General Al-Mabrouk Abdel-Hafiz,
who runs the Directorate for Combat-
ting Illegal Migration, portrayed him-
self, 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.
S
everal days after I arrived in Libya,
I travelled to Gargaresh, the mi-
grant 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. Can-
dé’s friend Soumahoro, who was taken
to Al Mabani with him when their din-
ghy was intercepted, met me on the
main road and whisked me into a win-
dowless room occupied by two other
migrants. Over a meal of chana ma-
sala, 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, speak-
ing in their native tongues, or laugh-
ing. 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 cor-
ner; 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 vi-
olence 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 cloth-
ing,” he said.
Several former detainees I spoke
with in Tripoli said that they had wit-
nessed 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 Con-
akry, volunteered to help with daily
tasks and was soon pumped for infor-
mation: Which migrants hated each
other? Who were the agitators? The
arrangement became more formal, and
Soumah began handling ransom ne-
gotiations. 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 “disap-
peared” 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 tu-
berculosis and COVID-19 have since
been detected. During another visit, the
workers were told of beatings from the
night before, and they catalogued frac-
tures, cuts, abrasions, and blunt trau-
mas; one child was so badly injured that
he couldn’t walk.
“I’d like to get my withdrawal in either
cryptocurrency or social-media exposure.”
