Migrants stranded in Libya endure sewage, maggots, disease
CAIRO » For hundreds of African migrants, dreams of a new life in Europe have instead ended in a detention center in the remote desert of war-torn Libya, where they say they have been held for months amid raw sewage, piles of garbage, disease, maggots and barely enough food to survive.
Their plight, detailed in interviews with The Associated Press and social media images leaked last month, brings new attention to the waves of migrants from across Africa who have flowed into Libya in recent years seeking passage across the Mediterranean to Europe — and the highly effective efforts to stop them in their tracks.
“Our life is worse and terrible from day to day,” wrote an Eritrean migrant who is among 700 held in the detention center run by one of Libya’s militias out of a complex dominated by a hangar near the western town of Zintan.
Others who spoke on condition of anonymity because they feared retribution said in texts to the AP that at least 22 migrants have died since September — a figure confirmed by United Nations and Doctors Without Borders aid workers — and that at least 100 migrants were sick with disease, mainly tuberculosis. Some migrants said the center includes 100 minors who live side by side with adults.
“We need emergency evacuation from Zintan,” one told the AP. “We suffer physically, mentally and emotionally.”
Photos and videos taken by migrants showed heaps of garbage in the hangar, parts of the center flooded with sewage and plates of food crawling with maggots. The hangar had only four toilets, along with buckets for detainees to urinate in.
Migrants said they were not allowed out to see the sun, and the head of the center would often deprive them of food and water for days as a form of punishment. Those who were given food got only a small plate of pasta or couscous each day and had to share water that a few detainees were allowed to fetch once a day in buckets.
Internal memos and emails obtained by the AP show disagreement among aid agencies over conditions at the center, with one nonprofit working on behalf of the United Nations denying there was lack of food, even as it acknowledged it had not been able to see most of the migrants held there.
Migrants in the Zintan center and their advocates accused U.N. aid agencies of being slow to respond or forgetting them altogether. But the U.N. refugee agency, or UNHCR, disputes that, saying the Libyan militias who run the facility have denied their workers access to all parts of it.
UNHCR chief Filippo Grandi told the AP that after photos from inside the site emerged last month, the agency intervened and evacuated 96 migrants from a separate building at the facility where it had access. They were sent to the one U.N.-run center for migrants in Tripoli.
“It is not because of lack of will or not even because of lack of resources,” Grandi said. “Access in Libya is the fundamental obstacle to saving more lives.”
Col. Nasser Nakoua, part of the militias who run the detention center in Zintan, denied there was any lack of access to the facility.
“Those saying that they have no access are just lying. The doors are open, and we want the agencies to come and help or just shut the place down, because there is severe shortage in everything,” he told the AP by phone.
He blamed the government, which is nominally in control of the facility, for failing to fund its operations.
“We received nothing from Department for Combating Illegal Migration,” he said, referring to the body in charge of the facilities, “not a single penny.”
Libya became a major crossing point for migrants to Europe after the ouster and killing of longtime dictator Moammar Gadhafi in 2011, when the North African nation was thrown into chaos, armed militias proliferated and central authority fell apart.