‘Money has more value than a human being’

Life became a two-year-long nightmare of violence and captivity when Adonay, now 25, arrived in Libya. All he wanted was to enjoy basic freedoms, rights, and the opportunity to work—but he escaped open-ended military conscription in his home country of Eritrea only to find himself trapped in another, more brutal form of captivity.

Childhood in Eritrea had been, for Adonay, a time of joy. “I remember my lovely friends who grew up with me, and my relatives. It was a very good time. Circumstances were very different.” But after a brief stint at school, Adonay was conscripted into the Eritrean army, and his contented childhood came to an abrupt end. “I left school and went to the national service,” he says.

Happy memories were gradually overwritten with the constraints of an open-ended, forced military duty that drives thousands of young Eritreans to flee every year, a generation escaping in the hope of a better life.

“One of the reasons that forced me to leave the country was the absence of the young generation,” Adonay says of a land that he feels has begun to feel empty due to the youth exodus. “I had ambition, a vision, but I couldn’t realise my goals,” he says.

“You must flee from your country in order to live your life.”

One day in March 2014, Adonay slipped away from his military unit and later crossed the border into Ethiopia.

“When I got out, I thought that everything will be good and I can make a good life,” he says, but finding work in Ethiopia proved difficult. Adonay was burning through his savings and began thinking he should try his luck in Sudan. He contacted a smuggler who promised safe passage.

All he had heard were the success stories from the Eritrean diaspora, those who had made it out of the country, but who spoke only of their destinations and their new lives, not the terrible journeys they suffered to get there.

Adonay set off in a group of 46. At first, the smugglers treated them well, giving them food and taking them as far as Khartoum, but then the group was kidnapped by men Adonay is sure were working with the traffickers.

“Traffickers only care about their profits, they don’t care about human lives. Money has more value than a human being.”

The kidnappers raped women and girls and beat the men. They continually threatened the group with guns. “They can do whatever they want there. They are the bosses,” says Adonay.

Adonay was forced to work to pay his own ransom which, together with repeated run-ins with the police, drove him to leave again, this time for Libya. By now he had no money to pay smugglers. One of them said he would do Adonay a favour, and take him anyway. The journey to Libya was quick and uneventful, but when he arrived, Adonay was forced into a warehouse and held captive. The captors routinely beat and tortured him along with the other captives. Some died after being tortured, Adonay recalls.

With no one to pay for him, Adonay suffered. He was locked up for over a year suffering near-constant mistreatment and abuse. His experiences in Libya took a mental as well as a physical toll.

Eventually, Adonay was able to share his plight on social media and, where his relatives could not help, the wider diaspora and the world could: his ransom was paid by crowd-funding and he was released. Desperate to leave Libya, Adonay continued his journey, making it across the Mediterranean Sea to Italy, where he received both physical and mental rehabilitation in hospital. He lives in Italy today, but still has difficulties talking, and sleeping.

Adonay sought a new and better life, but along the way he learned a terrible, hard lesson: “A person can bring change to his life and his family only if he stays alive and healthy.” For Adonay, it was close. “I can say life in Libya is like hell on earth,” he says. “Thank god, after all this, I’m still alive.”

ENDS