Black Migrants Sold into Slavery in Libya for as Little as $400
“Eight hundred,” says the auctioneer. “900 … 1,000 … 1,100 …” Sold. For 1,200 Libyan dinars — the equivalent of $800.
Not a used car, a piece of land, or an item of furniture. Not “merchandise” at all, but two human beings.One of the unidentified men being sold in the grainy cell phone video obtained by CNN is Nigerian. He appears to be in his twenties and is wearing a pale shirt and sweatpants. He has been offered up for sale as one of a group of “big strong boys for farm work,” according to the auctioneer, who remains off camera. Only his hand — resting proprietorially on the man’s shoulder — is visible in the brief clip.
After seeing footage of this slave auction, CNN worked to verify its authenticity and traveled to Libya to investigate further.
Carrying concealed cameras into a property outside the capital of Tripoli last month, we witness a dozen people go “under the hammer” in the space of six or seven minutes.“Does anybody need a digger? This is a digger, a big strong man, he’ll dig,” the salesman, dressed in camouflage gear, says. “What am I bid, what am I bid?” Buyers raise their hands as the price rises, “500, 550, 600, 650 …” Within minutes it is all over and the men, utterly resigned to their fate, are being handed over to their new “masters.”
After the auction, we met two of the men who had been sold. They were so traumatized by what they’d been through that they could not speak, and so scared that they were suspicious of everyone they met.
Crackdown on smugglers
Each year, tens of thousands of people pour across Libya’s borders. They’re refugees fleeing conflict or economic migrants in search of better opportunities in Europe. Most have sold everything they own to finance the journey through Libya to the coast and the gateway to the Mediterranean. But a recent clampdown by the Libyan coastguard means fewer boats are making it out to sea, leaving the smugglers with a backlog of would-be passengers on their hands. So the smugglers become masters, the migrants and refugees become slaves.
The evidence filmed by CNN has now been handed over to the Libyan authorities, who have promised to launch an investigation. First Lieutenant Naser Hazam of the government’s Anti-Illegal Immigration Agency in Tripoli told CNN that although he had not witnessed a slave auction, he acknowledged that organized gangs are operating smuggling rings in the country.“ They fill a boat with 100 people, those people may or may not make it,” Hazam says. “(The smuggler) does not care as long as he gets the money, and the migrant may get to Europe or die at sea.”
“The situation is dire,” Mohammed Abdiker, the director of operation and emergencies for the International Organization for Migration, said in a statementafter returning from Tripoli in April. “Some reports are truly horrifying and the latest reports of ‘slave markets’ for migrants can be added to a long list of outrages.“The auctions take place in a seemingly normal town in Libya filled with people leading regular lives. Children play in the street; people go to work, talk to friends and cook dinners for their families.But inside the slave auctions it’s like we’ve stepped back in time. The only thing missing is the shackles around the migrants’ wrists and ankles.
Deportation ‘back to square one’
One of the detained migrants, a young man named Victory, says he was sold at a slave auction. Tired of the rampant corruption in Nigeria’s Edo state, the 21-year-old fled home and spent a year and four months — and his life savings — trying to reach Europe.
He made it as far as Libya, where he says he and other would-be migrants were held in grim living conditions, deprived of food, abused and mistreated by their captors.” If you look at most of the people here, if you check your bodies, you see the marks. They are beaten, mutilated.“ When his funds ran out, Victory was sold as a day laborer by his smugglers, who told him that the profit made from the transactions would serve to reduce his debt. But after weeks of being forced to work, Victory was told the money he’d been bought for wasn’t enough. He was returned to his smugglers, only to be re-sold several more times.
The smugglers also demanded ransom payments from Victory’s family before eventually releasing him.
“I spent a million-plus [Nigerian naira, or $2,780],” he tells CNN from the detention center, where he is waiting to be sent back to Nigeria. “My mother even went to a couple villages, borrowing money from different couriers to save my life.”
Migrants in Libya forced by smugglers to kill sick or injured friends – by burying them alive
Migrants in Libya have been forced by smugglers to bury alive fellow migrants who are too sick or injured to board boats setting off across the Mediterranean towards Italy, it was revealed on Tuesday.
