Man's pain crossed the sea with him. Underneath his shirt, his skin has holes formed from melted plastic. His wrists bear marks left by the friction of tight shackles until they cut into the flesh. Elsewhere his body is injured by blows and blows from plastic-coated metal cables. Mr. Kombia, 30, who prefers to keep his first name as well as the name of his country of origin in West Africa, is a survivor of the economy of suffering fueled by an archipelago of detention centers in Libya. , staffed by militiamen, human traffickers and forces reporting to authorities.
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The bodies of displaced people like him in search of work are the raw material and the income, stopped on the streets before being passed from hand to hand, forced into slavery and tortured to extort ransom from their relatives who remain in the country. He says he managed to escape to Tunisia before surviving a shipwreck in the Mediterranean in February. Now he lives with his pain and memories in the shadows of Palermo, where he washes dishes in the back of a restaurant. “Every day I see the face of the man who hit me,” he admits, “I remember his smile. »
The effects of torture have no time limit, and Mr. Kombia is one of the rare victims on the Libyan street who has access to medical care designed to enable him to live with it. He is one of the 74 patients of the service specializing in the care of victims of torture with a migrant background that the Paolo Giaccone Hospital in Palermo, Sicily, opened in agreement with Doctors Without Borders (MSF).
“Tip of the iceberg”
“Every year there are more and more people who were tortured in Libya among those arriving in Italy,” explains Giuseppe De Mola, project manager for Doctors Without Borders in Sicily. Torture is a structural phenomenon of migration that has no response commensurate with its magnitude. The service set up in Palermo is intended to point the way to the future. » The structure brings together psychologists, a doctor, a social worker and cultural mediators and is linked to the specialties practiced at the Palermo Hospital to advise victims of torture according to their specific needs.
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With 194 patients treated since 2021, the service's activity appears insignificant given an unknown number of victims of torture for ransom and forced labor sent through Libyan detention centers and arriving on Italian shores every year. However, on the edge of a public hospital system in southern Italy already under strain, it is one of the observation posts of the horror that is raging upstream of the migration routes and whose traces can be read on the bodies of survivors. “The torture practiced on migrants in Libya has noticeable and specific repercussions on our patients, but what we see is just the tip of the iceberg,” emphasizes Domenico Lio, the service’s general practitioner.
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