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Europe. Ian Urbina
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/06/the-secretive-libyan-prisons-that-keep-migrants-out-of-europe
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The Secretive Prisons That Keep Migrants Out of Europe
Tired of migrants arriving from Africa, the E.U. has created a shadow
immigration system that captures them before they reach its shores, and sends
them to brutal Libyan detention centers run by militias.
By Ian Urbina
November 28, 2021
Acollection of makeshift warehouses sits along the highway in Ghout al-Shaal, a
worn neighborhood of auto-repair shops and scrap yards in Tripoli, the capital
of Libya. Formerly a storage depot for cement, the site was reopened in
January, 2021, its outer walls heightened and topped with barbed wire. Men in
black-and-blue camouflage uniforms, armed with Kalashnikov rifles, stand guard
around a blue shipping container that passes for an office. On the gate, a sign
reads “Directorate for Combatting Illegal Migration.” The facility is a
secretive prison for migrants. Its name, in Arabic, is Al Mabani—The Buildings.
This piece was published in collaboration with
The Outlaw Ocean Project.
At 3 a.m. on February 5, 2021, Aliou Candé, a sturdy, shy twenty-eight-year-old
migrant from Guinea-Bissau, arrived at the prison. He had left home a year and
a half earlier, because his family’s farm was failing, and had set out to join
two brothers in Europe. But, as he attempted to cross the Mediterranean Sea on
a rubber dinghy, with more than a hundred other migrants, the Libyan Coast
Guard intercepted them and took them to Al Mabani. They were pushed inside Cell
No. 4, where some two hundred others were being held. There was hardly anywhere
to sit in the crush of bodies, and those on the floor slid over to avoid being
trampled. Overhead were fluorescent lights that stayed on all night. A small
grille in the door, about a foot wide, was the only source of natural light.
Birds nested in the rafters, their feathers and droppings falling from above.
On the walls, migrants had scrawled notes of determination: “A soldier never
retreats,” and “With our eyes closed, we advance.” Candé crowded into a far
corner and began to panic. “What should we do?” he asked a cellmate.
No one in the world beyond Al Mabani’s walls knew that Candé had been captured.
He hadn’t been charged with a crime or allowed to speak to a lawyer, and he was
given no indication of how long he’d be detained. In his first days there, he
kept mostly to himself, submitting to the grim routines of the place. The
prison is controlled by a militia that euphemistically calls itself the Public
Security Agency, and its gunmen patrolled the hallways. About fifteen hundred
migrants were held there, in eight cells, segregated by gender. There was only
one toilet for every hundred people, and Candé often had to urinate in a water
bottle or defecate in the shower. Migrants slept on thin floor pads; there
weren’t enough to go around, so people took turns—one lay down during the day,
the other at night. Detainees fought over who got to sleep in the shower, which
had better ventilation. Twice a day, they were marched, single file, into the
courtyard, where they were forbidden to look up at the sky or talk. Guards,
like zookeepers, put communal bowls of food on the ground, and migrants
gathered in circles to eat.
The guards struck prisoners who disobeyed orders with whatever was handy: a
shovel, a hose, a cable, a tree branch. “They would beat anyone for no reason
at all,” Tokam Martin Luther, an older Cameroonian man who slept on a mat next
to Candé’s, told me. Detainees speculated that, when someone died, the body was
dumped behind one of the compound’s outer walls, near a pile of brick and
plaster rubble. The guards offered migrants their freedom for a fee of
twenty-five hundred Libyan dinars—about five hundred dollars. During meals, the
guards walked around with cell phones, allowing detainees to call relatives who
could pay. But Candé’s family couldn’t afford such a ransom. Luther told me,
“If you don’t have anybody to call, you just sit down.”
In the past six years, the European Union, weary of the financial and political
costs of receiving migrants from sub-Saharan Africa, has created a shadow
immigration system that stops them before they reach Europe. It has equipped
and trained the Libyan Coast Guard, a quasi-military organization linked to
militias in the country, to patrol the Mediterranean, sabotaging humanitarian
rescue operations and capturing migrants. The migrants are then detained
indefinitely in a network of profit-making prisons run by the militias. In
September of this year, around six thousand migrants were being held, many of
them in Al Mabani. International aid agencies have documented an array of
abuses: detainees tortured with electric shocks, children raped by guards,
families extorted for ransom, men and women sold into forced labor. “The E.U.
did something they carefully considered and planned for many years,” Salah
Marghani, Libya’s Minister of Justice from 2012 to 2014, told me. “Create a
hellhole in Libya, with the idea of deterring people from heading to Europe.”
Three weeks after Candé arrived at Al Mabani, a group of detainees devised an
escape plan. Moussa Karouma, a migrant from Ivory Coast, and several others
defecated into a waste bin and left it in their cell for two days, until the
stench became overpowering. “It was my first time in prison,” Karouma told me.
“I was terrified.” When guards opened the cell door, nineteen migrants burst
past them. They climbed on top of a bathroom roof, dropped fifteen feet over an
outer wall, and disappeared into a warren of alleys near the prison. For those
who remained, the consequences were bloody. The guards called in
reinforcements, who sprayed bullets into the cells, then beat the inmates.
“There was one guy in my ward that they beat with a gun on his head, until he
fainted and started shaking,” a migrant later told Amnesty International. “They
didn’t call an ambulance to come get him that night. . . . He was still
breathing but he was not able to talk. . . . I don’t know what happened to him.
. . . I don’t know what he had done.”
In the weeks that followed, Candé tried to stay out of trouble and clung to a
hopeful rumor: the guards planned to release the migrants in his cell in honor
of Ramadan, two months away. “The lord is miraculous,” Luther wrote in a
journal he kept. “May his grace continue to protect all migrants around the
world and especially those in Libya.”
Photograph courtesy Jacaria Candé
A selfie that Aliou Candé sent soon after his arrival in Libya.
