Rwanda opens door to Libya migrants after slave auction video

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Rwanda has offered to take in some 30,000 African migrants from Libya after video footage emerged last week showing a slave market where young men were sold off as potential farmhands for as little as 400 US dollars.

"Rwanda is currently under discussions... to see how we can help in welcoming migrants held captive in Libya," Rwanda’s Foreign Minister Louise Mushikiwabo told AFP. "It has just been decided so numbers and means are still under discussion but Rwanda estimates the number to be welcomed around 30,000," she added.

On Tuesday, African Union Commission chairman Moussa Faki Mahamat had called on African countries to help, after CNN released footage of a live auction in Libya where black youths were sold to north African buyers.

"I urge member states that have logistical means to make them available to facilitate the evacuation of African migrants who wish to leave Libya," Faki said.

Mushikiwabo tweeted in response: "For Africans being sold in Libya: Rwanda is small, but we will find some space!"

"Rwanda, like the rest of the world, was horrified by the images of the tragedy currently unfolding in Libya, where African men, women and children who were on the road to exile, have been held and turned into slaves," Mushikiwabo told AFP.

"Given Rwanda's political philosophy and our own history, we cannot remain silent when human beings are being mistreated and auctioned off like cattle," she said referring to the 1994 genocide in which around 800,000 mostly Tutsi people were killed while the outside world looked on.

African migrants, mostly from the west and Horn of Africa make the dangerous journey to Libya with hopes of making it across the Mediterranean Sea to Europe.

But testimony collected by AFP in recent years has revealed a litany of rights abuses at the hands of gangmasters, human traffickers and the Libyan security forces, while many end up stuck in the unstable north African nation for years.

(Top picture: Reuters Photo)

Source(s): AFP