Migrants often spend months in Libya, held captive in squalid compounds or trying to earn enough money for their passage, and suffer knife and gunshot wounds at the hands of Libyan militia or ruthless gangs of traffickers.
They are even sold as cheap labour in modern-day slave markets, humanitarian organisations say. If they are too badly injured to walk to the beaches from where the rubber dinghies set out or if they are perceived as being too much trouble because of illness, then they are killed, said Flavio Di Giacomo, spokesman for the International Organisation for Migration.
“We have recently heard of cases where migrants who are wounded or sick have been buried alive by other migrants, on the orders of the traffickers,” Mr Di Giacomo told The Telegraph.
“It’s horrific to think that traffickers can be so cruel. But they don’t care about the lives of migrants. If a migrant is a problem, they will kill them. A lot of migrants are shot dead on the beaches if they refuse to board the boats. It might be that they see the boats are overcrowded or the weather conditions are very bad. They are scared of the sea. A lot of these people come from small African villages and it’s the first time they have seen the sea.”
A young Gambian migrant named Ousmane told IoM: “My friend got very sick in Libya. He was sick, but not dead. They buried him alive. They said he couldn’t have survived anyway. I heard him shout my name from the ground. I ran to him and saw them throwing dirt on top of him. I tried to save him, but they cut me with a knife.”
Before they even reach the coast, some migrants are sold in slave markets held in town squares or car parks for the equivalent of £170 each, after which an even worse fate awaits them.
Their new “owners” torture them in a bid to extract money out of their traumatized families back home, the IOM says. “Sometimes they are tortured while they are on the phone to their families, so that their relatives know they are suffering,” said Mr Di Giacomo.
[…]
So far this year more than 43,000 migrants have been rescued at sea and brought to Italy, an increase of 38 per cent compared with the same period last year.
The dramatic increase could be a result of smugglers’ fears that the Libyan Coast Guard is about to become more effective, having undergone months of intensive training by the EU. Traffickers are trying to put to sea as many migrants as they can because they fear a looming crackdown on their business, humanitarian groups say.
The photo above is of migrants on a rubber dinghy awaiting to be rescued in the Mediterranean off the coast of Zawiya in Libya, in April 2017.
Star Wars never really explores the cool time-keeping situations that you can end up with in a society that spans multiple planets:
planets with no moon that don’t
have a time increment between days and years
planets with a dozen moons where
understanding their cycles involves university courses
multi-planet star systems where the position of the other planet features prominently in calendar systems
tidally locked planets with no days
(or years, really, because even though they’re orbiting a star they wouldn’t have significant changes in seasons)
and not only do they not have days or years, they have no cultural concept of those things and are bewildered by the rest of the galaxy’s obsession with measuring time
planets with years so long that
they’re useless as a way of measuring age, so people give their age
in months instead
planets with like 6 hour days where people are used to sleeping frequently for only a couple hours at a time
the space equivalent of jetlag involves adjusting to a new day length, not just a new time zone
when two planets have slightly different day lengths, the days shift relative to each other, so if you travel frequently between two such planets, sometimes the days line up perfectly and sometimes you have to deal with 12 hours of “jet”lag
And there are tons of interesting cultural implications that go along with using Coruscant time as a standard throughout the galaxy:
standard Coruscant dates have basically no correlation to seasons on planets with different year lengths, so to even guess at the weather during a historical date given in standard time you need to do calculations
everyone has a different age in
local years and standard years, and a different birthday
some planets have days much longer or shorter than standard days, so your standard birthday might be spread over a few local days or vice versa
stuff like being old enough to
drive – it tends to go in round numbers of local years, so even on
planets where the rule is “about 18 standard”, you have some
planets where it’s actually 17.36 standard years, or 19.1, or
whatever works out nicely in local years
planets that follow Coruscant standard time and totally ignore natural phenomena on their own planets
up to and including days – they force themselves into sleep cycles with nothing to do with the sun rising and setting
planets that refuse to use standard time even in official settings, and pilots hate having to travel there because the space port is always chaotic because no one knows what time it is
the Separatists try to switch to another time system than Coruscant standard and it’s a total mess but it would be embarrassing to switch back