What came to be called the migrant crisis began around 2010, when people
fleeing violence, poverty, and the effects of climate change in the Middle East
and sub-Saharan Africa started flooding into Europe. The World Bank predicts
that, in the next fifty years, droughts, crop failures, rising seas, and
desertification will displace a hundred and fifty million more people, mostly
from the Global South, accelerating migration to Europe and elsewhere. In 2015
alone, a million people came to Europe from the Middle East and Africa. A
popular route went through Libya, then across the Mediterranean Sea to Italy—a
distance of less than two hundred miles.
Europe had long pressed Libya to help curb such migration. Muammar Qaddafi,
Libya’s leader, had once embraced Pan-Africanism and encouraged sub-Saharan
Africans to serve in the country’s oil fields. But in 2008 he signed a
“friendship treaty” with Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian Prime Minister, that
committed him to implementing strict controls. Qaddafi sometimes used this as a
bargaining chip: he threatened, in 2010, that if the E.U. did not send him more
than six billion dollars a year in aid money he would “turn Europe Black.” In
2011, Qaddafi was toppled and killed in an insurrection sparked by the Arab
Spring and supported by a U.S.-led invasion. Afterward, Libya descended into
chaos. Today, two governments compete for legitimacy: the U.N.-recognized
Government of National Unity, and an administration based in Tobruk and backed
by Russia and the self-proclaimed Libyan National Army. Both rely on shifting,
cynical alliances with armed militias that have tribal allegiances and control
large portions of the country. Libya’s remote beaches, increasingly unpoliced,
have been swamped with migrants headed for Europe.
One of the first major tragedies of the migrant crisis occurred in 2013, when a
dinghy carrying more than five hundred migrants, most of them Eritrean, caught
fire and sank in the Mediterranean, killing three hundred and sixty people.
They were less than half a mile from Lampedusa, Italy’s southernmost island. At
first, European leaders responded with compassion. “We can do this!” Angela
Merkel, Germany’s Chancellor, said, promising a permissive approach to
immigration. In early 2014, Matteo Renzi, at thirty-nine, was elected Prime
Minister of Italy, the youngest in its history. A telegenic centrist liberal in
the model of Bill Clinton, Renzi was predicted to dominate the country’s
politics for the next decade. Like Merkel, he welcomed migrants, saying that,
if Europe was willing to turn its back on “dead bodies in the sea,” it could
not call itself “civilized.” He supported an ambitious search-and-rescue
program called Operation Mare Nostrum, or Our Sea, which insured the safe
passage of some hundred and fifty thousand migrants, and Italy provided legal
assistance for asylum claims.
As the number of migrants rose, European ambivalence turned to recalcitrance.
Migrants needed medical care, jobs, and schooling, which strained resources.
James F. Hollifield, a migration expert at the French Institutes for Advanced
Studies, told me, “We in the liberal West are in a conundrum. We have to find a
way to secure borders and manage migration without undermining the social
contract and the liberal state itself.” Nationalist parties such as the
Alternative for Germany and France’s National Rally exploited the situation,
fostering xenophobia. In 2015, men from North Africa sexually assaulted women
in Cologne, Germany, fuelling alarm; the next year, an asylum seeker from
Tunisia drove a truck into a Christmas market in Berlin, killing twelve.
Merkel, under pressure, eventually insisted that migrants assimilate and
supported a ban on burqas.
________________________________
“We need to free ourselves from a sense of guilt,” Matteo Renzi said. “We do
not have the moral duty to welcome to Italy people who are worse off than
ourselves.”
________________________________
Renzi’s Mare Nostrum program had cost a hundred and fifteen million euros, and
Italy, which was struggling to stave off its third recession in six years,
could not sustain the undertaking. Efforts in Italy and Greece to relocate
migrants floundered. Poland and Hungary, both run by far-right leaders,
accepted no migrants at all. Officials in Austria talked of building a wall on
its Italian border. Italy’s hard-right politicians mocked and denounced Renzi,
and their poll numbers skyrocketed. In December, 2016, Renzi resigned, and his
party eventually rolled back his policies. He, too, retreated from his initial
generosity. “We need to free ourselves from a sense of guilt,” he said. “We do
not have the moral duty to welcome to Italy people who are worse off than
ourselves.”
During the next several years, Europe embarked on a different approach, led by
Marco Minniti, who became Italy’s Minister of the Interior in 2016. Minniti, a
onetime ally of Renzi’s, was frank about his colleague’s miscalculation. “We
did not respond to two feelings that were very strong,” he said. “Anger and
fear.” Italy stopped conducting search-and-rescue operations beyond thirty
miles from its shores. Italy, Greece, Spain, and Malta began turning away
humanitarian boats carrying rescued migrants, and Italy even charged the
captains of such boats with aiding human trafficking. Minniti soon became known
as the “Minister of Fear.”
In 2015, the E.U. created the Emergency Trust Fund for Africa, which has since
spent nearly six billion dollars. Proponents argue that the program offers aid
money to developing countries, paying for covid-19 relief in Sudan and
green-energy job training in Ghana. But much of its work involves pressuring
African nations to adopt tougher immigration restrictions and funding the
agencies that enforce them. In 2018, officials in Niger allegedly sent
“shopping lists” requesting gifts of cars, planes, and helicopters in exchange
for their help in pushing anti-immigrant policies. The program has also
supported repressive state agencies, by financing the creation of an
intelligence center for Sudan’s secret police, and by allowing the E.U. to give
the personal data of Ethiopian nationals to their country’s intelligence
service. The money is doled out at the discretion of the E.U.’s executive
branch, the European Commission, and not subject to scrutiny by its Parliament.
(A spokesperson for the Trust Fund told me, “Our programs are intended to save
lives, protect those in need, and fight trafficking in human beings and migrant
smuggling.”)
