State crimes and state surveillance in the Mediterranean. Solidarity practices to counter them in the name of truth and justice.
Two cases at the beginning of the new year caused a stir around the “normalization” of border management in the Central Mediterranean. The facts are well known, but it’s worth summarising them and remembering their importance.
On 19th January in Turin, the Italian police stopped four Libyan citizens: one of them was Osama Njeem Elmasry, better known as Almasri, who was taken to prison on the basis of an arrest warrant issued the day before by the International Criminal Court in the Hague. The charges against him are serious: crimes against humanity, human trafficking and enslavement, violence of many kinds, and torture and abuse committed against migrants. Officially Almasri is a “general” at the top of the judicial police, employed by the Government of National Unity in Tripoli.
In reality, he is much more: among the leaders of the Rada militia, he has for years managed the trafficking that occurs around the Mitiga International Airport. At Mitiga he runs one of the most infamous detention camps for migrants, as well as other concentration-like facilities. In recent months the ICC has collected testimonies and overwhelming evidence against him.
And above all, also concerning Italy, Almasri is one of the key men for the management of the “Libya system,” or the terrible mechanisms of interception, capture and detention of people on the move across the country in line with the externalization of European borders, which aims, starting from the Italy-Libya memorandum of 2017, for the rejection and detention in Libya of migrants trying to reach European shores at the cost of unprecedented suffering and thousands of deaths thus far.
The Italian government attempted to hide the news of Almasri’s arrest for 48 hours – we will later understand why – which only became public thanks to the monitoring of activists and independent journalists. The news itself is welcomed by all those who hope that justice will be found for the thousands of women, men, and children trapped in Libya.
But within a few hours, hope turned to disappointment, indignation, and anger: the Italian government organized a mechanism to guarantee immunity and impunity for the criminal Alamari, who was not detained and handed over to the ICC, as international treaties and Italian law itself would prescribe, but was instead released from prison and, formally “expulsed”, accompanied on the evening of 21st January, on a state-sponsored flight carried by an Italian secret service plane, to Mitiga in Libya, where he was celebrated by his militiamen and immediately returned to do his dirty work.
But the Italian government miscalculated, thinking that the matter would end there. Within a few hours, the news of Almasri’s release had spread throughout Italy and the world, first raising many questions and then a wave of indignation. While the government remained silent or tried to present clumsy justifications, the role of Refugees in Libya became crucial: the victims of the Libya system took the floor themselves, explaining to parliament and the media who Almasri really is, what his crimes are, and who his Italian accomplices are.
Picture: Alliance with Refugees in Libya
The emperor has no more clothes. And, as never before, the condition of migrants in Libya is laid bare before the Italian public in all its brutality and violence. Moreso, the case clearly shows the direct responsibility of the Italian government. The case cannot be closed and is not closed: the ICC itself publicly refutes the lies of the Italian government and opened a file on the deliberate removal of a wanted person from the jurisdiction of the Court, while the office of the Public Prosecutor in Rome opened an investigation against Prime Minister Meloni, her powerful secretary of state Mantovano and the ministers of Justice and the Interior Nordio and Piantedosi.
In the middle of this case, on the afternoon of January 31, a message sent by Meta (Mark Zuckerberg’s company that owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp) reached the mobile phones of some activists and journalists. This is how it was discovered that since November and December 2024 (though in some cases the intrusion attempts began at least as early as February 2024) sophisticated military-grade spyware had been introduced into the phones of about ninety people in 13 European countries.
The software in question is called Graphite and is produced by the American company Paragon Solutions Inc.: a ‘worm’, as the experts call it, that can be installed without a click, able to read all the files and communications on the mobile phone, but also to transform it into a camera and always-open ambient microphone, and even manipulate the contents, to the point of sending emails and messages in place of the owner. This technology is being sold and can only be used by government agencies. It seems like the script for the film MATRIX, but it’s the reality of the forms of contemporary power. And also how to try to resist.
For the moment, only the names of six people (five in Italy and one in Sweden) affected by the espionage are known: the president and spokesperson of Refugees in Libya, David Yambio, the Mediterranea activists Luca Casarini, Beppe Caccia and Don Mattia Ferrari, the journalist for the news website Fanpage.it Francesco Cancellato and the Libyan journalist residing in Sweden Husam El-Gomati. But the independent center Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto is conducting in-depth and wide-ranging research that provides new information on this espionage activity every day.
Here too, one fact immediately stands out: there is a common thread that links the people who have been victims of spyware and the Almasri case: Libya. All those affected have long been committed to denouncing the situation and showing solidarity with migrants imprisoned in the country. The Italian government, when called upon, first remained silent, then intervened with a press release from Palazzo Chigi (the Italian council of ministers) that was denied a few hours later. On the morning of February 6, Paragon Solutions leaked to the international press that it had two contracts with Italian governmental law enforcement and intelligence agencies, but that it had terminated them for violating the contractual ethical clauses that prohibit spying on journalists, activists, and political opponents.
In this case, too, Meloni’s government is trying to impose ‘State secrecy’ on the whole affair, even refusing to answer questions from the political opposition in parliament. But even here it’s too late, at least two public prosecutors have opened investigations into what appears to be illegal espionage, in violation of the constitutional rights and freedoms of the victims, and every day new revelations and details are made public about what, for the public opinion, appears to be a big scandal of government espionage against those who practice solidarity.
So while the two cases are more open than ever and new developments can be added every day, some preliminary considerations: it is quite clear that Libya, and more generally the situation in the Central Mediterranean, is the ‘black hole’ of the last ten years of Italian state policy, with its jumble of interests that intertwine geopolitical and energy issues and the external border management of the European Union. In the name of ‘reason of state’, any means seems to be justified to defend these interests. But this ‘reason of state’ includes complicity with militias and criminal gangs, dirty business, brutal violence against innocent and defenseless people, and illegal and unconstitutional actions according to international and national law. Those who denounce and actively oppose all this become a target.
But for the first time in ten years, all this has been exposed and has become a central topic in public opinion and also in institutional discussions. The question of the externalization of borders and violence against people on the move has finally become a question of democracy, for everyone. Many levels are involved, but we have the extraordinary opportunity not only to expose the dirty tricks of the power and the powerful but also to try to change things. Today more than ever, solidarity, and brotherhood and sisterhood are our most powerful weapons. Truth and justice don’t just appear to be a utopia in the name of which it is right to fight, but also something that we can try to achieve.
To be continued …
Rome, 24th February 2025
Mediterranea Saving Humans
