What Verzera later discovered was that the woman, realizing she was being trafficked for sex when she, like Joy, was told to go out and wait on the street for someone to pick her up, had refused to leave the camp to join her madam. The men, presumably working for the madam as her henchmen, violently gang raped her as a warning, which is the sadistic tactic most often used in sex trafficking, especially when young women are not compliant. The theory is that if a woman realizes that the punishment for not prostituting herself is violent gang rape, she will likely agree that blow-jobs and roadside sex are a better alternative. It is rare to meet a trafficked woman who has not been faced with this choice.
The camp’s director is Sebastiano Maccarrone, who cut his teeth heading the migrant reception center on Lampedusa, where most migrants arrived on rickety boats before active rescues became the norm. Maccarrone readily admitted in a series of interviews in early 2016 that it was virtually impossible to control the activity among the inhabitants. “It’s like a small city. The big crimes get reported, but the smaller ones are usually handled among the residents,” he said, insinuating that violent gang rape was a smaller crime.
A few months after he sat for an interview, he was put under criminal investigation for corruption, accused of using funds intended for the care of migrants and refugees for personal profit in a scandal that reverberated all the way to Rome, with the discovery of a mafia organization tied to the capital city’s government. However, by the end of the year, he was back at the helm of the center.
Every single person at CARA Mineo is supposed to have applied for a right to stay in Europe, either refugee status, political asylum or humanitarian protection, in accordance with the 2003 Dublin Convention, which requires migrants to apply in the country in which they first enter the EU14 Many make the application, collect a few weeks’ worth of their spending money and then set out for northern countries where there are better opportunities for integration.
But crossing north into Europe isn’t guaranteed. In 2011, photographer Alex Majoli and I followed a group of about a dozen Tunisian men to the town of Ventimiglia on the Italian–French border. Each night at midnight they got on the late train and tried to make the crossing. Each night they got kicked off and sent back to Italy on the train. One night I met a man with bleeding gums on the train heading back across the border. He showed me his front teeth that he had picked up off the ground when the French border guard hit him with a baton.
The EU member states are supposed to accept and resettle a certain number of asylum seekers and refugees each that come in through any of the union’s border nations. The quotas vary depending on the country’s population and the number of arrivals. Most of the wealthier EU nations protested and, in 2017, the European Court of Justice ruled that member nations do not, in fact, have an obligation to resettle refugees who do not come via legal asylum procedures, such as programs set up at refugee camps in Jordan and Lebanon.15 The ruling was meant to dissuade people from taking the risky sea journey by sending a message that they are not welcome, though few migrants I have ever talked to followed inner EU politics. Instead, most assume they will be allowed to traverse Europe as they wish, either to join family or find a place to settle down.
Some migrants who wish to wait and apply for asylum in northern Europe where they have family and other connections that might help them secure a legal right to stay, or who are being advised by traffickers like Joy was, do go through the motions in Italy with false information, especially if they come from countries that do not meet the legal definition of a country where conditions are bad enough to be protected from, like Nigeria. Their fingerprints and details are entered into the EU’s digital cross-referencing database known as EURODAC, which purports to track anyone who has applied for asylum in Europe, in order to avoid multiple asylum applications.16 Its effectiveness relies on each country uploading its asylum seekers’ prints and information, which has proven a logistical challenge, especially when thousands of migrants arrive at the same time, which is often the case in Sicily.17 The EURODAC data is kept for ten years and is also used by law enforcement authorities like Europol.
UNHCR also keeps a database of migrants and refugees whom they assist called ProGres, which keeps track of health records and family ties for around seven million refugees worldwide. This database is far more extensive and they use the information to provide assistance to transient refugees. They refuse to share any of the information with border patrol authorities or police.
Anis Amri, the Tunisian ISIS sympathizer who slaughtered a dozen people with a stolen freight truck at a Christmas market in Berlin in 2016, is the perfect example of the failed system. Amri was on one of the many thousands of migrants who arrived in Lampedusa in 2011.
Shortly after arriving, he was convicted of arson for his role in setting the reception center on Lampedusa alight during a protest against the over-crowded conditions. Sometimes migrants fleeing violence in Tunisia and Morocco had to sleep in parking lots under sheets of plastic because the centers were overcrowded and authorities were wary of moving the men to the Italian mainland where they might escape. Flaring tempers led to many protests during those years and it was common for the army to be sent to the tiny island to help keep order.
Even though it was long before ISIS became a household term, Italy’s right-wing leaders, led by the Northern League’s Umberto Bossi, planted the seed that terrorists would be smuggled in among what was then mostly Tunisian and Moroccan men. In the case of Amri, they would eventually claim to be proven right, even though there is no evidence that he came over with the intention to kill. He was a troubled man, according to prison records and interviews with his family back in Tunisia, but they say he changed for the worse during his time in prison.
Italian authorities have concluded that he was radicalized in Palermo while serving a four-year sentence before going on to kill in the name of ISIS. Even though he is a rare example of the worst-case scenario, he is exactly the type of boat migrant Europeans continue to fear most.
