what’s happening in libya is unfortunately nothing new in the region

It’s 2017, and Black people globally still aren’t free. The damage the transatlantic slave trade facilitated has never been rectified, only evolved it into different forms, like mass incarceration in the United States.

But in some places, the evolution hasn’t even been that drastic, with the literal enslavement of African people remaining a staple in some places. A recent report by the Telegraph showed caused outrage for covering a modern day slave auction in Libya. Explaining that tens of thousands of migrants—most from West Africa, but also Bangladesh, Somalia, Sudan and Eritrea—are held captive after failing to escape to Europe, the report included footage of a man being sold on an auction block that many thought they would never see in their lifetime. But that would only be if they weren’t paying attention.

According to Sputnik, this form of slave trade can be attributed to activities in 2011, when the U.S. joined Western forces for a failed military intervention in the country. “Back in 2011, it was simply inconceivable that the UK, the US and France would ignore the lessons of Iraq in 2003, just nine years previously,” Sputnik writer John Wight explains. “Yet ignore them they did, highlighting their rapacious obsession with maintaining hegemony over a region that sits atop an ocean of oil; this regardless of the human cost and legacy of disaster and chaos this particular obsession has wrought.”

This is an indictment of imperialism, and how it disrupts in the name of a “greater good” that only comes to some of us. “Washington and Europe have never been a source of stability in the Middle East or North Africa,” Wight writes. “On the contrary, their presence and double-dealing has only ever brought the people of this part of the world unremitting suffering and despair.”