NAIROBI, Kenya (RNS) — African church leaders are speaking out against Libya’s move to shut down humanitarian organizations providing care to migrants and refugees being held in detention centers in the North African country.
The move is the latest signal of Libya’s determination not to become a resettlement zone for migrants fleeing violence in the Horn of Africa who have been stopped by European Union countries from crossing the Mediterranean.
“This deeply disturbs me. It (lack of care for migrants) leaves me angry,” Catholic Bishop Tesfasellassie Medhin told Religion News Service in a telephone interview from Ethiopia’s Tigray region. “It proves that we are losing communal responsibility.”
Thousands of migrants from Tigray fled into Sudan from 2020 to 2022 as the conflict between the Ethiopian army and a rebel group, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, intensified. An estimated 600,000 people have been killed in the fighting, and an estimated 3 million others have been displaced, according to aid agencies. Barely a year later, the civil war in Sudan reignited, forcing the Tigray refugees to flee again.
With nowhere else to go, many landed in Libya, where they were crowded into ad hoc camps run by Libyan militias. The armed groups, some affiliated with the government but others run by smugglers an …