Amri’s request for political asylum in Italy was denied and, after his stint in prison, he was supposed to be deported back to Tunisia. But the Tunisian government wouldn’t recognize him or give him travel documents and the Italians had no valid reason to keep him in jail once his sentence was served, so he was set free. He moved north to Germany through Europe’s open border countries where he applied for asylum once more. Denied again, he carried out the Christmas market attacks and then traveled back south through France and eventually returned to Italy where he was shot during a routine document check at a train station near Milan by a novice police officer in December 2016.18 Despite being a known ISIS sympathizer who had previously been expelled from Italy, he was easily able to re-enter the country undetected. He was also under surveillance in Germany for terrorist ties, but no one had found a reason to lock him up.
Even if EURODAC were fully functional, fingerprints aren’t always processed efficiently at CARA Mineo, meaning the prints might never be cross-checked. After an initial interview with local police, the applicant’s asylum paperwork is sent to Rome to process, and the backlog means it’s around two years before an immigration officer even looks at an application. That’s why it is so easy for young women who are trafficked to disappear.
Almost all the Nigerian women and girls rescued from the smugglers’ boats by the charities or Coast Guard vessels are from the small villages around Benin City in the southwestern Edo State. Most are single and traveling alone. More than eighty percent are “sponsored” by sex traffickers who have paid for their journey, according to the International Organization on Migration (IOM). The rest will have paid the smugglers themselves, but will likely not escape the eventuality of the sex trafficking rings that search out and prey on these vulnerable women.
It is important to note that the vast majority of Nigerian women are not running away from Boko Haram, the Islamic extremist group that thrives in the northeastern regions of Nigeria
and that famously kidnapped 276 school girls from Chibok in 2014. Instead, the women who come to Italy tend to fit a very specific profile: they are very young and very poor and often without formal education – a combination that makes them easy to exploit in Nigeria and to convince that there is work for them in Europe.
Educated women are trafficked as well, but they generally fly in on fake visas rather than come in on rickety boats, often falling for the same false promises of legitimate work. The horror stories of what happens to the women and girls once they get to Italy rarely make it back to Nigeria, often because the women are too embarrassed to admit what they are being forced to do or they feel ashamed that they fell victim in the first place. Some are rightly concerned that their families will disown them if they speak out. Instead, they unwittingly help perpetuate the trafficking cycle by lying about what they are really doing in Europe. In 2016, more than eleven thousand Nigerian women came to Italy – more than eighty percent are known to be trafficked as sex slaves. The number for 2017 is estimated to be the same or higher.
Many of the Nigerian women trafficked for sex slavery are assured by their “sponsors” that they will “take care of getting the documents for them” once they leave the reception centers like CARA Mineo. Others are told to make up information or are provided with detailed false information that they are asked to use for their applications, given to them by those they call when they get to Italy or the traffickers who pose as asylum seekers and operate inside the centers who guide them through the well-oiled process that skirts the law. In fact, the trafficked women often do end up with documents, albeit only thanks to the extensive false document network operated by Italy’s various mafia organizations. The documents, which often pass the smell test with local authorities, are another link in the chain that keeps them tied to sexual slavery because the madams threaten to take them away if they try to leave or underperform.
Eurostat did a study of Nigerian asylum requests granted in Italy in the first nine months of 2015. Of the 11,340 requests, 510 were given full refugee status and 720 were given limited humanitarian protection, which is the category below full refugee status but allows a two-year permit to stay in the country.19 Most of those who were given protection were unaccompanied minors or pregnant women or those who had realized that they were being trafficked for sex work. Some women who were systematically raped or tortured along the desert trail or in Libya are also given a right to stay if their injuries are bad enough. In a few rare cases, Nigerian men who can prove they or their families have been threatened or killed by Boko Haram terrorists in Nigeria are also given a pass. Despite so few Nigerians being given legitimate documents, thousands of women forced into sexual slavery have false papers.
There is often ambivalence when it comes to processing requests by Nigerian women, in large part because even the officials assume to know why they are really there, no matter what they are told. Some migrants have been coached what to tell authorities that might give them the best chance at being granted asylum, even if it’s not entirely true. Italian authorities processing the massive number of requests, which lately number more than 150,000 a year, have neither the time nor the resources to try to carry out background checks on everyone. When a Nigerian woman says she has been threatened in Nigeria, or that her family has suffered under the corrupt government, or that she worries about Boko Haram, the authorities can be reluctant to believe her stories and just choose to see a prostitute in the chair in front of them. In these cases, the authorities may even know she is being trafficked and forced to sell sex against her will, but they still look away. As well as being short on time, they simply don’t have a mandate for that sort of social service.
Such is life in CARA Mineo and other camps like it, where a long list of priority cases comes before those trafficked for sex work, and where the longer people stay, the more corrupt they become.
Those who built CARA Mineo for the American military families likely had no idea what it would become, though it does operate like a small city, even if most of the amenities are provided clandestinely by the asylum seekers rather than the administration. There are little restaurants, barbers and even witch doctors who operate out of the center’s villas, and guests can find almost anything they want at the African souk-style bazaar where handcrafts, tobacco and supplies smuggled into the center are sold and traded. Alcohol is forbidden, and so are drugs, but residents say even what’s forbidden is available for a price.
Angela Lupo, a legal adviser for the Italian Council for Refugees (CIR) told a parliamentary committee in 2016 that the center runs the risk of complete lawlessness. “There’s talk of prostitution, of drug trafficking, there is certainly a lively black market,” she testified. “The residents sell clothes, food, cigarettes and phone cards at bazaars dotted around the center. There’s even an illicit restaurant and a migrant-run taxi service. The controls are few and far between.”
Women are coerced into selling sex inside the camp, too, but they are rarely Nigerian. Instead, those who run the sex trade clearly know that the Nigerian women have already been exploited, so they tend to prey on women from other African nations like the Ivory Coast or Ghana. Nigerians occupy the top rung of the hierarchy of criminal gangs operating within the center because they outnumber the other nationalities and, because of that, they are the ones who have forged ties with the local mafia and other organized crime syndicates in Italy, for whom they can easily provide drug runners and others who might eventually enter a life of crime, especially if their asylum request is denied.
Of CARA Mineo’s average of four thousand residents, most are men. There are only around six hundred women at any given time. Sex is a currency at the camp, often traded for drugs, cigarettes or other supplies in lieu of cash.
In 2012, a Caltagirone prosecutor opened an investigation into forced prostitution inside the facility tied to a spate of abortions carried out by doctors treating patients from the center. In the first three months of that year, the center’s doctors performed thirty-two abortions on migrants, which constituted an increase of more than two hundred percent from the year before. The abortions were not due to what are considered normal migrant factors, such as maternal health, which often results from malnourishment or from the dangerous sea voyage. Nor were the women requesting abortions claiming rape in Libyan camps before they set sail to Italy. Instead, authorities concluded that the high number of abortions was due to the increase in prostitution within the camp, coupled with the lack of birth control options. Because of extensive Catholic Church donations and influence over migrant and refugee care, contraception was not being distributed, and few migrants have the financial means or even access to stores to source their own. Since then, some aid groups are rumored to be handing out condoms to women suspected of being forced into selling sex inside the center.
The camp is uninviting after a long period of time and most people whose asylum requests are delayed simply leave because they can no longer tolerate the substandard quality of life. Those inside the camp are treated with something far less than human dignity. During the 2016 investigation into the seventeen camp administrators, prosecutors alleged that refugees were essentially bought and traded at the highest levels for kickbacks. A common complaint has long been that the meals are cheap and starch-based with no daily variety, generally rice and bread and heavily processed meats served with overripe bananas and apples that have been rejected by local growers. Children are given long-life UHT milk, but there are few vegetables on offer. Providing sub-standard food is a common ploy for centers to bilk the system of state-funded reimbursements that are supplemented by the EU. By offering bulk foods, like rice, that cost just pennies a plate, they can save money. That’s why smaller refugee centers, where treatment is often more personalized, struggle to make ends meet. It becomes very difficult to provide for a person’s total needs, even including the money that the government provides per migrant.
On average, around ten migrants waiting fo
r their asylum requests to be heard die at CARA Mineo every year, often killed in fights or because they have medical conditions that aren’t tended to, according to Amnesty International and other aid groups that work in the center. In 2016, a young man from Ghana named Ebrahima Fati was killed by a local Sicilian woman driving her SUV too fast along the citrus grove-lined road that passes by the camp. His death sparked angry protests in the center when the woman wasn’t charged with a crime, despite multiple witnesses – all migrants – testifying that she was driving at an excessive speed. Her defense was that she was afraid that the migrants might stop her car and hurt her.
In 2015, a thirty-one-year-old man from Pakistan was found dead behind the villa he shared with other Pakistani nationals. His death was ruled natural, despite his young age and lack of known medical problems. Autopsy results were incomplete and because he had no family to speak of, there was apparently no real reason to find out just how he died.
Suicide is common, too, especially for those whose asylum is denied, and sometimes for those who just can’t wait any longer to hear the outcome. In 2013, a spate of more than a dozen suicides culminated with the death of a twenty-one-year-old Eritrean man named Mulue, who hung himself with a curtain from his room. The center administrators responded by removing the curtains in most of the villas.
The reality is that migrants are treated as second-class citizens in the eyes of the law and in public perception. This isn’t unique to Italy or to African migrants. In 2016, Hungarian authorities were caught on videotape throwing loaves of bread over a tall fence to crowds of Syrian refugees as if they were dangerous animals.20 Such attitudes play a role in the EU’s inability to come up with a strategy for the ongoing crisis. Italy is especially schizophrenic on this, at once rescuing tens of thousands of migrants from the sea and at the same time treating them without the basic respect for human dignity once they have been saved. Even if they are granted asylum, things don’t always improve. In August 2017, a group of around eight hundred mostly Eritrean and Ethiopians who had been granted political asylum were kicked out of an old office building in Rome they had been staying in illegally for around four years. When those who had nowhere to go after the evictions camped out in a nearby park, police removed them with water cannons. These were people who had been granted full protection by the Italian state but who had not been provided with housing or income.
Roadmap to Hell Page 4