Migrant Sales Under Gaddafi
While CNN was able to document a few clandestine “slave auctions” in post-Gaddafi Libya, while Gaddafi ruled-nighttime slave auctions were common. Two or three times a week, the manager of a Kufra camp conducted the sale of several dozen migrants. A 26-year-old Eritrean told HRW,
Every two or three days, the manager of Kufra camp took 25 or 30 persons at night and sold them to Libyan transporters so he could get money from us. Other people were just thrown in the desert. Sometimes they would take people in the desert and run over their legs with a car and just leave them. He sold me with a group of 25 or 30 people to a Libyan man who put us in a big house in Kufra and told us we needed to have our families send $200 to pay for our release from Kufra and to take us to Benghazi. (HRW, 2009, 72)
Even children were used as slaves. One unaccompanied child, Kofi, an orphan from Ghana, was 16 years old while in Libya for one year in 2007. Kofi spoke of being pressed into forced labor after being detained by the Libyan authorities: “The guard took me out to work on his house. I worked all the time every day for four months, but he never paid me. Then he gave me to an Egyptian woman. I worked on her farm for seven months. She also didn’t pay me, but she at least gave me food and clothes.” (HRW, 2009, 62)
Gaddafi’s Libya also regularly brought slaves back from its
“adventures” in other African countries (Claiborne, 2011). Speaking of the Gaddafi-supported Arab supremacist terror campaigns in Sudan and Mauritania, Jeff Jacoby wrote in the
Boston Globe, April 2, 1996, “Tens—maybe hundreds—of thousands of black Africans have been captured by government troops and freelance slavers and carried off into bondage. Often they are sold openly in ‘cattle markets,’ sometimes to domestic owners, sometimes to buyers from Chad, Libya and the Persian Gulf states.”3
In 1993, Augustine Lado, president of Pax Sudani, noted,
In 1990, Africa Watch concluded that there was evidence of kidnapping, hostage-taking and other monetary transactions involving human beings “on a sufficiently serious scale as to represent a resurgence of slavery.” And a declassified report from the U.S. Embassy in Khartoum released last May by Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) documents how Sudan government troops and armed Arab militias are involved in massacres, kidnapping and the transporting of African Sudanese to Libya.4
As we shall see, there can be no doubt that this required the support of the Libyan government. In March 1996, U.S. congressional hearings were held on “Slavery in Mauritania and Sudan” (U.S. House of Representatives, 1996), and while those two countries were the headliners, the subject of Libya kept popping up. For example, Augustine Lado told the hearing, “There has been very critical evidence that the people, our people, some of them were actually sold into slavery in Libya, Saudi Arabia, and other parts of the Arab world.”
