but it is the infor-
mation that provokes the refoulement.”
The official had repeatedly urged su-
periors to stop any activity that could
result in migrants being returned to
Libya. “It didn’t matter what you told
them,” the official said. “They were not
willing to understand.” (A Frontex
spokesperson told me, “In any poten-
tial search and rescue, the priority for
Frontex is to save lives.”)
Once the Coast Guard has the coör-
dinates, it races to the boats, trying to
capture the migrants before rescue ves-
sels arrive. Sometimes it fires on the
migrant boats or directs warning shots
at humanitarian ships. In the past four
years, according to the U.N.’s Interna-
tional Organization for Migration
(I.O.M.), the Coast Guard and other
Libyan authorities have intercepted
more than eighty thousand migrants.
In 2017, a ship from the aid group Sea-
Watch responded to distress calls from
a sinking migrant boat. As Sea-Watch
deployed two rescue rafts, a Libyan
Coast Guard cutter, called the Ras
Jadir, arrived at high speed, its swells
causing some of the migrants to fall
overboard. Coast Guard officers then
pulled the migrants out of the water,
beating them as they climbed aboard.
Johannes Bayer, the head of the Sea-
Watch mission, later said, “We had a
feeling the Coast Guard were only in-
terested in pulling back as many peo-
ple to Libya as possible, without car-
ing that people were drowning.” One
migrant jumped overboard and clung
to the Ras Jadir as it accelerated away,
dragging him through the water. Ac-
cording to Sea-Watch, at least twenty
people died, including a two-year-old
boy. A migrant told Amnesty Interna-
tional that this past February a Coast
Guard ship damaged a migrant boat
while officers filmed with their cell
phones; five people drowned.
The Coast Guard appears to oper-
ate with impunity. In October, 2020,
Abdel-Rahman al-Milad, the com-
mander of a Coast Guard unit based in
Zawiya, who had been added to the U.N.
Security Council’s sanctions list for being
“directly involved in the sinking of mi-
grant boats using firearms,” was arrested
by Libyan authorities. Milad had at-
tended meetings with Italian officials
in Rome and Sicily in 2017, to request
more money. This past April, authori-
ties released him, citing a lack of evi-
dence. The Coast Guard, which did
not respond to requests for comment
for this piece, has often pointed to its
success in limiting migration to Eu-
rope, and argued that humanitarian
groups hinder its efforts to combat
human trafficking. “Why do they de-
clare war on us?” a spokesman told the
Italian media. “They should instead
coöperate with us if they actually want
to work in the interest of the migrants.”
The spokesperson for the Trust Fund
said that the E.U.’s work with the Coast
Guard is intended “to save the lives of
those making dangerous journeys by
sea or land.”
This past May, a documentarian
from my team, Ed Ou, spent several
weeks aboard a Doctors Without Bor-
ders vessel, filming its attempts to res-
cue migrants in the Mediterranean.
The organization located migrant boats
with the help of radar and volunteer
planes, but in many cases the Coast
Guard beat them there and captured
the migrants. Occasionally, aid work-
ers saw a Frontex drone—an I.A.I.
Heron, capable of operating continu-
ously for up to forty-five hours—cir-
cling overhead. Their ship was careful
to conduct rescues only in international
waters, but threats from the Coast
Guard crackled over the radio. “Get
away from the target,” an officer said.
“Don’t enter Libyan waters. Otherwise,
I’ll deal with you, and we resort to other
measures.” After one successful rescue,
several Sudanese migrants spoke about
what they had seen in Libya. One said
that he had been beaten and tortured
by the Coast Guard when he was cap-
tured on an earlier voyage. Another
had watched detainees shot to death
in a Libyan detention center. A third
migrant wore a homemade T-shirt that
read “Fuck to Libya.”
A
round 10 p.m. on February 3, 2021,
a smuggler led Candé and a hun-
dred and thirty others to the Libyan
coast, and launched them from shore
in an inflatable rubber dinghy. Some
of the migrants, excited by the depar-
ture, broke into song. Roughly two
hours later, the boat entered interna-
tional waters. Candé, straddling the
side of the dinghy, felt hopeful. He told
others on board that he was thinking
about bringing his wife and children
to join him.
The trafficker had put three migrants
in charge. A “bussolier” guided the
Candé was in international waters when he was captured and taken back to Libya.
MAP BY FRANCESCO MUZZI
