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Godwin risked everything for a better life in Europe, but he was detained and ransomed in Libya by European Union-backed authorities accused of "extreme abuse" against captured migrants.

The 34-year-old Nigerian had paid 1,100 euros ($1,100) for a place on an overcrowded vessel from the Libyan port of Zawiya, heading for Italian shores via the world's deadliest migration route.

"It was night when I got on the boat, it was already dark. I didn't know (where we were going)," he said, giving only his first name."I just wanted to go to Europe and have a good life."

Those hopes were dashed when a Libyan patrol boat approached.

Godwin said he was so reluctant to avoid going back to Libya that he considered throwing himself into the sea.

But he was detained and dragged back to Libya, where he was only released after his family paid a 550 euro ransom.

His is far from the only case.

Earlier this month, Human Rights Watch said some 32,450 people had been intercepted by Libyan forces last year and "hauled back to arbitrary detention and abuse" in the war-ravaged country as European countries turned a blind eye.

HRW accused the EU's border agency Frontex of using a drone to provide information that "facilitates interceptions and returns to Libya ... (despite) overwhelming evidence of torture and exploitation of migrants and refugees".

The migrant-run @RefugeesinLibya Twitter account regularly posts images of refugees allegedly killed by Libyan forces or tortured to extort money from their families.

Refugees in the country are "tortured by European taxpayers' money, dehumanised and deprived in all forms," it said in a recent tweet.

That chimes with a report in October by United Nations experts, who said acts of "murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment (and) rape" against detained migrants in Libya may amount to crimes against humanity.

None of this has stopped the European Union funding and working closely with the Libyan coast guard to prevent migrants reaching northern Mediterranean shores.

The accusations against Europe are not limited to financial support.

Alarm Phone, a group running a hotline for migrants needing rescue, this month accused Malta of failing to launch operations to rescue migrants in danger, "despite their obligations to do so" under international law.

"Alarm Phone has witnessed this non-assistance policy in action innumerable times," it said, accusing Malta of "abandoning boats at risk of capsizing" within the island's search and rescue zone.

From the start of January until August 20, almost 13,000 migrants have been intercepted and dragged back to detention in Libya while trying to cross the Mediterranean, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

Some have been detained, while others have been sent home or simply allowed to leave the overcrowded detention centres.

A further 918 were either dead or missing.

Libyan authorities deny reports that migrants are abused.

"The arrests are carried out according to the rules in place," a migration official said.

But many argue that the long years of lawlessness since a NATO-backed revolt toppled and killed longtime dictator Moamer Kadhafi in 2011 has left the country prey to armed groups and people traffickers.

"Human rights? There are no human rights in Libya," said Hussein, another migrant stuck in Tripoli.

The 26-year-old from Sudan said he had tried to reach Europe on an overnight boat crossing in 2017.

"The Libyan coast guard caught us and sent us back," he said.

He was detained for a day before managing to escape, he said.

He called on African countries to "look after their people" and discourage them from leaving, "instead of European countries funding Libya to stop migration".

But despite the risks, both Godwin and Hussein said they were saving money for a new effort to reach Europe.

They spoke to AFP while waiting on the roadside in the hope of picking up some work for the day -- for a pittance.

"Now I'm just in Libya, suffering, there is no work, no food to eat, nothing," said Godwin, wearing a paint-specked t-shirt and a grey beanie.

"I'm tired of living this kind of life I'm living here."

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Migrants face abuse in Libya after EU-backed interceptions - Times of Malta

The Libyan army spokesman, Brig. Gen. Mohamed Gununu, has stated that the statements of warlord Haftar's spokesman, Ahmed Al-Mismari, are a direct threat to the capital, Tripoli, saying that Haftar will not return to Tripoli no matter with whom he forged alliances.

In press statements, Gununu clarified that they have always supported political and social solutions. He called on UNSMIL to send observers to Sirte, Al-Jafra and Brak Al-Shati to identify the identity of Syrian mercenaries and thousands of members of the Russian Wagner Group being transferred to and from these areas.

He also said that they are waiting for a UN investigation to reveal the crimes of genocide committed by warlord Haftar's militia against the people of Tarhuna .

Gununu said that Sirte, Al-Jufra, southern Libya and Al-Khadim base have today become centres for foreign mercenaries such as Wagner group from Russia, Syrians, and local criminal gangs accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity, after they were expelled from Tripoli and Tarhuna, to turn into the most dangerous places for security and community peace in Libya.

Gununu explained that they do not trust the ability of Haftar's militias to expel more than 5,000 Wagner mercenaries and same number of mercenaries from Syria, Sudan and Chad, and they do not believe that they have the ability to make this request at a time when Wagner Company continues to establish camps, fortifications and digging trenches.

The Libyan army spokesman said that they are not confident of the success of any peace path in which the executioner and the victim are treated on equal bases.

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Gununu: Haftar will never enter Tripoli - The Libya Observer

A fresh wave of protests have started in Southern Libya organized by a group called the Fezzan Anger Movement, Dryad Globals latest maritime security threat advisory (MSTA) has revealed.

