![]() In the past six years, the European Union, weary of the financial and political costs of receiving migrants from sub-Saharan Africa, has created a shadow immigration system that stops them before they reach Europe. Luther told me, “If you don’t have anybody to call, you just sit down.” But Candé’s family couldn’t afford such a ransom. During meals, the guards walked around with cell phones, allowing detainees to call relatives who could pay. The guards offered migrants their freedom for a fee of twenty-five hundred Libyan dinars-about five hundred dollars. Detainees speculated that, when someone died, the body was dumped behind one of the compound’s outer walls, near a pile of brick and plaster rubble. “They would beat anyone for no reason at all,” Tokam Martin Luther, an older Cameroonian man who slept on a mat next to Candé’s, told me. The guards struck prisoners who disobeyed orders with whatever was handy: a shovel, a hose, a cable, a tree branch. Guards, like zookeepers, put communal bowls of food on the ground, and migrants gathered in circles to eat. Twice a day, they were marched, single file, into the courtyard, where they were forbidden to look up at the sky or talk. ![]() Detainees fought over who got to sleep in the shower, which had better ventilation. Migrants slept on thin floor pads there weren’t enough to go around, so people took turns-one lay down during the day, the other at night. There was only one toilet for every hundred people, and Candé often had to urinate in a water bottle or defecate in the shower. About fifteen hundred migrants were held there, in eight cells, segregated by gender. The prison is controlled by a militia that euphemistically calls itself the Public Security Agency, and its gunmen patrolled the hallways. In his first days there, he kept mostly to himself, submitting to the grim routines of the place. He hadn’t been charged with a crime or allowed to speak to a lawyer, and he was given no indication of how long he’d be detained. No one in the world beyond Al Mabani’s walls knew that Candé had been captured. “What should we do?” he asked a cellmate. On the walls, migrants had scrawled notes of determination: “A soldier never retreats,” and “With our eyes closed, we advance.” Candé crowded into a far corner and began to panic. Birds nested in the rafters, their feathers and droppings falling from above. A small grille in the door, about a foot wide, was the only source of natural light. Overhead were fluorescent lights that stayed on all night. There was hardly anywhere to sit in the crush of bodies, and those on the floor slid over to avoid being trampled. ![]() 4, where some two hundred others were being held. But, as he attempted to cross the Mediterranean Sea on a rubber dinghy, with more than a hundred other migrants, the Libyan Coast Guard intercepted them and took them to Al Mabani. He had left home a year and a half earlier, because his family’s farm was failing, and had set out to join two brothers in Europe. on February 5, 2021, Aliou Candé, a sturdy, shy twenty-eight-year-old migrant from Guinea-Bissau, arrived at the prison.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |