ElDiario.Es : Elvis lived for a year and a half locked in a dark bunker from which he could not escape. Every day, every hour and every minute he survived sunk in his thoughts to avoid concentrating on the outside. Waking up shouting, calling his mother to explain, between sobs of pain, that he has been captured while his kidnapper hits him with his rifle in the same area of his body as the previous afternoon. Listen to his mother cry, asking for forgiveness for not having enough money to pay what is required and end the suffering of his son.
This is only a small part of that “Libyan hell” described by each migrant rescued in the Mediterranean.
This is the Libya to which the European Union is committed to returning those who try to get to Italy risking their lives at sea, through the transfer of the rescue work exercised so far by the Italian Coast Guard and NGOs to a supposed Libyan coast guard.
Two large swollen scars remind him of the daily blows of the militias that kept him in captivity. The deepest pain, he explains, did not come from the weapons with which they left his shoulder and head raw. The biggest suffering came from the voice that forced him to listen to the other side of the phone every day: “My mother cried but I did not have money, I could not do anything but I heard my screams, they forced me to call her”, says Tagnabou Elvis on board. Open Arms.
“The Libyan criminals did it every day, except when they got tired of hitting, because when they hit us so much, there were days when they were exhausted and tired of hitting us,” says the young man from Burkina Faso.
He does not remember the number of murders witnessed. “Every day one had to die,” Elvis says with integrity. When night came to the bunker without windows in which dozens of people were crowded, “if they called you, it was a bad sign,” he continues. “They said ‘come, come’ and shoot, I saw how they killed my friend, when you are in that situation, only God can help you,” he laments.
To the forced calls, the injuries and the feeling of guilt was added the ritual of each day. “Before they were killed, they were raped in front of us, they took their pants down and then killed them,” he says after being asked about possible cases of sexual exploitation. None of his sexually assaulted companions survived: “If they raped you, you must die,” Elvis says on the Spanish ship for which he was rescued after his escape from Libya.
In his case, there were only men in the room where he remained locked.
“Every day they killed one in front of us, they used to rape him, they brought new people every week, they killed, they left a gap, to lock up other captured people,” adds the young Burkinabe man.
