For years now, the Italian authorities have been financing, legitimizing and protecting militiamen and officials: the Almasri case is only the latest in a series of cases.
The case of the immediate release of Njeem Osama Elmasry, the head of the Libyan judicial police also known as Almasri, arrested on January 19 in Turin on a warrant from the International Criminal Court and then immediately returned to Libya by the Italian government, is only the latest in a series of political and diplomatic operations with which Italy has legitimized and protected the various leaders who have governed Libya since the fall of Muammar Gaddafi’s regime in 2011.
These operations have often been on the edge of international law and highly controversial, because in the last 15 years Libya has been led de facto by armed militias implicated in potential war crimes, various illicit trafficking, systematic violations of human rights, and not by legitimate governments recognized throughout the national territory.
Since the fall of Gaddafi, successive Italian governments have had relations with these militias essentially for two reasons: to maintain a preferential channel of access to the oil wells and natural gas fields of Libya, which are effectively controlled by the militias, and to entrust them with the task of forcefully blocking the migrants who every year try to reach Italy by sea.
Maintaining a relationship with these militias has meant above all providing them with money, political legitimacy and protection from possible international judicial investigations: all “courtesies” , as defined for example by Luca Gambardella of Il Foglio , one of the journalists who most assiduously follows the evolution of relations between Italy and Libya.
An initial form of “courtesy” involved the allocation of European Union funds for Libya, many of which were approved under pressure from Italian diplomats and officials in European institutional settings. For example, from 2015 to 2022, the so-called European Union Emergency Trust Fund for Africa provided €465 million in projects for Libya, many of which were related to combating migration.
It is difficult to understand what happened to this money once it arrived in Libya.
An investigation by Lorenzo Bagnoli and Fabio Papetti published in 2022 on IrpiMedia managed to trace approximately 20 million, less than half, of the expenditure item “Support to Integrated Border and Migration Management in Libya”, relating to border control and migrant management. «The main expenditure items are 8.3 million for new marine vehicles (20 fast boats of various lengths); 3.4 for land vehicles (30 off-road vehicles, 14 ambulances and ten minibuses); 5.7 for spare parts and maintenance of naval assets; one million in training activities and one million for 14 containers», wrote Bagnoli and Papetti.
In a 2024 report , the European Court of Auditors highlighted the risk that equipment purchased with European money could have “been used by parties other than the intended beneficiaries,” and that the opaque subcontracting procedures with which the money had been managed could have “potentially benefited criminal organizations,” that is, other branches of the same militias.
It is entirely possible, then, that the untraceable portion of these funds had simply been pocketed by the militias to finance their own activities.
The financing of the militias organized in the so-called Libyan Coast Guard has also had international implications. Between 2017 and 2018, first the center-left government of Paolo Gentiloni and then the one supported by the League and the 5 Star Movement led by Giuseppe Conte worked hard to ensure that the International Maritime Organization (IMO), the UN body that governs international maritime navigation, recognized the Libyan government supported by much of the international community, namely the one in Tripoli, as having jurisdiction over a SAR zone.
SAR zones are areas of sea in which the competent coastal states undertake to maintain an active search and rescue service (in English search and rescue , abbreviated to SAR). Managing an internationally recognized SAR zone is a symbolically important step for a state. At the same time, it is very demanding even for stable states with a Coast Guard included in the regular armed forces. Imagine for a failed state in which the Coast Guard is replaced by the armed militias that govern its territory.
During the process of recognizing Libya’s SAR zone, the IMO itself, through a spokesperson, explained that Italy and the European Commission were “supporting capacity-building efforts to establish SAR services in Libya”. Furthermore, in the first months of activity, the command center of the Libyan SAR zone was positioned on an Italian navy ship docked in the port of Tripoli. Without Italy’s diplomatic and logistical support, in short, Libya would never have obtained a SAR zone and the associated international recognition.
Both the supply of equipment and the establishment of the Libyan SAR, moreover, occurred thanks to a memorandum between Italy and Libya signed in 2017 between the government of Gentiloni and that of Tripoli, then led by Fayez al Serraj. The agreement is automatically renewed every three years and none of the Italian governments that succeeded the first Conte government has deemed it necessary to ask for changes: neither the second Conte government (supported by the PD and the M5S), nor the government of Mario Draghi nor the current one led by Giorgia Meloni.
We have known for years that the militias that make up the so-called Libyan Coast Guard are in cahoots with human traffickers and that interceptions off the coast of Libya are carried out with violent methods that put the lives of migrants at risk . The violence of the so-called Libyan Coast Guard has long been known thanks to journalistic investigations, testimonies of NGOs that rescue migrants at sea and reports from international organizations . No Italian government has ever openly condemned the actions of the so-called Libyan Coast Guard.
The memorandum also called for promoting the creation of “a civil and democratic state” in Libya. In 2018, the then Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte tried for months to organize a conference on the future of Libya. It was finally organized in Palermo in November. Both al Serraj and the head of the government that controlled and still controls eastern Libya, General Khalifa Haftar, arrived in the city and had themselves photographed shaking hands , along with Conte himself. However, the conference did not have any concrete consequences .
Haftar then, despite his status as a rebel leader with respect to the Libyan state recognized by much of the international community, has often met with the Italian prime ministers, and so have the officials and militiamen close to him: even from the eastern coasts of Libya, that is, those controlled by Haftar, thousands of migrants depart every year, and at various times when the flow of migrants from Benghazi, Tobruk, Bardia and other ports in the east has increased, people have wondered whether some sort of negotiation was underway between Haftar and the Italian government.
It is unclear whether Haftar ever obtained anything tangible from the Italian government, other than a certain political legitimacy.
The Italian government’s good relations with Haftar also extended to his son Saddam Haftar, head of the Tariq Ben Zayed militia and one of the most powerful men in eastern Libya together with his father. In the summer of 2024, Saddam Haftar came to Italy briefly and during a check was held for about an hour at Naples airport: however, he was then released and returned to Libya without problems.
In 2022, Amnesty International published a report accusing his militia of having committed “war crimes and other crimes under international law against thousands of alleged or actual critics and opponents” for years.
According to information gathered by Il Foglio to avoid similar incidents, at the end of January the head of the Italian secret service for foreign countries (AISE), Giovanni Caravelli, went to Tripoli to inform the Libyan officials and militiamen for whom the International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant. In theory, this information is confidential to the member countries of the Court, therefore inaccessible to Libya.
During a hearing on Tuesday at the Parliamentary Committee for the Security of the Republic (COPASIR), Caravelli confirmed that he had been in Libya at the end of January but denied having released information on Libyan officials and militiamen wanted by the International Criminal Court.
____________________
