a bomb struck the detention center, lev-
elling a hangar where the migrants were
held. More than fifty were killed, in-
cluding six children. Most of the sur-
vivors 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 unaccept-
able. The current arbitrary detention sys-
tem must end.” Last year, Josep Borrell,
a vice-president of the European Com-
mission, said, “The decision to arbitrarily
detain migrants rests under the sole re-
sponsibility” 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 spokes-
person told me that it sends money only
to provide “lifesaving support to mi-
grants and refugees in detention,” in-
cluding through U.N. agencies and in-
ternational N.G.O.s that offer “health
care, psycho-social support, cash assis-
tance 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 fi-
nance the Libyan Coast Guard and its
assets, there would be no interception,
and there would be no referral to these
horrific detention centers.”
She also pointed out that the E.U.
sends funds to the National Unity gov-
ernment, whose Directorate for Com-
batting Illegal Migration oversees the
sites. She argued that, even if the E.U.
doesn’t pay for the construction of fa-
cilities 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 au-
thorities in how to handle corpses in a
religiously respectful manner. Some of
these efforts make the prisons more hu-
mane, 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 meth-
ods 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 fa-
cility 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 unautho-
rized foreigners, regardless of age, to
be forced to work in the country with-
out pay. A Libyan national can pick up
migrants from a prison for a fee, be-
come their “guardian,” and oversee pri-
vate work for a fixed amount of time.In 2017, CNN broadcast footage of a
slave market in Libya, at which mi-
grants were sold for agricultural labor;
bidding started at four hundred dinars,
or about eighty-eight dollars, per per-
son. This year, more than a dozen mi-
grants from detention centers, some as
young as fourteen, told Amnesty Inter-
national 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 pay-
ing a ransom doesn’t guarantee release;
some migrants are simply resold to an-
other detention center. “Unfortunately,
as a result of the high number of cen-
tres and the commodification of mi-
grants, 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 Am-
bassador to Libya, earlier this year,“Never worry about what other people think—except me.”