Libya may have escaped the pandemic but for its thousands of refugees the suffering continues

The first patient with Covid-19 was confirmed in Libya on March 25, but since then the pandemic has not brought waves of patients in respiratory distress to the country’s hospitals. 

Neither has it provoked a sudden increase of mortality in the infamous detention centres still active across the country - where hundreds of migrants, asylum-seekers and refugees endure arbitrary and indefinite detention in dire living conditions.   

But while the pandemic may not have hit Libya as hard as other countries, for many of the 1,500 people currently held in the detention centres nominally under the authority of the Libyan agency fighting illegal migration (DCIM), it has brought a new wave of despair. 

There are an estimated 650,000 migrants in the country, which has a population of six million. The majority have come to seek work while others are waiting to make the perilous journey across the Mediterranean to Europe. 

Libya has become a focal point for Africans fleeing war and poverty, some of whom have ended up in the north African country after being picked up attempting to cross the Mediterranean. 

The coronavirus pandemic means that UN repatriation and resettlement programmes have come to a halt, extinguishing the migrants’ only hope of finding a way out of a cycle of abuse and violence in Libya, where a civil war has been raging for more than five years.  

Worldwide calls for a ceasefire to allow for proper Covid-19 preparedness and response planning has fallen on warring parties’ deaf ears. On the contrary, fighting  has intensified in and around Tripoli, with more indiscriminate shelling and deadly attacks on residential areas and health facilities.   

While the early implementation of preventive measures such as curfews, lockdowns and closure of borders have helped to contain the spread of Covid-19 in Libya, it has further disrupted an already fragile economy.    

In the weeks following the first cases of coronavirus in the country, shortages of basic food and hygiene items and price hikes combined with curfews led to concerns over food shortages in the detention centres where we provide medical and psychosocial assistance.  

Despite this, the UN World Food Programme, has so far decided not to deliver food directly to detention centres as this would reportedly infringe its opposition to arbitrary detention.   

This attitude encapsulates a general trend among international humanitarian actors. While we cannot condone the arbitrary detention of migrants and refugees in Libya, we also have to recognise that efforts to find alternatives are going nowhere.  More than ever, now is not the time to abandon people held in Libya’s detention centres to their fate. 

Yet, most migrants and refugees in Libya are not held in detention centres. The vast majority, including those released or who have managed to get out in recent months, live in the main Libyan cities. However, the pandemic and resulting lockdown has made it very difficult for them to work, leading to a desperate situation. 

MSF teams have received an unprecedented number of calls from migrants, often former detainees, now left without food and unable to pay their rent in Tripoli. The current restrictions on movements further fuel their fears of arrest, ransom or kidnapping by human traffickers if they go outside. Migrants and refugees are pushed underground, out of sight and out of reach.   

Support provided by international aid agencies to migrants and refugees living in Libya’s cities mainly consists of one-off relief packages and ad-hoc distributions. But it is very hard for aid agencies to reach those most in need because  of security and access challenges in a city at war.   

Just as ambulances continue to carry the sick and injured to emergency rooms despite public health lockdown policies, so should evacuation flights from Libya continue to operate as an emergency lifeline. Upon arrival to safe third countries, preventive measures like quarantine can be applied to prevent the spread of the Covid-19.