Minniti looked to Libya—by then a failed state—to become Europe’s primary
partner in stopping the flow of migrants. In 2017, he travelled to Tripoli and
struck deals with the government recognized in the country at the time and with
the most powerful militias. Italy, backed by E.U. funds, signed a Memorandum of
Understanding with Libya, affirming “the resolute determination to coöperate in
identifying urgent solutions to the issue of clandestine migrants crossing
Libya to reach Europe by sea.” The Trust Fund has directed half a billion
dollars to Libya’s assault on migration. Marghani, the former justice minister,
told me that the goal of the program is clear: “Make Libya the bad guy. Make
Libya the disguise for their policies while the good humans of Europe say they
are offering money to help make this hellish system safer.”
Minniti has said that the European fear of unchecked migration is a “legitimate
feeling—one democracy needs to listen to.” His policies have resulted in a
stark drop in migrants. In the first half of this year, fewer than twenty-one
thousand people made it to Europe by crossing the Mediterranean. Minniti told
the press in 2017, “What Italy did in Libya is a model to deal with migrant
flows without erecting borders or barbed wire barriers.” (Minniti has since
left government and now heads the Med-Or Foundation, an organization founded by
an Italian defense contractor; he did not respond to requests for comment for
this piece.) Italy’s right wing, which helped unseat Renzi, applauded Minniti’s
work. “When we proposed such measures, we were labelled as racist,” Matteo
Salvini, then the leader of Italy’s Northern League, a nationalist party, said.
“Now, finally, everyone seems to understand we were right.”
Source photographs courtesy The Outlaw Ocean Project / Ricci Shryock
Aliou Candé grew up on a farm near the village of Sintchan Demba Gaira. It has
no cell reception, paved roads, plumbing, or electricity. As an adult, he
worked the farm with his family, and lived in a clay house, painted yellow and
blue, with his wife, Hava, and their two young sons. He listened to foreign
musicians and followed European soccer clubs; he spoke English and French, and
was teaching himself Portuguese, hoping one day to live in Portugal. Jacaria,
one of Candé’s three brothers, told me, “Aliou was a very lovely boy—never in
any trouble. He was a hard worker. People respected him.”
Candé’s farm produced cassava, mangoes, and cashews—a crop that accounts for
around ninety per cent of Guinea-Bissau’s exports. But local weather patterns
had begun to shift, likely as a result of climate change. “We don’t feel the
cold during the cold season anymore, and the heat comes earlier than it
should,” Jacaria said. Heavy rains left the farm accessible only by canoe for
much of the year; dry spells seemed to last longer than they had a generation
earlier. Candé had four skinny cows that produced little milk. There were more
mosquitoes, which spread disease. When one of Candé’s sons came down with
malaria, the journey to the hospital took a day, and he almost died.
Candé, a pious Muslim, worried that he was failing before God to provide for
his family. “He felt guilty and envious,” Bobo, another of Candé’s brothers,
told me. Jacaria had immigrated to Spain, and Denbas, the third brother, to
Italy. Both sent money and photographs of fancy restaurants. Candé’s father,
Samba, told me, “Whoever goes abroad brings fortune at home.” Hava was eight
months pregnant, but Candé’s family encouraged him to go to Europe, too,
promising that they would look after his children. “All the people of his
generation went abroad and succeeded,” his mother, Aminatta, said. “So why not
him?” On the morning of September 13, 2019, Candé set out for Europe carrying a
Quran, a leather diary, two pairs of pants, two T-shirts, and six hundred
euros. “I don’t know how long this will take,” he told his wife that morning.
“But I love you, and I’ll be back.”
Candé worked his way across Central Africa, hitching rides in cars or stowing
away on buses until he reached Agadez, Niger, once called the Gateway to the
Sahara. Historically, the borders of many Central African countries have been
open, as in the E.U., though the arrangement was less formalized. In 2015,
however, E.U. officials pressured Niger to adopt a statute called Law 36:
overnight, bus drivers and guides, who for many years had carried migrants
north, were declared human traffickers and subject to thirty-year prison
sentences. Migrants were forced to consider more perilous routes. Candé, along
with a half-dozen others, struck out through the Sahara, sometimes sleeping in
the sand on the side of the road. “Heat and dust, it’s terrible here,” Candé
told Jacaria, by phone. He sneaked through a portion of Algeria controlled by
bandits. “They will capture you and beat you until you’re released,” he told
his family. “That’s all that’s there.”
In January, 2020, he arrived in Morocco, and learned that passage to Spain cost
three thousand euros. Jacaria urged him to turn back, but Candé said, “You have
worked hard in Europe. You sent money to the family. Now it’s my turn.” He
heard that, in Libya, he could book a cheaper boat to Italy. He arrived in
Tripoli last December, and stayed in a migrant slum called Gargaresh. His
great-uncle Demba Balde, a forty-year-old former tailor, had lived undocumented
in Libya for years, doing various jobs. Balde found Candé work painting houses
and pressed him to abandon his plan to cross the Mediterranean. “That’s the
route of death,” Balde told him.
Source photograph from Getty
This past May, I travelled to Tripoli to investigate the system of migrant
detention. I had recently started a nonprofit called the Outlaw Ocean Project,
which reports on human-rights and environmental issues at sea, and I brought
along a three-person research team. In Tripoli, the coastline was dotted with
half-built offices, hotels, apartment buildings, and schools. Armed men in
fatigues stood at every intersection. Almost no Western journalists are
permitted to enter Libya, but, with the help of an international aid group, we
were granted visas. Shortly after we arrived, I gave my team tracking devices
and encouraged them to put photocopies of their passports inside their shoes.
We were placed in a hotel near the city center and assigned a small security
detail.
The Libyan Coast Guard’s name makes it sound like an official military
organization, but it has no unified command; it is made up of local patrols
that the U.N. has accused of having links to militias. (Humanitarian workers
call it the “so-called Libyan Coast Guard.”) Minniti told the press, in 2017,
that building up the patrols would be a difficult undertaking: “When we said we
had to relaunch the Libyan Coast Guard, it seemed like a daydream.” The E.U.’s
Trust Fund has since spent tens of millions of dollars to turn the Coast Guard
into a formidable proxy force.
