Those who hope to salve their consciences by stopping the smuggling across the water should read this

All the talk about waging war on the ferrymen who smuggle people across the Mediterranean, to stop the journeys and the drowning, strikes me as just a giant case of ‘out of sight, out of mind’ and ‘what you don’t know/see doesn’t hurt you’.

The politicians and ordinary people talking this way don’t want the drowning and the smuggling to carry on because they are forced to look at and take note of the suffering of others, and to deal with those others – either as living people or their drowned corpses.

But stopping the ferrymen isn’t going to stop people travelling to Libya. They will carry on making the journey in droves, only to end up trapped in Libya in horrendous conditions.

The Telegraph reports today that people are being kept in makeshift prisons in Libya for months, waiting for the smugglers to find an empty boat to take them across. They are not fed, have no sanitary facilities and not even given water to drink. Children are drinking their own urine in despair, the British newspaper reports, quoting a spokesman for Save The Children. They are dying of disease.

Those awaiting transport are routinely beaten and tortured as a way of extorting more money from their families. They are kept up to a hundred in a single room.

Flavio Di Giacomo of the International Organisation for Migration told The Telegraph that EU proposals to capture and destroy smugglers’ boats would leave tens of thousands of migrants and refugees stranded in a very dangerous situation in Libya.

“If you destroy the boats so that migrants cannot leave, they are then stuck in Libya, which is in crisis. Migrants tell us the situation in Libya is like hell. They know they could die while crossing the desert or in one of the boats, but they are surprised at the level of violence they experience in Libya. The smugglers are violent criminals who torture people,” he said.