Libyan Coast Guard Shoots at Migrants, Funded by Europe

How many drowned bodies will it take before we stop calling this "migration management"? How many capsized boats, how much gunfire in the night, how many corpses floating off Zuwara or Sabratha will it take before Europe admits that its moral record in the Mediterranean is sinking along with those boats?

Sea-Watch, the German sea rescue organization, has just published a report that should shame every government with the means to act. Since 2016, more than a hundred violent incidents have been recorded against migrants or against rescue NGOs. Twenty-six of them have occurred this year alone. Gunfire. Intimidation. Men, women and children forced into the water. Humanitarian ships harassed while they were simply trying to save lives. And in more than 70% of cases, the perpetrators wear the uniform of the Libyan coast guard.

Read that again. Coast guard. A force meant to protect life at sea has become, in an overwhelming share of incidents, the main threat to those fleeing. And this force does not exist in a vacuum.

Let us be clear about what this means. Since the memorandum of understanding signed in 2017 between Italy and the government in Tripoli, and through European Union support programs, training, boats, vehicles and communications equipment have been handed over to these Libyan units. The stated goal was simple: stop departures and intercept boats before they reach European waters. The result is now documented, and it is far from an isolated blunder. Those intercepted are sent back to Libya, where both official and secret detention centers have been repeatedly described by the United Nations as sites of torture, extortion, sexual violence and forced labor.

Look at what these numbers truly mean. Every incident is a human story. A father who sold everything he owned to pay for the crossing. A teenage girl whose family was massacred in Sudan or Niger. A woman who crossed the desert knowing what awaited her in Libya, who endured anyway, only to end up under bullets in a sea that was supposed to be her deliverance. When a coast guard officer fires on an overloaded boat, it is not statistics that go into the water. It is lives, and the families waiting for them somewhere else.

We must also say plainly what Libya really is. A country divided since the fall of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, it is governed de facto by militias, warlords and criminal networks that fight over its ports, its migration routes and the rents that come with them. Libya has not acceded to the 1951 Geneva Convention on Refugees. It has no functioning asylum system. Under these conditions, entrusting the policing of maritime borders to units controlled by armed factions means outsourcing violence while washing your hands of the blood. In the meeting rooms of Brussels and Rome, this is called "cooperation." In Libyan waters, it has another name.

Here is the paradox that should make us angry. Europe presents itself as the guardian of human rights, the rule of law and human dignity. It lectures the whole world on democracy and makes its aid conditional on respect for international standards. Yet it finances a force for which more than seven incidents in ten are attributable to its own agents. Saying this is not anti-imperialism. It is simply applying to Brussels and Rome the rules they claim to impose on Lomé, Kinshasa and Dakar. Values cannot be an export product that you abandon the moment it becomes inconvenient.

And we Africans must also look ourselves in the eye. These migrants are our children, our cousins, our neighbors. They come from Nigeria, Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Sudan, Somalia and Eritrea. When Libya, with European money, turns its coastline into a hunting ground, part of our youth is being sacrificed. And our governments, which should defend their citizens with the same energy they use to protect their own elites, are too often silent. Yet since 1969 the African Union has had its own Convention Governing the Specific Aspects of Refugee Problems in Africa, more protective than the 1951 text. How many of our capitals actually apply it?

So what must be done? The answer is neither to look away nor to resign ourselves. It lies in concrete actions that we can demand right now.

First, not a single euro should fund a coast guard unit without independent oversight. Every piece of equipment delivered and every training session provided must be tied to a verifiable monitoring mechanism, with incident reports published and those responsible sanctioned. A state that shoots at civilians does not deserve equipment.

Second, the International Criminal Court, seized of the Libyan situation by the Security Council in 2011, must receive the resources and political will to prosecute those who commit crimes at sea as well as on land. Impunity is the fuel of this violence.

Third, the African Union must make the 1969 Convention a living reality, with transparent asylum procedures, protection corridors and regional cooperation that does not reduce to secret deals struck with militias. Countries that succeed, such as Ghana and Senegal in their democratic transitions, prove that a credible state with strong institutions and the rule of law is the best bulwark against the exploitation of human misery.

Fourth, investments and partnerships must be grounded in transparency and good governance, not in subcontracting repression. Legal migration pathways, work permits, training programs and a genuine integration policy would cost less, in lives as well as money, than the current system of detention and refoulement.

Finally, it is up to us, citizens, journalists, civil society leaders and voters, to refuse silence. Ask your members of parliament what has become of the European funds earmarked for Libya. Ask your governments why they do not condemn gunfire against civilian boats. Ask the African Union why its own convention remains a dead letter.

Twenty-six incidents this year. More than a hundred since 2016. Behind each one, a name no one has recorded, a family still waiting for a phone call. We cannot, in good conscience, keep counting the dead the way we count parcels. It is time for those responsible for this violence to answer for their actions, and for those who finance it to stop hiding behind the word "cooperation."

Based on reporting by ACSS-EMAIL