the Rebellion learns their lesson from this and doesn’t try to change the standard time system even though the New Republic government is no longer based on Coruscant
people pay less and less attention to standard time as you get farther from the core
planets with similar natural time
cycles to Coruscant have more prosperous economies and produce more
prominent and successful people, although the effect is subtle
enough that it goes unnoticed until someone randomly decides to
check for correlation
The human trafficking crisis in Africa needs more attention. Africans are being sold like slaves and there has yet to be outrage in the western world. There is literally video footage of Africans being sold to Arabs. SLAVERY IS STILL ALIVE AND WELL
When people go off about how English is the worst language, I just wanna point out a few things:
– Our future tense requires only one word (looking at you, Spanish)
– Words don’t change meanings depending on tone (Cantonese)
– We don’t live in some bizarre Beauty And The Beast world where we give inanimate objects genders (romance languages, German)
– Likewise, we don’t have have two different words for “they” because we don’t care whether “they” were male or female (Spanish, French)
– There’s no formal “you” because we don’t play mind games about whether or not we respect you (Spanish, German)
– We don’t alter the whole fucking language based on how much we respect you (Japanese)
– The letters and sounds might not be consistent, but at least we have letters, not just pictures (Mandarin)
– We don’t have a fucking stupid tense specifically for talking to two people because some idiot decided that a two-person tense was necessary(Arabic)
So yeah, I think we’re doing okay as a language
Oh and some of our plurals are irregular, but at least it’s not like every goddamn plural is an entirely new word so you have to learn every word twice
At least it’s not like that, right? Right, Arabic? WHAT A DUMB IDEA THAT WOULD BE, HUH, ARABIC?
But we do kinda have the tone thing. Like record and record, resume and resume, etc
For a few words, but you can mispronounce a lot and still get away with it. I’m referring to this:
I love this post
Verbs don’t conjugate depending on who is doing the action and in what manner. (Finnish)
This is Greek and Russian erasure and I want to die each and every day
Reblogging literally just for that horrifying Shi story
Of the 1,864 women murdered in 2010, 91% were killed by men. (by contrast, of the 3,872 men murdered, only 9% were killed by women). Of all the women murdered (by either sex), over a third were killed by a husband or boyfriend. women have legitimate reason to fear men, even the ones they know.
Of the 3,327 white people murdered in 2010, only 13% were killed by black people. 3% were killed by other or unknown races. white people do not have a statistically legitimate reason to fear other races.
women’s fear of men is based in reality, not bigotry. white people’s fear of other races is based in bigotry, not reality.
I am going to print this out and plaster it everywhere I go
my heart just broke
Not gonna lie; I’m on the verge of tears right now. Because this is what I see every night when I come into work. I work at a Jewish-run elder care non-profit. Even in the memory care unit, we’re seeing a rise in the residents’ anxiety levels, to the point where they’ve had to stop turning on the TV news stations (and these residents still love the news). Multiple residents are direct survivors of the Shoah; some barely escaped, and almost all of them lost family members in death camps. One resident was one of the children saved by the Kindertransport. Many other residents tell me stories of when they were kids, how their neighborhoods were destroyed and relocated and of the siblings and parents they no longer have. One newer resident was finally starting to settle in when Charlottesville happened. Even though we immediately changed the channel, she was shaken. She was inconsolable for hours. When I left for the night, she was still crying and refused to leave her room. Even now, weeks after the direct event, she still is wary to come to programs, fearing that if she is away from her room too long that her possessions and place will be stolen from her like they were in 1938. Even with dementia, even with Alzheimers, these residents remember what happened. They cannot forget their lost loved ones. They cannot forget the things stolen from them. They cannot forget, period. Because this fight against Neo-Nazis isn’t just a theoretical thing. These groups know that people are forgetting about Shoah; they take great strength knowing that people from that generation are dying. When they regard WWII as a “dark cloud” hanging over the heads of this generation, it is not with a solemn regard, with they knowledge that we must not forget lest we repeat our mistakes. These White supremacists, these White Neo-Nazis, see Shoah remembrance as something they will gladly eradicate. When people gladly throw out the Nazi salute, chant the 14 words, or march under the banner of “hail victory,” they are two things and two things only – Nazi apologists and Nazi supporters. Shoah survivors are not gone. They are still here. We need to stop ignoring that this normalization of Nazis marching in the street harms real people. It’s not just ideas. It’s not just “free speech”. We cannot forget. We cannot forget. We cannot forget.
