The Killing Seas (on Libya, Europe and migrants)

By artappraiser on Thu, 05/19/2011 - 8:57am |

Guest op-ed by Hans Lucht, New York Times, May 18/19, 2011

....The corrupt participation of the Libyan authorities in human smuggling to southern Europe is an open secret. Ebo told me his journey had been arranged by a group of young Libyan policemen. The Qaddafi regime itself has used migration, or the threat of it, for political leverage. Tellingly, when the protests broke out, Colonel Qaddafi warned Europe not of an oil embargo or new terrorist attacks but that “millions of blacks” could be on the way if he were overthrown.....

(Hans Lucht, an anthropologist at the University of Copenhagen, is the author of the forthcoming “Darkness Before Daybreak: African Migrants Living on the Fringes in Southern Italy Today.”)

URL:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/19/opinion/19lucht.html?ref=world