Reportage
Men describe torture at the hands of Osama Elmasry Njeem
Testimony of Elmasry’s victims. ‘The Italian government should have called us and said: we’ve arrested your torturer, you can have justice. Instead, he is back in Libya.’
David Yambio and Lam Magok, both from South Sudan, needed only a few sentences to show the impact of so-called “national interest” on the bodies of migrants and make the self-victimization of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni look ridiculous.
“I encountered Elmasry because on November 29, 2019, I was intercepted by Libyan militias calling themselves the “Coast Guard” and taken to the Tarik-al-Sikka center. They sold me twice until I arrived in Mitiga, a prison run by the man the Italian government freed and brought back to Libya. I suffered all forms of torture there.”
Silence fell over the press room at the Chamber of Deputies. “I am one of the migrants who ended up in Elmasry prisons. I am one of his victims. He personally beat me with a big baton in an underground center where you couldn’t tell whether it was night or day.”
Yambio and Lam showed photos, published in a book, of themselves when they were slaves in centers set up in Tripolitania with Italian and European support. They managed to escape, cross the sea, organize the Refugees in Libya collective and take their complaints to the International Criminal Court and now to the Italian Parliament.
The pauses in their speech, the emotion in their voices, the expressions on their faces all showed the suffering they’ve been through. “While we were prisoners, I told Lam: one day we will get justice. Back then, talking to journalists and letting the world know what was happening to us meant risking my life,” Yambio recounted. ”And this is what we have today: an enormous disappointment. This should have been a day of celebration. The Italian government should have called us and said: we’ve arrested your torturer, you can have justice. Instead, he is back in Libya.”
Most of all, they were thinking of the thousands of “brothers and sisters” who are still in torture centers, “victims of enforced disappearances, violence and slavery,” and for all those who will suffer more abuse at the hands of Elmasry. “I heard that President Meloni once said, ‘I am a mother, I am a Christian.’ But then, how was it possible to send back a criminal who kills children?” Magok added. He recounted another terrible episode experienced in a center overseen by the Libyan general: “They forced me to remove the bodies of soldiers killed in clashes and migrants who died in detention. Without gloves and without a mask. The militiamen stayed far away, because those bodies had been abandoned for days. I will never forget that.”
Both recounted that even now, living in Italy, they still have nightmares about what they experienced across the sea. Nightmares in which they see Elmasry himself.
Representatives of Refugees in Libya wrote a letter addressed to Meloni, Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi, Justice Minister Carlo Nordio, and Undersecretary to the Prime Minister Alfredo Mantovano. “One cannot claim to fight human trafficking while making agreements with those who profit from it,” it reads, before listing four demands addressed to the government: to stop all agreements between Italy and Libya that allow the abuse of migrants; to work for the release of those imprisoned in Mitiga and other centers; to explain why Elmasry was freed; and to set up legal pathways for people imprisoned in the North African country to arrive in Italy and reopen the Italian embassy in Tripoli for issuing humanitarian visas.
The letter was delivered to the representatives of the center-left, with the request for them to act as intermediaries. All opposition parties were present. “Today, there was a briefing on the Elmasry case. And it was a cold shower of truth, hard to take, as it always is when the stories of flesh-and-blood people take center stage,” wrote the PD, AVS, M5S, Az, IV and +Eu in a joint note that criticized the ministers’ decision not to appear before the Chamber. A few hours earlier, Piantedosi and Nordio had informed the presidents of the House and Senate that the planned briefings they were supposed to give were cancelled, supposedly in order to respect the “investigative secrecy” of the case after the notices of investigation were issued.
In the press room, there was enough time for one last reflection: “’Refugee’ or ‘migrant’ are labels we will never be free of,” said Yambio. “They haunt us because they are associated with negative things. But we are human beings. We pose no danger or threat to Italy and Europe. We are the ones who live in danger every day.”
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/elmasry-le-accuse-dei-torturati-litalia-ci-ha-negato-giustizia on 2025-01-30