Roadmap to Hell Read online

  By this time, NGOs were already taking matters into their own hands. The first was the Mobile Offshore Aid Station, or MOAS, launched by wealthy American entrepreneur Christopher Catrambone and his Italian wife Regina. During the summer of 2013, the couple and their family were sunning themselves on their yacht off the coast of Malta when an abandoned jacket floated by. Regina asked the skipper about it and when he explained that it surely belonged to a dead migrant, the couple decided to act. A million dollars of their own money and a year later, they were out saving lives. By the summer of 2017, there were more than a dozen charity ships run by well-known groups like Doctors Without Borders, Save The Children and SOS. Mediterranée, along with several run by smaller German and Spanish groups. The NGOs coordinate with the Italian Coast Guard, dispatching whichever ships happen to be closest to the smugglers’ boats when distress calls are sent out and determining which Italian ports will receive those rescued.

  The EU’s border control agency Frontex has its own boats at sea as well, but they loathe the NGOs’ work, publicly accusing them of creating a pull factor that they say invites more migrants to come, a criticism that was also leveled at the Mare Nostrum program back in 2013. It is unclear if that’s true. There is no way to measure this. Of all the rescued migrants I’ve interviewed, not one even knew what an NGO rescue boat was. They were just thankful someone had saved them. What is clear, is that without the NGOs, the death toll would be more absurd than it already is. Even with a dozen NGO ships at sea, more than five thousand people died making the crossing in 2016, and Amnesty International says the death toll is getting worse, having increased threefold between 2015 and 2017.5

  In the end, the fate of these trafficked women is the same, whether their boat crashes onto the island of Lampedusa or a charity ship picks them up. No matter what their circumstances are, almost all have endured the same horrific conditions and physical and mental abuse along the way. Many witness death along the desert trail and are kept in prison-like conditions in Libya, run by the militias that operate freely in the country while they wait for smugglers’ boats to become available. Some women are given birth control by their traffickers so they don’t end up pregnant as a result of the inevitable rapes along the way. When they are finally taken to the smugglers’ boats, it is often at gunpoint. They are then pushed out to sea in boats that are not even remotely seaworthy. At that point, it doesn’t really matter if it is a charity ship, a Frontex vessel, the Italian Coast Guard or a merchant ship that picks them up – they are just lucky to be alive.

  Of all the nationalities making the treacherous journey, it is the rapid increase in Nigerians that has troubled authorities the most. Incremental increases in asylum requests from people from Syria, Eritrea or Somalia can be justified over the years by conflicts in those regions. Nigeria, on the other hand, is the richest country in Africa based on its GDP, of more than $405 billion, the twenty-sixth highest in the world, according to the world bank.6 Despite having widespread corruption and extremes in poverty and wealth that impact the majority of its population, it does not fit the usual economic profile of a country from which asylum seekers should flee, which is reflected in the fact that few Nigerians are granted political asylum when they reach Europe.

  Everyone who reaches Italy by sea has a right to apply for asylum, a process that can take more than a year, during which time they are mostly free to come and go from the state-run centers for asylum seekers. So even those who have no real chance at winning the legal right to stay can easily disappear into the country’s vast undocumented population while they wait. Sex traffickers take advantage of that and many women destined for sexual slavery are never seen again after they apply for asylum. It shouldn’t be this way. Nigeria has the economic power to help its people.

  Yet Nigerian women are the single largest group of victims trafficked to Europe for the forced sex slave trade in a racket everyone knows about but no one stops. The US State Department says the government in Nigeria does not even comply with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking.7

  Because prostitution is legal in Italy, there is an assumption that women selling sex on the streets are there by choice. Prostitution is often described as the “oldest profession in the world.” But trafficked women do not make choices. Sexual slavery and sex trafficking are assault and systematic rape dressed up as prostitution. A woman who has been sex trafficked may stand on a street in skimpy clothing and solicit sex; she may smile and pretend she wants a client to pull over to the curb. She may willingly take him to a house and open the door to a bedroom. She may touch him, please him and satisfy his sexual wants. She may lie with him after. She may eventually even take what becomes a form of comfort in the familiarity of a regular client. But a woman who has been trafficked for sex is never doing these things by choice. She is threatened by an unseen captor she knows is watching her, whose punishment will be worse than the hand job or blow job or degrading sex act she has to endure. Punishment for not soliciting sex for Nigerian women who have been trafficked is, without exception, a fierce beating – the first time. After that, it is almost always brutal, violent gang rape or death.

  What is almost worse than the fact that this skin trade exists in the first place is that this is not in any way a secret in Italy. Every nun, police officer, priest, prosecutor and aid worker who deals with the girls knows exactly how the corrupted system works, yet for some unthinkable reason no one has ever had the means, or maybe the will, to stop it. Despite everything I love about this country, its people and rich culture, this is one thing I can’t ignore.

  Dolly, a sex trafficked woman, arrived in Lampedusa on board this migrant boat.

