African migrants say they have been held in squalor in a detention center in the remote desert of war-torn Libya for months.
In this May 21, 2019 photo provided by an African migrant, hundreds of migrants stage a protest in a detention center in the town of Zintan, western Libya, appealing for help from the United Nations. In the desert of western Libya, hundreds of African migrants were held for months in a detention center, packed in amid garbage covered in maggots and sewage, shared buckets of water, and barely surviving on only one meal a day.
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.
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. Col. Nasser Nakoua, part of the militias who run the detention center in Zintan, denied there was any lack of access to the facility.
Currently, a U.N.-aligned but weak administration in Tripoli oversees the west, where Zintan is located, but much of its powers are in the hands of militias. Eastern Libya is controlled by a rival government aligned with the self-styled Libyan National Army led by Field Marshal Khalifa Hifter, who in April launched an offensive on Tripoli.
Responding to questions from the AP, the EU said a joint task force with the African Union and the United Nations is seeking safer alternatives for migrants outside Libya, including by stepping up evacuations and legal resettlement.
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