From Tigray to Libya, young migrants in Brussels are hoping for a better life
Sania Mahyou
“Where are you from?” I ask, on my first day volunteering at a migrant shelter in Brussels.
“From Tigray”.
“Where is that?”
“You don’t know Tigray? It’s famous to the whole world!” Thomas* replies, with a smile on his face. He proceeds to show me a video of a protest against “the genocide currently occurring in Tigray”, which he attended a few weeks ago in front of the European Parliament.
Among the protesters, I can discern other individuals I know from the shelter - or rather, “the hotel”, as they call it - yelling and waving their fists. The hotel, officially known as Ulysses’ door (baptised as such in honour of one of the first residents who encountered death on the road) is managed by the NGO Bxl Refugees. Since its founding in 2015, it has served as a safe haven for the migrants, where they can sleep, eat, laugh, make friends, get bored, and even cry.
As part of my studies, I spent one month at Ulysses’ door working as an English teacher and a collaborator. Sometimes, the violence within the stories I heard made me speechless. For a long time, I didn’t know what to do with them. Slowly, I realised that the only thing I could do was write, because, to quote Arudhati Roy, “once you’ve heard it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political as speaking out”.
Thomas fled Mekele, the capital of Tigray, almost one year ago, a few months after the beginning of the Tigray war. The conflict opposing the rebels from the Tigray Defense Forces to the Ethiopian and Eritrean forces has been ongoing since November 2020 in this region situated in Ethiopia. According to the UN, at least 400,000 people live in famine-like conditions and an investigation led by Amnesty International reported numerous cases of civilian massacres and the use of rapes against women as a war weapon.
So one day, Thomas took his backpack and left. So did Adam, who was thirteen years old at the time.
“All of us, we just lied, saying we were going to school, or elsewhere. Because our parents would have never let us go away,” says Yassine, who was seventeen at the time. “My parents called me many times, begging me to come back. Especially when I was in Libya. They knew it was a bad country, very bad country, for Black people.”
Saying that Libya is bad for Black people is an understatement: it is the scene of a modern slave trade, whose main victims are Black Africans immigrants. One day, Yassine showed me a picture of one of his friends, before and after being enslaved. The body of this young man was unrecognisable and his puffy face had given way to hollow cheeks.
On October 1, 2021, a wave of arrests targeting Black African immigrants started in Gargaresh, Tripoli. According to the UN, “at least 4,000 people, including women and children, were arrested during the security operation. Unarmed migrants were harassed in their homes, beaten and shot.” Nevertheless, immigrants from Tigray do not have the choice: crossing the Mediterranean Sea remains a necessary step on their journey, and for most of them, after a few months, it will become their gateway to Europe.
“Libya.” Every time they say this word, their eyes suddenly become empty.
Thomas, who is only 20 years old, is still traumatised by what happened to him there. “They took me to prison. They put me in a cell with many, many people: men, women, young and old people. Our only meal was one piece of bread a day. One day, they told me I needed to give them $10,000 to get my freedom back. I was lucky, some are being asked $20,000,” he recounts.
To pay the ransom, his family had to sell one of their two houses and after two months stuck in prison, where he was being beaten and whipped, Thomas walked out, free. The same situation happened to most of them, either in detention centers or in prisons controlled by militias; and if they had the chance to avoid being enjailed, they all encountered extreme violence from the Libyan security forces.
“Please, my friend, pray for me. I just need a little bit of luck”, Yassine asks me on Facebook Messenger. For those seeking refuge, it seems that everything revolves around chance.
“The word I heard the most when I was in Libya was Inshallah. Every day, we would sit on the beach and we would hope that today was the day God’s will would align with ours and make us cross the Mediterranean”, recalls Thomas.
The young men staying at the shelter all succeeded in surviving the vicious waves that separate Libya from Sicily. From there, while encountering significant police brutality and often having to sleep on the streets, they made their way through the Italian peninsula, the French metropolis and lastly, Brussels, the capital of the EU. Most of them ended up in Brussels quite randomly, following the advice of old friends who had taken this journey before them.
However, Belgium is not their final destination: their dreams lie in England, a place they speak of ceaselessly.
“I heard London is very beautiful. And it’s big, too. And that they give the papers easily. Is it true?” They hang onto their dream to reach England like a lifebuoy. “Sania, do you want to talk to my friend? He is in London now!” wonders Yassine.
They often call their friends who made it there on FaceTime, almost as a subconscious reminder that it is indeed possible. Adam, who is fifteen, made himself a tattoo that reminds him to “think positive”. He has not spoken to his family for three months, because of the non-functioning network in his hometown. It’s for them that Adam risks his life constantly.
Back at the shelter. Tonight, like every night, the same scenario takes place: after dinner, the three hundred fifty men hosted in the shelter put all their stuff in a small backpack. Tonight, they are “going to chance”, as they say. In other words, they are trying to cling onto lorries heading to the UK.
And tomorrow morning, like every morning, 99% of them will come back with tired faces, exhausted from the long night they just spent in the Belgian parking lots. Some of them would have just been released from a night in prison, after having been caught by the police in Calais, “the hope graveyard”, as they call it. Others would come back with wounds, bitten by police’s dogs. However, for a few, the lucky day would have come and soon enough, their faces will be all over Facebook stories of their friends, with the caption “congratulations brother” alongside emojis of the British flag.
Back to reality, too. The reality that is made with dramatic and happy events. My friends from Tigray are full of life. Everyday, they gather in the North Station of Brussels to chat with their friends, to welcome new ones, to play football and, even, to party. When Thomas shows me a video of him dancing with his friends, a beer in his head, in a Belgian parking lot with Tigrean music in the background, his eyes are full of light.
After all, they are teenagers who had to grow up too quickly. But what I feel when I am looking at them has never been - and will never be - pity. I feel admiration. Admiration for all the kilometres they have done, on the roads of North Africa, of the Balkans, of Spain, Italy and Greece, and hopefully soon, of Great Britain.
As fellow human beings and conscious citizens, it is our duty to help people like Thomas, Adam and Yassine on their road to safety. But we also have to keep in mind that it is the policies of the countries we live in that are directly responsible for the human rights abuses they had to live through when they started their journey towards the UK, whether it be in Libya or in the European Union.
Therefore, whatever we might individually do to compensate for the bad conditions put into place by our governments, we should also collectively resist the racist and xenophobic regulations in our Western societies, so that in the future, migrants do not have to risk their lives to be treated with humanity.
A few days after finishing this piece, I received a phone call.
It was Yassine.
“Sania, I am in the UK! I made it! I am so happy Sania, I am so happy! I am in London! Please, come visit me!”.
A few days later, I booked a flight to London, and when he asked me how much it was, I said “expensive”, to which he replied: “Why don’t you do what I did? Planes are not good, you should try to come in a lorry like me!”
*The names of the author’s sources have been modified for security reasons.
The art in the article’s thumbnail, ‘Hope is Here for You’ by Damian Klaczkiewicz (@damianklaczkiewicz), is licensed under CC-BY-NC-SA.