  1

  Rescued, Then Captured

  “If you don’t call this number when you get to Italy, you will break the spell and your family will be killed.” – Nigerian maman to sex trafficking victim

  MINEO – Joy is a petite Nigerian woman who said she was eighteen when I met her in late summer 2016. She was waiting outside the CARA Mineo reception center for asylum seekers, one of the biggest refugee and migrant ghettos in Europe, for someone she didn’t yet know to pick her up.8 She looked much younger, wearing a faded denim jacket over a crisp white T-shirt and jeans that hugged her small figure. Six or seven strings of colorful beads were wrapped around her neck. A pretty gold chain hung from her left wrist. She smelled of talcum powder and mint chewing gum. She had left Nigeria six months earlier with the plan to come to Italy to work as a hair braider. She had been told that there was much work in African salons thanks to all the wealthy Nigerian women who had found success here. Italian beauticians simply didn’t know how to style African women’s hair, she explained.

  Joy said she grew up in a poor family in a small village in Edo State with no electricity or running water. She was the oldest of six children and her parents were hard workers, but illiterate. When she was fifteen, she moved to Benin City under circumstances she can’t clearly recall but, in retrospect, she suspects that her parents may have sold her in some way to raise money for their younger children. Her mother gave her the thin gold bracelet on her wrist to sell if she was ever desperate for money.

  “They probably had no choice,” she said as she looked down the road toward the thick citrus groves that hide the coming traffic. She had the wisdom that comes from being forced to accept a certain set of bad circumstances, but also the dangerous naivety of someone who had no idea what she was getting into.

  As we spoke, a dark car came into view and she took a couple of steps away from me to make sure whoever was driving saw her, and saw that she was alone. There were a handful of other migrants loitering along the road, perhaps waiting for someone to pick them up or just passing the time they were allowed outside the barbed-wire fences. The approaching car didn’t slow down, so Joy came back over to me and picked up the story about her parents.

  “They had so many children and no money to feed them and I was old enough and smart enough to go t
o the city to work,” she explained. “It was the best thing that happened to me – to get out of the village. I would still be there if I hadn’t been sent away.”

  She ended up working as what one can only describe as an indentured servant for a wealthy Nigerian woman who owned a beauty salon in Benin City. She was told that her wages were sent to her parents in the village, though she has no idea if they ever received them because her parents didn’t have a phone or internet and she had never gone back. There were six other girls who worked for the woman, whom Joy says they called their “maman,” the French word for mother. It’s a term often used to describe recruiters who find women in Nigeria for the Nigerian madams, or pimps, working in Europe. During the evenings, one of the women taught Joy how to read and write in fancy cursive, which she showed me by writing her name in my notebook.

  When Joy first arrived in Benin City, she told me she had to wash floors and clean the bathrooms, but she eventually learned how to braid hair, which she often did for more than eight hours a day at the maman’s salon.

  When she turned sixteen, she took a JuJu curse that she remembers as terrifying. JuJu is a spellbinding curse that plays on faith, superstition and lack of education. It dates back to ancient African rituals performed in Edo State, where nearly ninety percent of trafficked women are from. It plays on a combination of Islamic, Christian and animist beliefs. Many women who have taken the curse but who then wish to escape its bonds sleep with a Bible or Qur’an under their pillow out of fear that they will die from the spell in their sleep.

  The curse ties these Nigerian women to debt bondage that can only be paid back through forced sex slavery. “They took my period blood and mixed it with my toenails and some powders,” she remembers, describing how the man also cut a tiny bit of skin from her breast near her nipple that she says left a small scar. “There was a lizard and a chicken, and a tiny dead animal like a baby mouse we had to swallow without chewing. There was also a loud drum. The smell was of spoiled meat. All the city girls who work for maman must do the ritual.”

  Her eyes were wide as she recalled the details of the story. The “priest” who performed the ceremony wore a red and white mask and had thick white scars on his chest and around his arms that Joy remembers staring at as she sat, semi-naked, in front of a small stone fire pit. They were inside a tent in a small grove of trees on the outskirts of Benin City. The priest then took all the elements used in the ritual and put them in a package along with the little bloody piece of skin and told her that if she broke the bond to her maman, her family in the village would die, and that she must do whatever her maman says to keep them safe. She was told that she must also promise to repay the maman for all the money she had spent on her. Joy agreed. She had no choice.

  A few weeks after taking the curse, she was told that she would soon be moving to Italy, where she would work for her maman’s sister.

  At first, she said she was excited to go, but as the time to leave grew closer, she became anxious. She had no money of her own and knew no one at all in Italy. Still, she had no choice but to agree to the plan since her maman told her she had to do it, and she didn’t want to break the curse. She had heard stories of girls going mad if they broke the curse, and she didn’t want that to happen to her. She knew that as long as the witch doctor had the packet with her skin and toenails in it, he had control over her from Nigeria, and he would keep her safe as long as she followed the rules.

  On the morning of her departure, her maman gave her fifteen thousand Nigerian naira, the equivalent of about €45, a cheap cellphone and an Italian phone number that she wrote in dark ink with a permanent marker on the inside of her left ankle, where her skin was lightest. She also wrote the number on a piece of cloth and sewed it into her jacket sleeve under the arm, below which she stored the gold bracelet from her mother in a seam. She had no passport or means of identification, no real possessions beyond a few changes of clothes, her hair braiding combs and the cellphone, which had a removable SIM card she was told to swap for an Italian one that she would get from the “church people” when she arrived in Italy.

