The extortion state: how the EU helps Libya to show migrants into money, by Wolfram Lacher & Jérôme Tubiana (Le Monde diplomatique

Jackson left Cameroon in 2020, when he was 16 or 17. He spent two years in Libya and tried to cross the Mediterranean 4 instances. On the final try, he was rescued by a European vessel, which took him to Italy. The earlier instances, 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 household in Cameroon had borrowed and wired a number of thousand euros for his crossing makes an attempt and to purchase his launch from successive prisons.

His worst expertise got here after his second try in mid-2021, when his wood craft was intercepted by a gray speedboat with an armed and masked crew. He and his fellow passengers had been transferred to not an ‘official’ detention centre however to a sequence of underground pens which had apparently been used for livestock and now served to accommodate the overflow of migrants. After two weeks, they had been moved to a derelict pharmaceutical manufacturing facility, which got here to be referred to as Al-Maya detention centre.

Jackson mentioned, ‘The place was deserted. They opened up a big room coated in mud. We tried to wash it with our spare garments and slept on the ground. There had been greater than 1,000 of us in that room. We had been their first detainees; that they had collected us to open Al-Maya.’ Some of this primary group ended up constructing its future cells. The one during which Jackson spent six months was virtually hermetically sealed. Water in jerrycans and little meals (a loaf or half a loaf every per day) had been lowered on a rope from the roof. This was additionally the one solution to get out. A video on social media exhibits a prisoner being pulled out — a uncommon occasion. Jackson talked about a sick detainee being evacuated that manner; he heard he had died shortly after. Some died from starvation, others from the winter chilly.

The rope may be used to drag out somebody who had purchased his launch, although Jackson didn’t see this throughout his time there. In some Libyan detention centres, migrants are allowed to telephone contacts to ask them to switch cash. Jackson and his cellmates tried to method one of many extra open-looking commanders. ‘Boss, please, what would you like from us? If it’s cash, deliver us a telephone.’ The reply: ‘This place isn’t like different prisons. We don’t want your depressing cash. We’re after the European Union. You can’t give us the type of ransom the EU can. When we get what we’re searching for, we’ll launch you’ (1).

Not the same old type of jail

Migrants who had been detained in Al-Maya informed of their shock (and despair) once they understood that it wasn’t the same old type of jail the place they may purchase their freedom. Up to five,000 detainees had been rounded up there to draw the eye of EU and UN companies. The purpose was to acquire the official recognition, tools and funding already supplied to different our bodies centered on arresting migrants — the LCG and the inside ministry’s Department for Combating Illegal Migration (DCIM), which runs detention centres — by the internationally recognised authorities in Tripoli, in addition to Italy and the EU and UN.

Those behind the Al-Maya scheme had been properly conscious of the system. They included the Buzriba brothers from the neighbouring metropolis of Zawiya, the godfathers of the native coastguard unit and Al-Nasr detention centre. This centre had been formally recognised by the Tripoli authorities, and visited by UN companies, with the IOM (International Organisation for Migration) proposing the detainees’ ‘voluntary humanitarian return’ to their international locations of origin. (The time period ‘voluntary’ is questionable, notably for individuals who don’t have any cash to purchase their freedom.)

The place was deserted. They opened up a big room coated in mud. We tried to wash it with our spare garments and slept on the ground. There had been greater than 1,000 of us in that room. We had been their first detainees

Jackson

But the poor remedy of arrested migrants in Zawiya had led to Al-Nasr being delisted as an official detention centre and three of its high officers being sanctioned by the UN (2). The most infamous, Zawiya’s LCG unit commander Abderrahman Milad (‘Al-Bija’), was held by the Tripoli prosecutor for six months (he was later murdered in 2024). A key purpose of the Al-Maya plan was to distance the brand new jail from these controversial figures and procure official assist.

In early 2021 the Buzribas joined the brand new Stability Support Apparatus (SSA) established by the Presidency Council in Tripoli, and Hassan Buzriba turned its deputy chief. Largely autonomous from Tripoli, the Buzribas mended relations with former enemies in neighbouring Warshafana, they usually determined to work collectively in Al-Maya, on the border between the 2 districts. They additionally constructed a port close to the brand new detention website for patrol boats which they purchased overseas, and commenced intercepting migrants at sea.