Probably how he tamed his horse, because that is some straight up Mary Sue level bullshit that no one would ever believe except the people who saw it wrote it down going “Yeah son of a bitch the kid did it what the hell.”
… I am intrigued. Elaboration?
When he was still a young teenager, his dad, King Philip of Macedon, went to look at a super awesome horse that a horse breeder was showing off trying to get the king to buy. Philip took his son along because horse shopping was the sort of father/son bonding ritual you did back in the day.
Well, turns out this horse is beautiful and strong and fiery and wonderful and no one can ride it. Philip and his advisers agree that it is a gorgeous example of a horse, but regretfully they don’t want a half-wild and unmanageable stallion and they’re gonna turn the deal down.
At this point Alexander, who’s been watching very carefully, says “It would be a shame to lose such a wonderful horse” and just fuckin goes over to the half-wild stallion, catches hold of the bridle, and hops up on the 1500 pound half-wild horse.
(This is a good way to get super dead, if anyone is wondering, but Alex never, once in his life, gave even a single fuck.)
Phillip and all his advisers are slightly freaking out now, visions of tragically dead and trampled prince and heir flashing before their eyes. And Alex, the little shit, proceeds to ride that horse around the paddock as calmly as a lamb. The horse quiets down and behaves beautifully. Everyone goes “What the actual fuck.” Philip is crying tears of manly pride, and according to legend says here “My son, you must find a kingdom big enough for you.”
(What happened, see, is that Alexander, being an observant sort, noticed that the stallion was shying from his own shadow. And so he turned the horse towards the sun, where Bucephalus did not see his shadow and therefore calmed down.)
Bucephalus would go on to carry Alexander through battle after battle, to an empire that reached from Greece to Africa to India. When the stallion died, Alexander gave him a hero’s funeral.
Oh my god Alexander what the hell most people would just LEAD the horse away from its shadow not ride it!
But considering everything else I know about Alexander the Great… I’m not really surprised.
Alexander the Great had absolutely Zero Fucking Chill and a highly developed sense of Drama.
ever wanted to do some stuff? like, different stuff? tired of having to scroll through your huge ref tag? LOOK NO FURTHER!! Have a masterpost of LITERALLY EVERYTHING which took me 5 hours to make so reblog it
Unpopular opinion: Religion isn’t inherently bad or good. But it is dangerous.
It all depends on the context and how it’s utilized.
Religion can turn violent and uncaring people into more docile and merciful folk, but it can also turn healthy people to self-loathing and guilt complexes.
It can be used for positive social change, but also for violence and terrorism.
It can condone and support research and science, or suppress them.
It can build strong communities and familial ties, but it can also isolate people from their communities and families.
It should be practiced responsibly or it shouldn’t be practiced at all.
As someone who is both a practicing pagan and a religious abuse survivor, this is exactly what I’ve been trying to tell people.
opinion too meta to be popular or unpopular: this is the case with ANY
unifying system. any combination of emotional commitment plus group activity has the potential to make people behave in extreme and uncharacteristic ways.
you see this with political movements, with sports, with music, even with fiction fandoms. anything that unites a group of people and gives them a mental treasure to protect. it reaches past the skeptical cognitive level and digs right into the tribal monkey brain.
then an unscrupulous charismatic person, leader or not, can turn the group into a mob with very little effort. quite often without even intending to do so.
think about it. you’ve seen it in your fandoms. one fairly popular person with a pet peeve makes a deliciously nasty post about it, and within a week it’s torches and pitchforks all up ins.
a personal plea from a religious person who doesn’t mob up: please resist the viewpoint that it’s religion, and in particular christianity and islam, that causes this phenomenon. it’s inherent to apes with tribal social structures, and that’s what humans are. chimpanzees have wars. we didn’t invent this.
when you blame religion for human nature, you simultaneously demonize a lot of people who’ve done no harm, create a divide where there doesn’t need to be one, and excuse non-religious group violence.
tl;dr: don’t tell yourself you’re exempt from it just because you’re not religious. you’re human. we ALL have to watch ourselves when those Group Feels kick up.
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