Dozens of Nigerian women and children deported from Libya
More than 150 Nigerian women and children have been deported from Libya as part of a UN-backed “voluntary return” scheme for irregular migrants.
According to The New Arab on March 19th, UN officials and Libyan migrant agents told press that all the migrants were “women accompanied by children.”
The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) confirmed that the group was made up of 160 women and 17 children, all of whom were of Nigerian descent.
The group was flown out of an airport in the country’s western capital Tripoli.
Mohamed Baredaa, the head of Libya’s immigration agency said that there would be more flights carrying migrants in the coming weeks, with flights set to leave from Mitiga airport in Tripoli and Benghazi in the east of the country.
Migrants of Nigerian, Bangladeshi, Gambian and Malian nationality are due to be deported from Libya.
Due to divisions between Libya’s east and west, the country has become a route for human traffickers and smugglers.
The country has seen high-levels of violence since the toppling of dictator Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, causing a civil war to break out in 2014.
On February 14th, Maghrebi reported that Libyan authorities had discovered the bodies of 39 migrants in mass graves in the southeast Kufra region of the country, some 1700 kilometres away from Tripoli.
The route through the Sahara desert is incredibly dangerous and the sheer scale of the region makes it difficult for authorities to track smugglers and traffickers.
Migrants are exposed to exploitation, physical brutality, kidnapping and forced labour.
According to the IOM, Libya is home to more than 700,000 migrants.
However, Imad Trabelsi, Libya’s interior minister in UN-backed Tripoli claimed that there are “more than four million migrants” in the country, but admitted exact figures were impossible to confirm.
Trabelsi asserted that Libya “will not bear the burden of illegal immigration alone and will not become a settlement zone.”
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