The movement has threatened to close oil fields in Southern Libya, having already blockaded roads to El Sharara oil field in the past, the MSTA noted.

Protests are likely to continue with an increased risk of commercial disruption from oil fields in Southern Libya, the MSTA added.

Dryad Globals latest MSTA also revealed that Libyas Waha oil company has resumed operations at the Dahra oil field. The asset had been shut down since 2015 due to an ISIS attack, the MSTA highlighted.

In a previous MSTA released earlier this month, Dryad noted that, following a significant escalation in militia activity in Tripoli due to clashes between militias loyal to rival Dbeibah and Bashagha administrations, militias agreed to end the latest round of fighting to avert another war.

This came amidst reports by the former commander of the Joint Operations Room that war is highly likely if there is intransigence and an absence of solutions, the MSTA stated.

On 26 July, rival Military leaders from General Haftars LNA and the Tripoli based Libyan Army met to discuss a unified command. Such talks will pave way for the Joint Military Commission to continue its activities to fully implement the ceasefire agreement, the MSTA added.

The continued unrest is likely to increase the short-term commercial disruption within Libya, the MSTA continued.

Dryad notes on its website that thesecurity situationin Libya can change rapidly so it is recommended that vessel operators warn their crew of the volatility of the situation, check with local port authorities as to the ports status, and carry out an assessment of the risks involved prior to entering or transiting Libyan waters.

To contact the author, emailandreas.exarheas@rigzone.com

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Fresh Wave of Protests Start in Southern Libya - Rigzone News

If you had to pick one of your many projects as being representative of your entire output, what would it be, and why?

I would like to point to the duo of films in the Abandoned series, although as fiction films, they diverge dramatically from the documentary and archive-based films I have made for the last decade.

The first film in the series, Tripoli Cancelled (2017), premiered at the art exhibition Documenta 14, and follows a man on his daily routine of smoking, writing letters, and reading from the dark childrens classic Watership Down by Richard Adams. Is the man a prisoner or a solitary emperor? There are no guards or fences, only mannequins in Olympic Airlines uniforms, and Melina Mercouri songs. The script is loosely inspired by the experience of my father, who was trapped in the same airportHellinikonin Athens, Greece, for nine days in 1977, after losing his passport in India.

The film blurs the line between prisoner and king, by merging our epoch of migration with the post-Holocaust concepts of "spectral human" (Hannah Arendt) and "Der Muselmnner" (Primo Levi, via Giorgio Agamben). The film was shot in Hellinikons International Terminal, designed by Eero Saarinen from 1960 to 1969.Hellinikon, closed in 2001, was used recently as a temporary home for Syrian refugees, and is now the site of a luxury real estate project, as part of a privatization effort spurred by EU debt renegotiation conditions. Tripoli Cancelled can be seen as a monument to an airport, and an ambitious postwar architectural project, that in the future may not exist.

The sequel film was shot before the pandemic, but completed in 2020 during lockdown. Jole Dobe Na (Those Who Do Not Drown) was conceived in response to a prompt given by the curators of the Yokohama Triennale, the Delhi-based Raqs Media Collective. They asked us to think about modes of care, and the afterlife of caregivers. In an empty hospital in Kolkata, India, a man faces blood protocols, a subtly discriminatory office, and a vacant operating theater.

His mind is on a loop of the last months of his wifes life, when a quiet argument developed. When is the end of pharma-medical care? Whose life is it anyway? They were an estranged couple, thrown back into intimacy by an unknown illness. Even in a dreamworld of his making, the paranoia of infection is twinned with a hesitant intimacy. The film revisits themes from Tripoli Cancelledthe family unit as a locus for pain-beauty dyads, abandoned buildings as staging grounds for lost souls, and the necessity of small prevarications to keep on living. In Tripoli, the boredom of daily life is punctuated by letters to an invisible wife, and endless readings of Watership Down. In Jole, a memory of final days is kept alive by the partner, and the book readings are from Bengali writer Syed Mujtaba Alis stories of Europe between the two world wars.

My position is refracted through shifting borders of decolonizing Asia, which map uneasily and imperfectly onto fault lines of the diversity of America. My grandfather was a British Indian subject, who became a mathematician because of affirmative action quotas for Muslims inside the British colonial administration. My father was a Pakistani citizen, and then his portion of the country became Bangladesh. When he wanted to go to India for medical treatment in 2016, his visa was denied because of that old Pakistani identity. As I mentioned earlier, I was born in Britain, with dual British-Bangladeshi citizenship, and grew up in Libya and Bangladesh because of where my father went to work as a military doctor.

Our racial position constantly changed with movement. In Britain, we were Pakis (a slur for Asians), and in Libya, we were miskeen (Arabic for beggar). But back in Bangladesh, we are Bengali Muslims from the majority racial-linguistic group, which has oppressed and crushed indigenous Adivasi communities, driving 10 local languages and peoples almost into extinction. So I am wary of Bengali majoritarianism as well.

Later, in America, we were initially Asian American, but after 9/11 became ethnicized into American Muslims. In our contemporary moment, when migration is at record levels and ethno-nationalist politics have new value in response, passport and class privilege overlap unpredictably with racial and religious identities. These dynamics become ever more germane as U.S. colleges host an increasingly global student body.