In 2018, the Italian government, with the E.U.’s blessing, helped the Coast
Guard get approval from the U.N. to extend its jurisdiction nearly a hundred
miles off Libya’s coast—far into international waters, and more than halfway to
Italian shores. The E.U. supplied six speedboats, thirty Toyota Land Cruisers,
radios, satellite phones, inflatable dinghies, and five hundred uniforms. It
spent close to a million dollars last year to build command centers for the
Coast Guard, and provides training to officers. In a ceremony in October, 2020,
E.U. officials and Libyan commanders unveiled two state-of-the-art cutters that
had been built in Italy and upgraded with Trust Fund money. “The refitting of
these two vessels has been a prime example of the constructive coöperation
between the European Union; an E.U. member state, Italy; and Libya,” Jose
Sabadell, the E.U.’s Ambassador to Libya, said in a press release.
Perhaps the most valuable help comes from the E.U.’s border agency, Frontex,
founded in 2004, partly to guard Europe’s border with Russia. In 2015, Frontex
began spearheading what it called a “systematic effort to capture” migrants
crossing the sea. Today, it has a budget of more than half a billion euros and
its own uniformed service, which it can deploy in operations beyond the E.U.’s
borders. The agency maintains a near-constant surveillance of the Mediterranean
through drones and privately chartered aircraft. When it detects a migrant
boat, it sends photographs and location information to local government
agencies and other partners in the region—ostensibly to assist with rescues—but
does not typically inform humanitarian vessels.
________________________________
The E.U. has given the Libyan Coast Guard
ships, training, a command center, and an expanded jurisdiction to capture
migrants.
________________________________
A spokesperson for Frontex told me that the agency “has never engaged in any
direct cooperation with Libyan authorities.” But an investigation by a
coalition of European news organizations, including Lighthouse Reports, Der
Spiegel, Libération, and A.R.D., documented twenty instances in which, after
Frontex surveilled migrants, their boats were intercepted by the Coast Guard.
The investigation also found evidence that Frontex sometimes sends the
locations of the migrant boats directly to the Coast Guard. In a WhatsApp
exchange earlier this year, for example, a Frontex official wrote to someone
identifying himself as a “captain” in the Libyan Coast Guard, saying, “Good
morning sir. We have a boat adrift [coördinates]. People poring water. Please
acknowledge this message.” Legal experts argue that these actions violate
international laws against refoulement, or the return of migrants to unsafe
places. Frontex officials recently sent me the results of an open-records
request I made, which indicate that from February 1st to February 5th, around
the time that Candé was at sea, the agency exchanged thirty-seven e-mails with
the Coast Guard. (Frontex refused to release the content of the e-mails, saying
that it would “put the lives of migrants in danger.”)
A senior official at Frontex, who requested anonymity out of fear of
retaliation, told me that the agency also streams its surveillance footage to
the Italian Coast Guard and Italy’s Maritime Rescue Coördination Center, which,
the official believes, notify the Libyan Coast Guard. (The Italian agencies did
not respond to requests for comment.) The official argued that this indirect
method didn’t insulate the agency from responsibility: “You provide that
information. You don’t implement the action, but it is the information that
provokes the refoulement.” The official had repeatedly urged superiors to stop
any activity that could result in migrants being returned to Libya. “It didn’t
matter what you told them,” the official said. “They were not willing to
understand.” (A Frontex spokesperson told me, “In any potential search and
rescue, the priority for Frontex is to save lives.”)
Once the Coast Guard has the coördinates, it races to the boats, trying to
capture the migrants before rescue vessels arrive. Sometimes it fires on the
migrant boats or directs warning shots at humanitarian ships. In the past four
years, according to the U.N.’s International Organization for Migration
(I.O.M.), the Coast Guard and other Libyan authorities have intercepted more
than eighty thousand migrants. In 2017, a ship from the aid group Sea-Watch
responded to distress calls from a sinking migrant boat. As Sea-Watch deployed
two rescue rafts, a Libyan Coast Guard cutter, called the Ras Jadir, arrived at
high speed, its swells causing some of the migrants to fall overboard. Coast
Guard officers then pulled the migrants out of the water, beating them as they
climbed aboard. Johannes Bayer, the head of the Sea-Watch mission, later said,
“We had a feeling the Coast Guard were only interested in pulling back as many
people to Libya as possible, without caring that people were drowning.” One
migrant jumped overboard and clung to the Ras Jadir as it accelerated away,
dragging him through the water. According to Sea-Watch, at least twenty people
died, including a two-year-old boy. A migrant told Amnesty International that
this past February a Coast Guard ship damaged a migrant boat while officers
filmed with their cell phones; five people drowned.
The Coast Guard appears to operate with impunity. In October, 2020,
Abdel-Rahman al-Milad, the commander of a Coast Guard unit based in Zawiya, who
had been added to the U.N. Security Council’s sanctions list for being
“directly involved in the sinking of migrant boats using firearms,” was
arrested by Libyan authorities. Milad had attended meetings with Italian
officials in Rome and Sicily in 2017, to request more money. This past April,
authorities released him, citing a lack of evidence. The Coast Guard, which did
not respond to requests for comment for this piece, has often pointed to its
success in limiting migration to Europe, and argued that humanitarian groups
hinder its efforts to combat human trafficking. “Why do they declare war on
us?” a spokesman told the Italian media. “They should instead coöperate with us
if they actually want to work in the interest of the migrants.” The
spokesperson for the Trust Fund said that the E.U.’s work with the Coast Guard
is intended “to save the lives of those making dangerous journeys by sea or
land.”
This past May, a documentarian from my team, Ed Ou, spent several weeks aboard
a Doctors Without Borders vessel, filming its attempts to rescue migrants in
the Mediterranean. The organization located migrant boats with the help of
radar and volunteer planes, but in many cases the Coast Guard beat them there
and captured the migrants. Occasionally, aid workers saw a Frontex drone—an
I.A.I. Heron, capable of operating continuously for up to forty-five
hours—circling overhead. Their ship was careful to conduct rescues only in
international waters, but threats from the Coast Guard crackled over the radio.
