The fruits of Libyan régime change

This is Africa. This is chattel slavery. This is happening today:

A day after reaching safety aboard a humanitarian ship, migrants on Friday told of arbitrary detention, slavery and beatings in Libya as Europe seeks to build up the Tripoli-based coastguard.

“Libya is crazy. They arrest us, the police ... They put us in some place ... two, three days no eat, no drink. They beat us,” said Alseer Issa Ibrahim, 28, from the Darfur region of Sudan.

Ibrahim is one of almost 600 people on the Aquarius, a rescue ship operated by Medicins Sans Frontieres (MSF) and SOS Mediterranee, now heading toward an Italian port.

Six years after the fall of strongman Muammar Gaddafi, Libya appears to be sliding deeper into lawlessness. Smugglers are packing record numbers of people onto unsafe boats, with sea arrivals to Italy up 35 percent so far this year. More than 1,300 have died.

John Osifo, a 29-year-old Nigerian, spent 11 months in Libya. He said he did not plan to go to Europe, but after a few months working at a car wash, a local man destroyed his passport and work permit, making him an irregular migrant, and he was forced into hard labour.

In Libya “they believe blacks are slaves. That is what they call us. When they want to beat us, they beat us with pipes,” he said, showing a scar on his left hand.

“They take us to jobs, force us to do hard labour without payment ... Sometimes they take you to a prison where you'll be kept and beaten up,” he said, as the Aquarius’s crew served tea and bread to the migrants ...

“We are always suffering in Libya from hunger, and the Libyan people hate us. They don't look at us like people, they look at us like animals,” said Yagob Mobark Ibrahim, 21, from Sudan.

Remember clearly that no such conditions existed for black Libyans under Gadhafi’s régime. Remember that the accusations of atrocities against Colonel Gadhafi were fabricated whole cloth. Remember that ‘dark heart’ propaganda depicting black Africans as Gadhafi’s ‘mercenaries’ and ‘rapists’ was part-and-parcel of NATO’s information war in Libya that sparked off a race war, turning Arabs against their black neighbours in heinous acts of democide (like at Tawergha). Remember all of this historical background when you read these stories of dehumanisation of people on the basis of their skin colour, in a country which was considered a ‘model humanitarian intervention’ by some very important American and European politicians. As Our Lord Christ taught us, ‘ye shall know them by their fruits’; NATO’s strange fruits on display now in Libya are quite bitter. As that great anti-slavery Tory Dr Johnson would no doubt tartly observe, it is still the case that those yelping loudest for ‘liberty’ (and ‘human rights’ and ‘democracy’) are drivers of Negroes.