Yet the hyperlinks with Zawiya’s controversial gamers remained seen. Many of Al-Maya’s detainees seem to have been arrested by Zawiya’s LCG and first held in Al-Nasr. This occurred to Jackson when he tried his third crossing, 4 months after his launch from Al-Maya. In Al-Nasr, the detainees got just a few days to pay a 3,000 Libyan dinars (about $550) ransom, failing which they’d find yourself in Al-Maya. The considered returning there scared Jackson: ‘Relatives in Cameroon and pals in Europe paid and I used to be launched after ten days. The subsequent day, all of the others had been transferred.’ Al-Nasr had change into a buffer to extort migrants’ cash, and Al-Maya a dead-end jail to seize worldwide funds.

Machiavellian and naïve

The scheme was each Machiavellian and naïve. For months following Al-Maya’s opening, the query of whether or not or to not go to it was hotly debated by worldwide gamers concerned with Libya. The EU and UN apprehensive about reviews of violence and formally averted going there. But witnesses talked about visits by folks in IOM jackets, proposing the same old ‘voluntary’ returns. A Somalian minor, detained for six months simply after Jackson, noticed two IOM visits, which each went awry, turning into collective escape makes an attempt, adopted by lethal shootings.

With such a document, the scheme was unlikely to achieve success. Further, the Buzribas’ relations with Tripoli soured in 2022 after they backed an unsuccessful try by a rival authorities to take over. In May 2023 authorities drones bombed Al-Maya’s fleet. Hopes of presidency and EU assist light. And regularly, the jail appeared to slip right into a basic extortion mannequin (3).

In truth, it wasn’t irrational for the Buzribas to gamble on acquiring European assist if they may stop a big sufficient variety of migrants from taking to the ocean, even when this concerned abuses. The EU, together with Italy, has relied on teams resorting to those identical practices of their makes an attempt to close down migration by way of Libya.

EU migration insurance policies have more and more centered on controlling borders outdoors Europe. Commonly referred to as externalisation insurance policies, they contain paying non-European states to dam migrant flows, at sea and on land, as far south as attainable. Yet among the many 15 or so states with which the EU made agreements in recent times (4), Libya is exclusive in missing a government: the federal government with which Italy signed its first deal in 2017 didn’t even management Tripoli. Currently, many of the nation, together with its japanese and southern borders, is managed by the forces of Khalifa Haftar, who maintains a parallel authorities as a civilian façade for his navy energy.

Overall, the EU seems happy with the outcomes of externalisation, and has repeatedly said it intends to proceed partaking with exterior ‘companions’ (5). Considering the distinctive challenges it confronted in Libya, the EU’s insurance policies could possibly be seen as profitable in numerical phrases, not less than initially. Deals with Tripoli and Niger had a right away influence on arrivals from Libya in Europe, dropping from a 165,000 peak in 2016 to 7,000 in 2019. But thereafter, arrivals from Libya once more elevated, reaching 47,000 in 2024.

Dubious and partial success

Seen in a broader context, even this partial success seems doubtful. In 2023 some 157,000 migrants arrived in Italy, a determine nearing its earlier peak in 2016, defined by a shift in migration makes an attempt from Libya to Tunisia. Flows repeatedly transfer from one route to a different — as Libya closed down, Tunisia briefly turned a key transit nation. And the dangerous Atlantic crossing to the Canary Islands gained in significance when Libya, Tunisia and Morocco clamped down on departures. The nationalities presently dominating the Libyan route (Bangladeshis, Pakistanis, Syrians, Egyptians) partly mirror the truth that the Turkey-Balkans route has change into more durable.

Such modifications in routes have been yet one more justification for the EU to proceed its insurance policies unabated and full its North African blockade. In 2023 it shortly concluded a take care of Tunisia amid large violence towards sub-Saharan migrants, which pushed extra of them to take to the ocean. Tunisia then deported 13,000 migrants to the Libyan border, many ending locked in yet one more new detention centre referred to as Al-Assa. Yet, oddly, the EU referred to as its Tunisia deal a ‘blueprint’ (6). Since 2023 Brussels has additionally engaged in hasty partnerships with Egypt, Mauritania and Morocco — involving a softer stance with the latter on Western Sahara, from the place boats additionally depart.

