Incarcerated: Eritrean refugees peer through the only window of a building at the Dhar el-Jebel migrant detention centre, Libya, May 2019
Jérôme Tubiana
Jackson left Cameroon in 2020, when he was 16 or 17. He spent two years in Libya and tried to cross the Mediterranean four times. On the last attempt, he was rescued by a European vessel, which took him to Italy. The previous times, he had been intercepted by the Libyan coastguard (LCG), backed by the European Union, and ended up spending months in Libyan detention centres. His struggling family in Cameroon had borrowed and wired several thousand euros for his crossing attempts and to buy his release from successive prisons.
His worst experience came after his second attempt in mid-2021, when his wooden craft was intercepted by a grey speedboat with an armed and masked crew. He and his fellow passengers were transferred not to an ‘official’ detention centre but to a series of underground pens which had apparently been used for livestock and now served to house the overflow of migrants. After two weeks, they were moved to a derelict pharmaceutical factory, which came to be known as Al-Maya detention centre.
Jackson said, ‘The place was abandoned. They opened up a large room covered in dust. We tried to clean it with our spare clothes and slept on the floor. There were more than 1,000 of us in that room. We were their first detainees; they had collected us to open Al-Maya.’ Some of this first group ended up building its future cells. The one in which Jackson spent six months was almost hermetically sealed. Water in jerrycans and little food (a loaf or half a loaf each per day) were lowered on a rope from the roof. This was also the only way to get out. A video on social media shows a prisoner being pulled out — a rare event. Jackson mentioned a sick detainee being evacuated that way; he heard he had died shortly after. Some died from hunger, others from the winter cold.
The rope could also be used to pull out someone who had bought his release, though Jackson didn’t see this during his time there. In some Libyan detention centres, (…)
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(1) See Khaled Mattawa and Jérôme Tubiana, ‘The River’, New York Review of Books, 6 February 2023.
(2) See Wolfram Lacher, ‘A political economy of Zawiya: Armed groups and society in a western Libyan city’, Small Arms Survey, March 2024.
(7) Sources: IOM (including ‘Missing Migrants’), UNHCR, MSF.
(9) ‘Migrants’ bodies in Libya mass graves had gunshot wounds, IOM says’, Reuters, 10 February 2025.