“Get away from the target,” an officer said. “Don’t enter Libyan waters.
Otherwise, I’ll deal with you, and we resort to other measures.” After one
successful rescue, several Sudanese migrants spoke about what they had seen in
Libya. One said that he had been beaten and tortured by the Coast Guard when he
was captured on an earlier voyage. Another had watched detainees shot to death
in a Libyan detention center. A third migrant wore a homemade T-shirt that read
“Fuck to Libya.”
When I got to Libya, government officials told me that I would be allowed to
tour Al Mabani. But after several days it became clear that this would not
happen. Late one afternoon, my team and I went to an alley and launched a small
video drone, flying it high enough over the prison so that it would not be
noticed by the guards. On the monitor, I saw them preparing to march the
migrants from the courtyard back into their cells. Roughly sixty-five detainees
sat in a corner, unmoving, heads down, legs folded, each man’s hands touching
the back of the man in front of him. When one man glanced to the side, a guard
struck him on the head.
Under Libyan law, unauthorized foreigners—including economic migrants, asylum
seekers, and the victims of illegal trafficking—can be detained indefinitely,
with no access to a lawyer. There are currently some fifteen recognized
detention centers in the country, of which Al Mabani is the largest. An I.O.M.
official told me that tens of thousands of migrants have been held in the
detention centers since 2017. Earlier this year, six women who had been held at
a center called Shara’ al-Zawiya told investigators from Amnesty International
that women there had been raped or subjected to other forms of sexual violence.
At Abu Salim, at least two migrants were killed during an escape attempt this
past February. “Death in Libya, it’s normal: no one will look for you, and no
one will find you,” a migrant there told Amnesty investigators. Diana Eltahawy,
who works on North African issues at Amnesty International, declared in July,
“The entire network of Libyan migration detention centres is rotten to its
core.”
Migrants captured by the Coast Guard are loaded onto buses, many supplied by
the E.U., and brought to the detention centers; sometimes Coast Guard units
sell them to the centers. But some migrants never make it there. In the first
seven months of 2021, according to the I.O.M., more than fifteen thousand
migrants were captured by the Libyan Coast Guard and other authorities, but by
the end of that period only about six thousand were being held in designated
facilities. Federico Soda, the I.O.M.’s chief of mission in Libya, believes
that migrants are disappearing into “unofficial” facilities run by traffickers
and militias, where aid groups have no access. “The numbers simply don’t add
up,” he said.
Al Mabani was created early this year under the supervision of Emad
al-Tarabulsi, a senior leader in the Public Security Agency militia. The group
has links to the Zintan tribe, which helped overthrow Qaddafi and held his son
Seif prisoner for years. Today, the militia is aligned with the National Unity
government, and Tarabulsi briefly served as its deputy head of intelligence. He
built the prison in a corner of the city controlled by the militia and selected
Noureddine al-Ghreetly, a soft-spoken commander, to run it. (Tarabulsi could
not be reached for comment.)
Previously, Ghreetly oversaw a migrant prison called Tajoura, near a military
base on the eastern outskirts of Tripoli. In a 2019 Human Rights Watch report,
six detainees there, including two sixteen-year-old boys, described being
severely beaten, and one woman said that she’d been repeatedly sexually
assaulted. The report’s authors recounted seeing a female detainee attempting
to hang herself. Prisoners were forced to do labor at the facility, including
cleaning weapons, storing ammunition, and offloading military shipments,
according to U.N. investigators. In July, 2019, during the latest outbreak of
civil war, a bomb struck the detention center, levelling a hangar where the
migrants were held. More than fifty were killed, including six children. Most
of the survivors wound up at Al Mabani.
The E.U. concedes that the migrant prisons are brutal. The Trust Fund
spokesperson told me, by e-mail, “The situation in these centres is
unacceptable. The current arbitrary detention system must end.” Last year,
Josep Borrell, a vice-president of the European Commission, said, “The decision
to arbitrarily detain migrants rests under the sole responsibility” of the
Libyan government. In its initial agreement with Libya, Italy promised to help
finance and make safe the operation of migrant detention. Today, European
officials insist that they do not directly fund the sites. The Trust Fund’s
spending is opaque, but its spokesperson told me that it sends money only to
provide “lifesaving support to migrants and refugees in detention,” including
through U.N. agencies and international N.G.O.s that offer “health care,
psycho-social support, cash assistance and non-food items.” Tineke Strik, a
member of the European Parliament, told me that this doesn’t relieve Europe of
responsibility: “If the E.U. did not finance the Libyan Coast Guard and its
assets, there would be no interception, and there would be no referral to these
horrific detention centers.”
________________________________
Under Libyan law, unauthorized foreigners can be detained indefinitely and
punished with forced labor.
________________________________
She also pointed out that the E.U. sends funds to the National Unity
government, whose Directorate for Combatting Illegal Migration oversees the
sites. She argued that, even if the E.U. doesn’t pay for the construction of
facilities or the salaries of their gunmen, its money indirectly supports much
of their operation. The Trust Fund pays for the boats that capture migrants,
the buses that bring them to prisons, and the S.U.V.s that hunt them down on
land. E.U.-funded U.N. agencies built the showers and bathrooms at several
facilities, and pay for the blankets, clothes, and toiletries migrants receive
when they arrive. The Trust Fund has committed to buying ambulances that will
take detainees to the hospital when they are sick. And E.U. money pays for the
body bags they’re put in when they die, and for the training of Libyan
authorities in how to handle corpses in a religiously respectful manner. Some
of these efforts make the prisons more humane, but, taken together, they also
help sustain a brutal system, which exists largely because of E.U. policies
that send migrants back to Libya.
Militias also employ a variety of methods to make a profit from the facilities,
such as siphoning off money and goods sent for migrants by humanitarian groups
and government agencies—a scheme known as “aid diversion.” The director of a
detention center in Misrata told Human Rights Watch that militia-linked
catering companies that serviced the facility pocketed some eighty-five per
cent of the money sent to supply meals. A study financed by the Trust Fund in
April, 2019, found that much of the money that it sent through humanitarian
groups ended up going to militias. “Most of the time, it is a profit-making
exercise,” the study reads.
Qaddafi-era laws allow unauthorized foreigners, regardless of age, to be forced
to work in the country without pay. A Libyan national can pick up migrants from
a prison for a fee, become their “guardian,” and oversee private work for a
fixed amount of time. In 2017, CNN broadcast footage of a slave market in
Libya, at which migrants were sold for agricultural labor; bidding started at
four hundred dinars, or about eighty-eight dollars, per person. This year, more
than a dozen migrants from detention centers, some as young as fourteen, told
Amnesty International that they had been forced to work on farms and in private
homes, and to clean and load weaponry at military encampments during active
hostilities. Perhaps the most common money-making scheme is extortion. At the
detention facilities, everything has a price: protection, food, medicine, and,
the most expensive, freedom. But paying a ransom doesn’t guarantee release;
some migrants are simply resold to another detention center. “Unfortunately, as
a result of the high number of centres and the commodification of migrants,
many are detained by another group after their release, leading to them having
to make multiple ransom payments,” the Trust Fund-financed study reads.
In a meeting with the German Ambassador to Libya, earlier this year, General
Al-Mabrouk Abdel-Hafiz, who runs the Directorate for Combatting Illegal
Migration, portrayed himself, and his country, as being tasked with an
impossible job. “Libya is no longer a transit country, but rather a victim left
alone to face a crisis that the countries of the world failed,” he said.
(Abdel-Hafiz declined to comment for this piece.) When I called Ghreetly, the
director of Al Mabani, and asked about allegations of mistreatment there, he
replied, “Abuse does not happen,” and quickly ended the call.
Several days after I arrived in Libya, I travelled to Gargaresh, the migrant
slum where Candé briefly stayed, to speak to former detainees. During the
Second World War, the Italian and German militaries used the area, then called
Campo 59 or Feldpost 12545, as a prisoner-of-war camp. Today, it is a honeycomb
of alleys and narrow streets, surrounded by fast-food restaurants and
cell-phone stores. Raids carried out by militiamen are part of daily life.
Candé’s friend Soumahoro, who was taken to Al Mabani with him when their dinghy
was intercepted, met me on the main road and whisked me into a windowless room
occupied by two other migrants. Over a meal of chana masala, he told me of his
time in prison. “Talking about this is really hard for me,” he said.
Migrants in Al Mabani were beaten for whispering to one another, speaking in
their native tongues, or laughing. Troublemakers were held for days in the
“isolation room,” an abandoned gas station behind the women’s cell with a Shell
Fuel sign hanging out front. The isolation room had no bathroom, so prisoners
had to defecate in a corner; the smell was so bad that guards wore masks when
they visited. Guards tied the hands of detainees to a rope suspended from a
steel ceiling beam and beat them. “It’s not so bad seeing a friend or a man
yelling as he’s being tortured,” Soumahoro said. “But seeing a six-foot-tall
man beating a woman with a whip . . .” In March, Soumahoro organized a hunger
strike to protest violence by the guards, and was taken to the isolation room,
where he was strung upside down and repeatedly beaten. “They hang you like a
piece of clothing,” he said.
Several former detainees I spoke with in Tripoli said that they had witnessed
sexual abuse. Adjara Keita, a thirty-six-year-old migrant from Ivory Coast, who
was held at Al Mabani for two months, told me that women were frequently taken
from their cells to be raped by the guards. “The women would come back in
tears,” she said. After two women escaped from Al Mabani, guards took Keita to
a nearby office and beat her, in an apparently random act of retribution.
The guards also engaged migrants as collaborators, a tactic that kept them
divided. Mohamed Soumah, a twenty-three-year-old from the Republic of Guinea,
sometimes called Guinea Conakry, volunteered to help with daily tasks and was
soon pumped for information: Which migrants hated each other? Who were the
agitators? The arrangement became more formal, and Soumah began handling ransom
negotiations. As a reward, he was allowed to sleep across the street from the
prison in the cooks’ quarters. At one point, as a gift for his loyalty, the
guards let him pick several migrants to be freed. He could even leave the
compound, though he never went far. “I knew they’d find me and beat me if I
tried to go away,” he told me.
One international aid organization visited the prison twice a week and found
that detainees were covered in bruises and cuts, avoided eye contact, and
recoiled at loud noises. Sometimes migrants slipped the aid workers notes of
desperation written on the backs of torn covid-safety pamphlets. Many told the
workers that they felt “disappeared” and asked that someone inform their
families that they were alive. During one visit, the workers couldn’t enter
Candé’s cell because it was so packed, and estimated that there were three
detainees per square metre. They met with migrants in the courtyard. The
overcrowding was intense, and tuberculosis and covid-19 have since been
detected. During another visit, the workers were told of beatings from the
night before, and they catalogued fractures, cuts, abrasions, and blunt
traumas; one child was so badly injured that he couldn’t walk.
In the weeks after Candé’s arrival, members of another aid group brought water
and blankets that the facility had requested. But, after discovering that
guards had kept some of the supplies for themselves, they decided that they
would no longer assist Al Mabani. Near the end of March, Cherif Khalil, a
consular officer from the Embassy of Guinea Conakry, visited the prison. Candé,
pretending to be from Guinea Conakry, asked if the Embassy could help him, but
Khalil was powerless. “He was desperate,” Khalil told me.
Halfway through my meal with Soumahoro, my phone rang. It was a police officer.
“You are not allowed to be talking to migrants,” he screamed at me. “You cannot
be in Gargaresh.” He told me that if I didn’t leave immediately I would be
arrested. When I returned to my car, the police officer was standing there. He
said that if I spoke to any more migrants I would be thrown out of the country.
After that, my team and I weren’t allowed to venture far from our hotel.
________________________________
As Candé sat in his cell, waiting for Ramadan, he and Luther passed the time by
playing dominoes. Luther wrote in his journal of a protest by female inmates:
“They are in underwear and sitting on the floor because they also demand to be
released.” He and Candé called the guards nicknames based on the orders they
barked. One was known as Khamsa Khamsa, Arabic for “five, five,” which he
yelled during meals to remind migrants that five people had to share each bowl.
Another guard, called Gamis, or “sit down,” insured that no one stood. Keep
Quiet policed the chatter. At one point, Candé and Luther cared for a migrant
who had sustained a blow to the head during a beating and seemed to be
suffering a mental break, thrashing and screaming. “He was so mad,” Luther
wrote, that they had to restrain him “so that we could sleep in peace.”
Eventually, the guards took the detainee to a hospital, but a few weeks later
he returned, as disturbed as ever. “Unbelievable situation,” Luther wrote.
Near the end of March, the migrants learned that they would not be freed during
Ramadan. Luther wrote, “This is how life is in Libya. We will still have to be
patient to enjoy our freedom.” But Candé seemed increasingly desperate. When he
was first taken into custody, the Coast Guard had somehow failed to confiscate
his cell phone. He had kept it hidden, fearing that he would be severely
punished if caught with it. After the Ramadan rumor was dispelled, however, he
sent a voice message to his brothers over WhatsApp, attempting to explain the
situation: “We were trying to get to Italy by water. They caught us and brought
us back. Now we are locked in prison. . . . You can’t keep the phone on too
long here.” He begged them, “Find a way to call our father.” Then he waited,
hoping that they would scrape together the ransom.
At 2 a.m. on April 8th, Candé awoke to a noise: several Sudanese detainees were
trying to pry open the door of Cell No. 4 and escape. Candé, worried that all
the inmates would be punished, asked Soumahoro what to do. Soumahoro went with
a dozen others to confront the Sudanese. “We’ve tried to break out several
times before,” Soumahoro told them. “It never worked. We were just beaten.” The
Sudanese wouldn’t listen, and Soumahoro told another detainee to alert the
guards, who backed a sand truck up against the cell door.
The Sudanese yanked iron pipes from the bathroom wall and began swinging them
at those who had intervened. One migrant was hit in the eye; another fell to
the ground, blood gushing from his head. The groups began pelting each other
with shoes, buckets, shampoo bottles, and pieces of plasterboard. Candé told
Soumahoro, “I’m not going to fight. I’m the hope of my entire family.” The
brawling lasted for three and a half hours. Some migrants shouted for
assistance, yelling, “Open the door!” Instead, the guards laughed and cheered,
filming the fight with their phones through the grille. “Keep fighting,” one
said, passing in water bottles to keep the brawlers hydrated. “If you can kill
them, do it.”
But at 5:30 a.m. the guards left and came back with semi-automatic rifles.
Without warning, they fired into the cell through the bathroom window for ten
minutes. “It sounded like a battlefield,” Soumahoro told me. Two teen-agers
from Guinea Conakry, Ismail Doumbouya and Ayouba Fofana, were hit in the leg.
Candé, who had been hiding in the shower during the fight, was struck in the
neck. He staggered along the wall, streaking blood, then fell to the ground.
Soumahoro tried to slow the bleeding with a piece of cloth. Candé died within
minutes.
Ghreetly arrived several hours later and shouted at the guards, “What have you
done? You can do anything to them, you just can’t kill them!” The migrants
refused to hand over Candé’s body, and the panicked guards summoned Soumah, the
collaborator, to negotiate. Eventually, the militia agreed to free the migrants
in exchange for the body. Soumah told them, “I, Soumah, will open this door and
you guys will get out. I will be in front of you, running with you until the
exit.” Just before 9 a.m., guards took up positions near the gate, guns raised.
Soumah opened the cell door and told the three hundred migrants to follow him
out of the prison, single file, without talking. Morning commuters slowed to
gawk at the migrants as they left the compound and dispersed through the
streets of Tripoli.
________________________________
By my eighth day in Tripoli, my team and I were piecing together the details of
Candé’s death. We had interviewed dozens of migrants, officials, and aid
workers. I had the distinct impression that the hotel staff and our private
security guards were reporting our movements to the authorities.
On Sunday, May 23rd, shortly before 8 p.m., I was sitting in my hotel room, on
the phone with my wife, when there was a knock on the door. As I opened it, a
dozen armed men burst in. One held a gun to my forehead and yelled, “Get on the
floor!” They placed a hood over my head, kicked and punched me, and stepped on
my face, leaving me with two broken ribs, blood in my urine, and damage to my
kidneys. Then they dragged me from the room.
My research team was on their way to dinner near the hotel; their driver
spotted cars following them and turned back. Several cars blocked the road, and
armed men in masks leaped out. They took my team’s driver from the van and
pistol-whipped him, then blindfolded my colleagues and drove them away. We were
all taken to an interrogation room at a black site, where I was punched again
in the head and ribs. Still hooded, I could hear the men menacing the others.
“You are a dog!” one yelled at our photographer, Pierre Kattar, striking him
across the face. They whispered sexual threats to the female member of our
team, Mea Dols de Jong, a Dutch filmmaker, saying, “Do you want a Libyan
boyfriend?” After a few hours, they removed our belts and jewelry and placed us
in cells.
I’ve since discovered—by comparing satellite imagery with the little we
glimpsed of the surrounding area—that we were held at a secret jail several
hundred yards from the Italian Embassy. Our captors told us that they were part
of the Libyan Intelligence Service, nominally an agency of the National Unity
government, which also oversees Al Mabani, though it has ties to a militia
called the Al-Nawasi Brigade. Our interrogators bragged that they had worked
together under Qaddafi. One, who spoke conversational English, claimed that he
had spent time in Colorado at a U.S.-government-run training program for prison
administration.
I was placed in an isolation cell, which contained a toilet, a shower, a foam
mattress, and a ceiling-mounted camera. Guards passed me yellow rice and
bottles of water through a slot in the door. Every day, I was questioned in an
interrogation room for hours at a time. “We know you work for the C.I.A.,” a
man kept telling me. “Here in Libya, spying is punished by death.” Sometimes he
put a gun on the table or pointed it at my head. To my captors, the steps I had
taken to safeguard my team became proof of my guilt. Why would we wear tracking
devices and carry copies of our passports in our shoes? Why did I have two
“secret recording devices” in my backpack (an Apple Watch and a GoPro), along
with a packet of papers titled “Secret Document” (a list of emergency contacts
that was actually labelled “Security Document”)?
The fact that I was a journalist was less a defense than a secondary crime. My
captors told me that it was illegal to interview migrants about abuses at Al
Mabani. “Why are you trying to embarrass Libya?” they asked. They repeatedly
told me, “You people killed George Floyd.” Hoping to break out, I took apart
some of the toilet’s plumbing and searched for a piece of metal to unscrew the
bars on the window. I tapped on the wall of my cell and heard Kattar, the
photographer, tap back, which I somehow found reassuring.
My wife had overheard the beginning of my kidnapping and had alerted the State
Department. Along with the Dutch foreign service, the agency began lobbying the
National Unity government for our release. At one point, we were taken from our
cells to record a “proof of life” video. Our jailers told me to wash the blood
and dirt off my face, and we all sat around a table covered with sodas and
pastries. “Smile,” they said, and instructed us to say to the camera that we
were being treated humanely. “Talk. Look normal.” We were required to sign
“confession” documents written in Arabic on letterhead of the “Department for
Combatting Hostile Activity,” and bearing the name of Major General Hussein
Muhammad al-A’ib. When I asked what the documents said, our captors laughed.
They kept our computers, phones, and cash, plus thirty thousand dollars’ worth
of filming equipment and my wedding ring.
The experience—deeply frightening but mercifully short—offered a glimpse into
the world of indefinite detention in Libya. I often thought of Candé’s
months-long incarceration, and its terrible outcome. Soon afterward, my team
and I were released from our cells and escorted toward the door. As we
approached, an interrogator put his hand on my chest. “Guys, you can go,” he
told the others on my team. “Ian will be staying here.” Everyone stared. Then
he burst out laughing, and said he was just kidding. After a total of six days
in captivity, we were taken to a plane and flown to Tunisia—expelled from the
country, we were told, for “reporting on migrants.”
After the detainees in Cell No. 4 were released, word of Candé’s death spread
quickly through Tripoli, eventually reaching a community leader among migrants.
The community leader (who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation
in Libya) went with Balde, Candé’s great-uncle, to the police station, where
they were given a copy of the autopsy report. It said that Candé’s name was
unknown, and wrongly stated that he was from Guinea Conakry. The authorities
suggested that he had died in a fight, which angered the community leader. “It
wasn’t a fight,” he told me. “It was a bullet.” Later, the pair went to the
local hospital to identify Candé’s body; he was wheeled out on a metal gurney,
wrapped in a gauzy white cloth partially undone to reveal his face. In the next
several days, they travelled around Tripoli paying off Candé’s debts, all
incurred after his death: a hundred and eighty-nine dollars for the hospital
stay, nineteen for the white shroud and burial clothes, two hundred and
twenty-two for the coming burial.
Candé’s family learned of his death two days after it occurred. Samba, his
father, told me that he could barely sleep or eat: “Sadness weighs heavily on
me.” Hava had given birth to a daughter named Cadjato, who is now two, and told
me that she would not remarry until she finished mourning. “My heart is
broken,” she said. Jacaria had little hope that the police would arrest his
brother’s killers. “So, he is gone,” he said. “Gone in every way.” Conditions
on the farm have worsened, with heavy rainfall flooding the fields. Bobo,
Candé’s youngest brother, will likely soon try to make the journey to Europe
himself. “What else can I do?” he said.
Ghreetly was suspended from Al Mabani after Candé’s death, but was later
reinstated. For almost three months, Doctors Without Borders, which assists
migrants in detention centers, refused to enter the prison; Beatrice Lau, its
head of mission in Libya at the time, said, “The persistent pattern of violent
incidents and serious harm to refugees and migrants, as well as the risk to the
safety of our staff, has reached a level that we are no longer able to accept.”
It resumed its activities after receiving assurances that, among other things,
officials would prevent further violence in the prison. But in October Libyan
authorities, including members of the militia that controls Al Mabani, rounded
up more than five thousand migrants in and around Gargaresh and sent many to
the prison. Days later, guards opened fire on prisoners attempting to escape,
killing at least six.
After Candé’s death, Sabadell, the E.U. Ambassador, called for a formal
investigation, but it appears never to have taken place. (An E.U. spokesperson
said, “The assurances from the Libyan authorities that these events will be
investigated and that the appropriate judicial action will be carried out need
to be translated into practice. Perpetrators must be held accountable. There
can be no impunity for such crimes.”) Europe’s commitment to anti-migrant
programs in Libya remains unshaken. Last year, Italy renewed its Memorandum of
Understanding with Libya. Since this past May, with support from the E.U., it
has spent at least $3.9 million on the Coast Guard. The European Commission
recently committed to building the Coast Guard a new and improved “maritime
rescue coördination center” and to buying it three more ships.
On April 30th, shortly after 5 p.m. prayers, Balde and some twenty other men
gathered at the Bir al-Osta Milad cemetery for Candé’s funeral. The cemetery
occupies an eight-acre plot between an electrical substation and two large
warehouses. Many of Libya’s dead migrants are buried there, and it has an
estimated ten thousand graves, many of them unmarked. The men prayed aloud as
Candé’s body was lowered into a hole dug in sand, no more than a foot and a
half deep. They topped it with rectangular stones and poured a layer of
concrete. The men said, in unison, “God is great.” Then one of them, using a
stick, scrawled Candé’s name into the wet concrete.
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