The EU’s deal with numbers has eclipsed the human value of externalisation, starting with mortality. Nearly 28,000 deaths have been recorded during the last decade within the Mediterranean, of which over 21,000 within the central Mediterranean. Crucially, whereas the speed of interceptions by the Libyan coastguard rose sharply from 12% to 50% of tried crossings in the important thing 2017-19 years, the demise fee at sea greater than tripled, from 2% to 7% (7). This contradicts the EU’s declare that its insurance policies are saving lives. The EU’s naval operation Irini — not like its predecessors — was established in 2020 with out a mandate for sea rescue. Italy has taken to obstructing rescue ships operated by NGOs, and Germany has lately halted funding to them. All this raises the chance of demise, and seems to be a deliberate technique to maximise deterrence.

Less visibly, the desert hinterland south of Africa’s northern coast has been lethal too. In Niger, migrant deaths multiplied by 5 between 2016 and 2017 after an EU-backed legislation criminalising the transport of migrants was enforced (8). In Libya itself, knowledge is missing on deaths within the desert, in traffickers’ hangars the place migrants are systematically tortured for ransom, and in official detention centres. Mass graves of migrants are often found — however extra such graves are probably crammed day by day (9).

Migrant extortion enterprise

Europe’s insurance policies will not be the elemental purpose why migrants are violently preyed upon in Libya: exploitation was constructed into the nation’s migration governance throughout the Gaddafi period, when Libya hosted properly over one million migrant labourers — amongst them tons of of 1000’s of sub-Saharans who lacked any common standing and had been already uncovered to arbitrary detention and deportation. The huge bang of at this time’s extortion racket got here with the collapse of central authority, together with the Gaddafi regime itself, in 2011. Thereafter, armed teams forming throughout the nation may smuggle or ransom migrants in their very own sphere of affect — usually promoting them safety from their very own threats. Whether they acted as items of the fractured state’s safety forces or as non-state prison gangs initially made little distinction.

European insurance policies did, nevertheless, form the enterprise fashions utilized by Libya’s migration profiteers at this time. They incentivised extortionists to function inside state safety establishments, and to revenue primarily from stopping crossings relatively than enabling them. Europeans — starting with Italy — thereby helped create a now well-entrenched system of exploitation by state-sanctioned forces.

The foundational second got here in July 2017, a couple of months after Italy and the federal government in Tripoli signed an settlement to cooperate ‘within the battle towards unlawful migration’. The yr earlier than, Libya had change into an important route for migrants and refugees to Europe, and 2017 was on observe to change into one other document yr for arrivals in Italy. But that July, the numbers immediately dropped. This was not because of a rise in interceptions by the LCG, which was simply then beginning to obtain boats and coaching from the EU and Italy. (They have since equipped over 30 boats to the LCG). Rather, it was as a result of militia leaders in western Libyan coastal cities immediately started stopping departures. Tripoli and Italian officers had reached out to them, promising them legitimacy as items of state safety forces, and elevating the specter of sanctions or prosecution in the event that they saved smuggling migrants (10).

From then on, counter-migration turned a gorgeous enterprise mannequin for Libyan militias. It provided official standing, salaries and entry to state budgets comparable to DCIM funds. Libyan state funds for meals and cleansing of detention centres could possibly be embezzled in myriad methods, as may the help supplied by UN companies funded by the EU. Detainees could possibly be rented out as compelled labour and extorted in alternate for his or her launch. In truth, many militia leaders concurrently engaged in counter-migration and migrant smuggling. In Al-Maya as elsewhere, they tailored their enterprise mannequin to shifting political circumstances. According to migrants who made it to Europe, one of the best smugglers are LCG members — who run no danger of being intercepted. Recently, and more and more, Libyan navy vessels have been seen dropping migrants outdoors the Libyan Search and Rescue zone, in entrance of European vessels.

Crucially, counter-migration turned militia leaders into interlocutors for worldwide actors. Coastguard and detention centre commanders obtained Italian intelligence operatives, IOM and UNHCR delegations, in addition to overseas embassies in search of to repatriate their detained residents. The heads of the DCIM and their superiors within the inside ministry had been courted by European ambassadors.

Boosted by the cash and overseas connections they collected via counter-migration, militia leaders regularly took over state establishments. In 2021 the commander of Tripoli’s infamous Tariq al-Sikka detention centre, Mohammed al-Khoja, turned the top of the DCIM. Emad Trabelsi, whose group had managed the equally ill-reputed Al-Mabani detention centre within the metropolis, was appointed inside minister the next yr. Trabelsi picked two of his lieutenants as, respectively, Khoja’s deputy and the top of a brand new border guard. Trabelsi’s associates would work collectively on locking up migrants deported by the Tunisian authorities in Al-Assa, then shifting them to a detention centre within the hinterland south of Tripoli.

