Only now the Swedish Migration Board has stopped all deportations to Libya, which is not one day too early.
Previously asylum seekers whose applications were turned down where deported by force to Libya. The regime, though, has been oppressive all the time and punished critics very hard.
Over the years I have had contact with a number of people who have been active in the resistance against the Libyan regime but threatened to be deported to Libya and therefore forced to live secretly and without papers in Sweden. Several of them have had long personal relationships with Swedish citizens, but that has not been respected. Evidence of serious and severe torture of one of the Libyans who was sent back was dismissed as ”less credible”.
Now it seems that reality has caught up with the Migration Board, but unfortunately too late for those who are already sacrificed. All lot of filth floats to the surface nowadays when the peoples of the oppressed countries hit the streets in public uprisings.
My thoughts also anxiously goes to a those refugees who were stopped on their way to Europe (through contracts Italy-Libya) and in camps in Libya. What happens to them?
In a new shape, history repeats itself. We remember how we refused persecuted by the nazi Third Reich access to Sweden many of whom were executed in concentration camps. Only later came the consideration and the white buses that saved Holocaust survivors.
Ingeborg Sevastik, refugee activist