The Dungeons of Empire
A few months ago I wrote a piece called the moats of Europe which was about how border guards and frontex officials would use rivers as a way to deter migrants. They would often strip them of their possessions and force them to swim across the river out of the country. This is known as a pushback which is illegal but it also lead to many deaths of migrants. I was going to follow this up with a post about detention facilities that are used to disappear migrants or torture them as a way to force them to return to their home country. This at the time proved to be a bigger task than I was able to take on.
The title of that piece was going to be “The Dungeons of Europe” but as I started looking into it I realised that Europe was just one small piece of a larger picture. A better title would be The dungeons of Empires. We have all heard about how the USA is sending people to CECOT in El Salvador. Or how Australia sends people to Christmas Island or Manus island in the past. So as you can see that the European policy is just a business as usual policy of keeping people in a hole outside the borders of your country. The EU has been trying and semi failing to set up more of these detention centres in the Balkans states for some time. However this doesn’t mean that there aren’t already detention centres that are being used by empires all over the world.
The Global detention project is the go to resource for this topic which is run by Michael Flynn as well as Abdelaziz Muhamat who himself was held for six years on Manus island. They have an extensive database of all the detention centres around the world. Their blog also follows the ever changing immigration policies, international agencies and detention centres. It’s a valuable resources but also very overwhelming when you first start poking around. Another resource that is sitting on my bookshelf is the book “My fourth time, we drowned” by Sally Hayden. This book is a harrowing look at the detention centres in Libya which up until this book had received very little coverage. It delivers first hand accounts of the human rights abuses suffered by migrants at the hands of Libyan militias who would capture migrants and then ransom them or enslave them. This is not light reading and as much as I would recommend this to anyone interested in this issue, I would also issue a warning that it will leave you feeling hollow. This may be why I never completed this original post.
Once I had finished the book I realised that the unrest in Libya is fuelled by Europe because it is a convenient way to stop migrants. Frontex, the EU’s border security force, is know to alert the Libyan coast guard of migrant boats so that they can be caught before they reach europe. The Libyan coast guard is also funded by Europe. So you see that the chaos of Libya works in their favour. Once migrants are caught they are returned to the detention centres where they are abused, starved and tortured for months on end until they find their way back onto a boat or die. The UN is aware of these abuses but doesn’t want to really do anything because they are corrupt and to put it bluntly, don’t care. Detention in Libya is a money making industry that fuels the conflict which is ongoing in the country.
Closer to the walls of fortress Europe is Lukavica which is the only detention centre in Bosnia. Located in an out of the way part of Sarajevo it is described as a black box where people disappear. According to a report by the NGO collective aid it has mouldy cells, water restrictions, broken toilets and 22 hour confinements. Vague laws on security threats allow for prolonged stays for detainees as well as inadequate legal aid which also prevents people from leaving. After reading the report one gets the feeling that Lukavica exists to torture people who end up there which includes children. These are the dungeons of empires. These are the places that our governments intend those who are looking for a better life to land in. These black boxes are scattered around the world and their purpose is to break humans and ideally end them. It might have been all this knowledge that stopped me from writing my original piece. This is not the post I wanted to write but its a start.