The Buzribas additionally rose via the ranks: Essam Buzriba has been inside minister within the japanese, parallel authorities since 2022; in Tripoli, the Presidency Council promoted his brother Hassan to go the SSA in June 2025, regardless of his open enmity in the direction of prime minister Abdul Hamid al-Dbeibeh. Networks that owed their rise to the migrants enterprise now run it from the highest echelons of the state.

How to amass capital

These figures’ ascent mirrored a broader conquest of the state by militia leaders. Counter-migration was not their solely path to accumulating capital and constructing overseas connections. They may make much more cash by infiltrating the monetary networks via which Libya’s oil revenues had been channelled into imports, public contracts, subsidies and the like. But within the area of counter-migration, they benefited from an incentive construction created by EU insurance policies. After all, LCG interceptions supported by the EU fashioned the primary provide of captives for the detention centres — the EU’s nominal opposition to arbitrary detention in Libya however.

Critics of the EU’s insurance policies usually disparage its Libyan companions as mere militias, referring to the ‘so-called Libyan coastguard’. This might have been a legitimate criticism when the present insurance policies had been devised in 2017. Today, it misses the purpose: Libya’s militias have change into the state (11). In the method, that state has developed vested pursuits within the continuation of the extortion enterprise — pursuits that EU insurance policies have helped to create.

On a go to of European ministers to Tripoli this July, Dbeibeh and Trabelsi pitched a grand plan to massively step up deportations of migrants and refugees. The scheme is wholly unrealistic. The Dbeibeh authorities has little efficient management outdoors Tripoli, and deportations are pricey. But Dbeibeh is preventing for political survival and is in search of to mobilise European assist for his authorities by demonstrating his usefulness. In the previous, Europeans would foyer their Libyan counterparts, for whom migration was the bottom precedence. But with counter-migration networks having risen to the highest of the agenda, senior Libyan officers now discount over the worth for his or her cooperation.

Dbeibeh is competing for European assist with Khalifa Haftar and his sons, whose Libyan Arab Armed Forces management three quarters of Libya’s territory. The Haftars provide the clearest instance for a way Europe’s obsession with curbing arrivals has led it to legitimising Libyan warlords. Before 2022, japanese Libya had not been a degree of departure for migrant boats, as western Libya is way nearer to Italy. But that yr, 1000’s of individuals immediately began arriving in Italy from japanese Libya in giant fishing vessels. Many had flown into Benghazi airport. Alarmed, prime minister Giorgia Meloni obtained Haftar in Rome in May 2023 — the primary time Italy had bestowed that honour upon Haftar since his defeat in Tripoli in 2020. Shortly afterwards, the boats from japanese Libya stopped coming.

Since then, Italian officers have often met Haftar’s sons, and Italy has began coaching his troops. The Haftars have demonstrated that they will flip the faucet on and off. This yr, they’ve allowed a surge of crossings to Crete, prompting equally panicked visits by Greek ministers. Athens has since provided to coach Haftar’s coastguard, however Haftar remains to be asking for extra (12).

In July a delegation together with ministers from Italy, Greece and Malta in addition to EU migration commissioner Magnus Brunner had been made to attend at Benghazi airport, then ejected with out their scheduled viewers with Haftar, who had demanded that additionally they meet with representatives of his parallel authorities (13). Both Brunner and senior Italian officers have repeatedly warned that Russia might ‘weaponise’ migrant departures from Libya towards Europe — claims for which there isn’t a proof thus far. There is nevertheless ample proof that Haftar is utilizing migration flows to blackmail Europeans, who appear solely too prepared to play his recreation.

In March this yr, a marketing campaign unfold on Libyan social networks: ‘No to the settlement of Africans in Libya! No to Italy’s plan! Together, let’s drive Africans from Libya! Demonstrate this Friday!’ Pundits and Facebook posts accused the Dbeibeh authorities of colluding with Italy and different overseas powers in a sinister plan to completely settle migrants in Libya, eternally altering the nation’s social cloth.

Political circles against Dbeibeh had launched the marketing campaign, in search of to leverage widespread xenophobia towards the federal government. Only a couple of dozen folks answered their name to take to the streets, however the authorities panicked. ‘We had been apprehensive this might trigger pogroms, a massacre,’ one in every of Dbeibeh’s ministers mentioned. He might have been solely barely exaggerating. Many vividly keep in mind the anti-migrant riots of 2000, during which not less than 130 sub-Saharan Africans and 16 Libyans had been killed.

Trying to grab the initiative, Trabelsi ordered haphazard roundups of migrant employees, promised large-scale deportations, and summoned European ambassadors to inform them that Libya would by no means settle for the settlement of migrants. Meanwhile, the home intelligence service shuttered the workplaces of worldwide NGOs engaged on enhancing the state of affairs of migrants and interrogated their Libyan workers. It then publicly accused these NGOs and the UNHCR of getting a secret EU plan to completely settle migrants in Libya. The cessation of medical care supplied by NGOs — a few of which had been appearing on behalf of UN companies — triggered the deaths of a number of migrants.

The plot could appear acquainted: as in neighbouring Tunisia, politicians and safety companies invoke a fantastic substitute idea to current themselves because the guardians of nationwide purity. Yet on this case, the instrumentalisation of xenophobia by cynical politicians is simply a part of the story. Suspicions of overseas conspiracies are deep-seated in Libya, together with amongst senior officers. Fear of demographic change is equally widespread, and never solely an expression of racism: naturalising foreigners would dilute the share of oil revenues obtainable to Libyan residents within the type of public sector salaries and subsidies.

Is Libya actually the sufferer?

Allegations of a European conspiracy to change Libyan society have lengthy been a part of mainstream public discourse on migration. Officials, amongst them Trabelsi and Dbeibeh, have repeatedly alluded to such claims, that are rooted within the virtually common view that Libya is above all of the sufferer of transit migration to Europe. That discourse obscures the truth that the overwhelming majority of migrants — specifically these from neighbouring Niger and Chad — come to Libya to work relatively than journey on to Europe, and the Libyan financial system is dependent upon a big migrant labour pressure.

It additionally ignores the EU’s funding for so-called ‘voluntary humanitarian returns’ via which the IOM has repatriated over 100,000 migrants from Libya since 2015 — excess of the Libyan authorities may obtain, and infinitely greater than the UNHCR resettlement programmes to a handful of ‘secure’ international locations in Europe and North America nonetheless prepared to welcome refugees (14). (Tellingly, the IOM was spared by the home intelligence companies’ accusations of collusion in malign European designs).

Yet EU insurance policies have additionally unwittingly helped to lend such conspiracy theories a level of plausibility. The EU does, in any case, deal with blocking migrants in Libya. Moreover, via the IOM and different organisations, the EU has additionally lengthy sponsored efforts to enhance the circumstances of migrants in Libya, in detention centres but in addition via tasks supporting service supply in localities, or (unsuccessful) makes an attempt to regularise the authorized standing of migrant employees. The reasoning behind such initiatives is smart: migrants coming to work in Libya could also be compelled to maneuver on to Europe by hardship and exploitation; migrants in search of to achieve Europe might select to remain in Libya in the event that they discover work and security there. But in a society that rejects the notion of Libya as a vacation spot nation, such efforts are simply seen as pernicious.

Libyans’ fears of Western conspiracies are definitely not assuaged by recurrent media reviews that the Trump administration is wanting in the direction of Libya as a vacation spot to which each to deport third-country nationals and to switch tons of of 1000’s of Palestinians from Gaza (15). Vying for US backing, each Dbeibeh and the Haftars have reportedly signalled their openness to such plans. Whether they’d truly cooperate in implementing them is unsure — that they may climate the general public backlash this is able to set off is unlikely. Still, even their willingness to entertain such concepts exhibits how ruthlessly they pursue their quest for energy.

This can also be true of their cooperation with Europe which, by trapping migrants in Libya and turning Libyan forces into EU proxies, clearly runs counter to the nationwide curiosity and satisfaction as most Libyans would outline them. The prevalent notion is that European insurance policies are ‘extra involved with Europe’s pursuits than they’re with Libya’s stability and safety’[[
Tim Eaton and Lubna Yousef, ‘How migrant smuggling has fuelled conflict in Libya’, Chatham House, February 2025.

For now, Europe is satisfied with using Libya as a legal grey zone, where the lack of refugee laws conforming to international standards allows for counter-migration measures that would be illegal elsewhere. But in the long run, the EU is empowering forces that are no longer content to ransom migrants, but have their eyes set on extorting European governments too.