  “Don’t lose this number,” her maman told her. “If you don’t call this number when you get to Italy, you will break the spell and your family will be killed.”

  The 4,800-kilometer trail from Benin City to the coast of Libya takes several days of solid driving on bumpy, narrow roads. Joy says she was stuffed into the back of a small bus commandeered by two Libyan men who took turns driving through the days and nights. A car with two or three armed men followed behind them. Joy was with twenty or more other young women and a handful of men in their late teens. They were not allowed to talk during the dusty journey, and they were given very little food and only warm water, which is a tactic used to avoid having to stop for bathroom breaks. But it was hot and the little water soon ran out. Towards the end of the journey, they became so dizzy and dehydrated that they had no choice but to drink their own urine, which they did by cupping it in their hands as they peed under blankets to keep the sand out.

  Along the way, Joy remembers passing groups of men and women wrapped in yards of flowing material to protect their faces from the sand as they made their way on foot through the Sahara Desert. The drivers didn’t pick anyone up, even when people tried to wave them down. Joy also saw skeletons protruding from the sand, some near small rock memorials, others just tufts of material strung on bones like flags in the wind. She has no idea which route they took, whether through Algeria and Tunisia or through Libya, but she remembers the journey lasting many long days.

  They didn’t stop in any towns, but sometimes they stopped at night so the men could sleep or do repairs on the truck. She and the other passengers slept on the ground under the truck, guarded by an armed man from the vehicle that followed them as the drivers slept beside a fire.

  When they arrived in Tripoli, maybe a week later, the young men in their group were taken away. Joy heard later that all the men who come to Tripoli from Nigeria are held in appalling conditions in Libyan detention centers until money arrives from their families. Joy says she never paid any money at all and she never really considered why no one asked her to. She simply trusted that her maman had taken care of those details for her.

  Even as she stood outside CARA Mineo, a world away from her homeland, she clearly felt indebted to her maman, whom she described in glorious terms of praise for giving her this opportunity, despite the hardships she had endured along the way and the uncertain future ahead. She genuinely believed she would work as a braider.

  Once in Libya, she and the other women were taken to a small safe house near the coast, which she says was already filled with other African women. Several of them were pregnant, but none of them had children or husbands with them. The accommodation was dismal and most of the women slept on thin blankets on a wooden floor, leaving the mattresses for the pregnant women. There was one bathroom and no shower or bathing facilities, so the women used a garden hose that hung on a hook on the outside of the house to wash with cold water.

  They were given rice to eat, but, again, very little water to drink. The water from the hose outside was brown and they were afraid it might make them sick. Joy thinks they stayed there for almost a week with nothing to do but wonder what would happen next. Joy told me she was so bored and worried that she even thought about killing herself, but she didn’t know how she would do it, and, more importantly, she worried that suicide would break the curse and bring bad luck to her family in the village.

  Every day more women arrived, but they didn’t dare ask questions or talk to each other too much. There were whispers that women who “talked too much” had been taken away and raped and beaten or even killed. Joy said she thought day and night about her family in the village in Nigeria and wanted nothing more than to go back. She didn’t care about the lack of running water or electricity. Anything had to be better than where she was at that moment, feeling hungry and scared and alone.

  One morning,
the two Libyan women who ran the safe house woke them early to tell them that they would be sailing to Italy that night. They removed all the food and water from the house, telling them that it was better if they didn’t eat or drink before they got on the boat. After dark, a man came to the house. Joy said he was waving a gun like a madman and yelling at them to get out of the house. They could only take the clothes they were wearing at that moment, but Joy was able grab her jacket with her gold chain sewn inside and the cellphone number she had to call when she arrived in Italy.

  They walked through tall grass toward the shore, where they were forced at gunpoint to join a group of African men who were already waiting on a very flat rubber dinghy. No one had the option to turn back and those who cried were hit or pushed to the ground. They were told to take off their shoes and leave them on the shore, where a young boy collected them in a plastic bag and took them away, likely to sell on the streets. They were told to go to the half-inflated boat and find a spot. Some people chose to sit in the middle. Joy straddled the edge.

  The men quickly inflated the rubber boat with a noisy air pump run by a generator. Then the dinghy was pushed into the water. Joy estimated there might have been a hundred people with her. One of the men on the boat sat at the back using a small outboard motor that was barely strong enough to push the overcrowded dinghy through the rough waters of the sea. Fuel sloshed around the bottom of the boat, which burned Joy’s skin and soaked through her clothing. The boat sailed toward the open sea for several hours. Joy said she and the other women cried as they watched the Libyan shore disappear behind them. She had no idea how to swim. Any time someone on the boat moved, the whole raft would start to twist and bend. Several people vomited over the sides or right into the bottom of the boat. There was no way to use a toilet so people just urinated or defecated in their clothing wherever they were sitting.