Haftar Trucked 602 Migrants Into the Desert and Called It Security

Six hundred and two people. Loaded onto trucks. Driven across the Sahara for a day and a half and dropped at a border like cargo nobody wanted to sign for. That is how the security authority in eastern Libya chose to spend its week, and it announced the operation with the pride of a government that believes it has done something good.

Let us be precise about who did this. The spokesperson, Abdulmenam al-Ghomati, speaks for the interior ministry agency tasked with tackling illegal migration in the east. The people were seized in cities and districts under the Libyan National Army of Khalifa Haftar, the commander who controls the east and much of the south. The campaign was branded as protecting "the homeland and the border." Those taken included people swept up in recent security operations and others who were stopped while trying to enter Libya. The official story is that these were criminals and border violators. The reality is that many of them were simply poor, black, and in the wrong place when the trucks came.

Ask yourself what a lawful removal looks like. It involves a charge or a documented immigration violation. It involves a hearing, a record, a lawyer, and a chance to claim asylum. It involves someone checking whether a Sudanese woman fleeing a massacre or a young Nigerian who was trafficked into Libya is being sent back to be killed or enslaved. Nothing about a truck convoy to the Chadian frontier suggests that any of this happened. It suggests a process designed for speed, not justice.

Libya has been split between rival authorities since the fall of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, and that fracture is the reason this business thrives. Every migrant who crosses the Sahara from Niger, Chad, or Sudan into Libya is crossing into a country with no single government, no functioning rule of law, and no accountable police. The UN Fact-Finding Mission on Libya has documented arbitrary detention, torture, sexual violence, and forced labour in facilities run by armed groups across the country, and it has pointed to the eastern authorities among those responsible. Years of UN reporting describe men and women held in overcrowded warehouses with no sanitation, no medical care, and no timeline for release. In 2017, CNN broadcast footage of migrants being sold at what appeared to be slave auctions in Libya. The world was horrified for about a news cycle. Then it went back to its dinner.

Notice who is holding the reins. Haftar's forces have been backed by the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and, according to multiple UN Panel of Experts reports and independent investigators, Russian mercenaries linked to the Wagner network. The internationally recognised government in Tripoli has had its own backers, including Turkey, which has deployed military assets and advisers. Each of these powers has treated Libya as a chessboard, propping up a commander here and a militia there, while the Libyan people and the migrants who pass through their country pay the price in blood and cash. This is the new scramble for Africa. The flags are different from the 19th century, but the logic is the same: foreign capitals buy influence, weapons, and access, and African men with guns are paid to keep the lid on.

And then there is Europe, which never misses a chance to lecture us about democracy and human rights. Since 2017, European Union programmes have funded and trained Libyan coastguard units tasked with intercepting migrant boats and returning those on board to Libya. Those returns deliver people straight back into the detention system that the UN has condemned. Brussels calls this migration management. The people in those warehouses call it hell. A continent that claims to hold human dignity as a founding value has built a border wall out of other people's suffering and outsourced the cruelty to a country it refuses to rebuild.

Chad is not some neutral dumping ground either. It is a poor country with its own conflicts, its own fragile institutions, and its own citizens who migrate in search of work. Absorbing deportees dropped at its border without warning or support strains communities that have little to spare. The burden is passed sideways, from one weak state to the next, and the migrants stand in the middle with nothing.

We have heard all the excuses before. Libya is complicated. The migrants are a security threat. Europe needs to stop the boats. Stop, and look at what these excuses have produced: a country where armed men decide who is a human being and who is cargo, and where the outside world counts the arrivals in its statistics but refuses to count the dead in the desert.

So what must change? Start with the fundamentals that every African state, including Libya, claims to believe. Libya needs a single, accountable government chosen through elections that are free, credible, and held on time. Its courts must be independent of the militias that currently rule by gun. Any person detained in Libya must be brought before a judge within a fixed period, given access to a lawyer, and screened individually for asylum before any removal. The United Nations and the African Union must be granted unrestricted access to every detention facility in the country, with the power to publish what they find. No deportation should proceed without a signed, reviewable record for every person sent across the border.

Africa already has proof that a better path exists. Botswana built one of the continent's most stable economies on property rights, rule of law, and institutions that outlast individual leaders. Mauritius proved that good governance and open markets can turn a small island into a prosperous, peaceful democracy. Senegal in 2024 showed that a court can stand against an attempt to postpone an election, and that a peaceful transfer of power is possible when citizens insist on it. These are not miracles. They are choices, and Libya's neighbours and partners can make similar ones by demanding them.

The European Union must end the pretence. Funding for Libyan coastguard operations should be made conditional on independent human rights audits, with public reporting and immediate suspension when abuses are documented. The African Union should use its Peace and Security Council to put the treatment of migrants in Libya on the formal agenda, and to name the authorities responsible. The UN Security Council should stop treating Libya's arms embargo as a suggestion and start enforcing it against every foreign power sending weapons and mercenaries into the country.

And we, the people, have a role. Libyan civil society groups that document abuses need protection and funding, not silence. Journalists who uncover detention centres need platforms that will carry their reports. Those of us living beyond Libya's borders need to ask our own governments, our parliaments, and our donors a simple question: what are you paying for? If the answer includes border policing that ends in a truck and a desert, then the money must stop until the abuses stop.

Six hundred and two people were driven to a frontier this week because a warlord, backed by foreign capitals, decided their lives were a problem to be trucked away. That is not security. That is the abandonment of every principle we claim to hold. Demand the courts. Demand the monitors. Demand the end of the convoys. Because the next truck is already being loaded, and the desert does not forget who it swallowed.

Based on reporting by ACSS-EMAIL