Because of my life experiences, I gravitate toward ambiguity and gray areas of research and artmaking. I am wary of certainty and absolute lines (not to be crossed) in my work. Almost a decade ago, I recall being heavily invested in the histories of certain forms of European ultra-left violence as a form of political action. I was in Stuttgart, Germany, and asked the curators of the museum hosting my visit if they would come with me to Stammheim Prison. Of course, they knew Stammheim as the site of the tragic-violent end of the militant Baader-Meinhof core group. But their next question stayed with me: But why are you interested in a German movement? Whats the connection with Bangladesh? In my work, I try to push back against that stay-in-your-lane sense of world history.

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From the U.K. to Bangladesh, Libya, and the U.S., an Artist Crosses Boundaries in His Life and Work - Columbia University

Zimbabwe's vice president Constantino Chiwenga on Tuesday flew to Togo on a private jet linked to Libyan strongman Khalifa Haftar, a renegade military commander who now controls the eastern and some southern parts of the north African country.

The San Marino-registered Gulfstream G450 (T7-LJA) flew into Harare from Dubai on August 22, according to flight data from FlightRadar24. Chiwenga, who doubles up as health minister, was onboard when it took off to the Togolese capital Lome for a United Nations health summit for African countries a day later.

The Gulfstream, described by aviation experts as "often operating for" Haftar and his Libyan National Army, previously flew to Zimbabwe from Libya on April 21 this year, leaving for Dubai in the United Arab Emirates a day later and onward to Switzerland on April 23.

The same aircraft was again in Harare on June 11 after taking off from Beida Al Abraq International Airport in Libya. It headed to Dubai two days later.

The Gulfstream also flew from Dubai to Harare on July 7, returning to the UAE a day later from where it flew to Kozhikode Calicut International Airport in India.

The 14-seater aircraft with a cruising altitude of 45,000 feet and a cruising speed of 885km/hr has been operated by the Dubai-based SkyMark Executive since April 2021. It costs around US$20,000 per flying hour, although terms of Chiwenga's charter for the five-hour, one-way trip to Lome are unknown.Comfy Inside the luxury jet which flew vice president Constantino Chiwenga to Togo

The Zimbabwe government refuses to say how the private jets are hired. President Emmerson Mnangagwa previously claimed his travel was financed by the government of the United Arab Emirates.

In 2020, the United States and Libyan authorities said they were investigating Haftar for suspected gold-for-cash trades with Venezuela, carried out using private jets, to undermine sanctions against the government of Nicols Maduro.

Haftar, the officials said, preferred to keep his assets in gold over fears "his accounts could be frozen if he comes under sanctions."

At the time, officials said they were tracking Haftar-connected private jets suspected of carrying gold between the South American country and West Africa, which then went to Europe mainly Switzerland and the Middle East.

Haftar heads the eastern-based Libyan National Army (LNA) and waged war on western factions after the country split in 2014, including a 14-month offensive to take Tripoli that was repelled after devastating areas of the capital.

A former senior military commander under Muammar Gaddafi before defecting to the United States where he sought asylum, Haftar who has support from the United Arab Emirates and Egypt reportedly works with the Wagner Group in Africa, a group of Russian mercenaries, to topple the government in Tripoli which is recognised by western countries.

It remains unclear what link Chiwenga, a former army general, has with Haftar if any.

Zimbabwe's late former President Robert Mugabe's foreign trips were the lifeblood of the struggling national airline, Air Zimbabwe. His predecessor, Emmerson Mnangagwa, rarely uses the national carrier's aged aircraft.

Since assuming power in a 2017 military coup, Mnangagwa, 79, has regularly used Dubai-registered private jets for most of his foreign and domestic trips including summoning an Airbus A318-112 (CJ) Elite from Dubai to fly him the 275km trip to Gweru from Harare in July 2019.

Responding to a ZimLive story at the time, Mnangagwa insisted that "we do not pay anything for that plane."

He claimed that during a meeting with the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Mohammed, "I told him we had a problem with availability of planes and he said whenever I want to travel, all I need to do is call."

Mnangagwa has also flown on a luxuriously-fitted Airbus A319-115 (CJ) owned by the Azerbaijan government, notably to a United Nations summit in Scotland, United Kingdom, in November 2021.

The Zimbabwe leader's willingness to accept gifts from foreign governments, as he publicly claims, has raised fears he is involved in some opaque transactions benefitting his benefactors.

Critics claim that the Dubai-registered jets flying into Harare are in fact a conduit for delivering scarce United States dollars to the regime, and then smuggling gold out, made easy by the United Arab Emirates' dubious no-questions-asked gold policy.

In 2016, the UAE reported gold imports from Africa topping US$16 billion. That same year, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) noted that the UAE which is not a gold producer ranked third globally in terms of gold exports, with a total value of US$25.4 billion, or 7.8 percent of total world exports.

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Chiwenga flies to Togo on luxury jet linked to Libyan strongman - Bulawayo24 News