Mistreatment of prisoners is rife in new Libya

By Anne-Beatrice Clasmann Feb 2, 2012, 2:01 GMT

Misrata, Libya - The life of a prisoner in the new Libya is monotonous and frightening at the same time.

The routine of prayers, breakfast, instruction about Islam, bean soup and nights spent in a dormitory with 200 other men is interrupted by interrogation sessions.

For the prisoners, questioning outside the prison often means being beaten or tortured by the military police.

Doctors Without Borders, or Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), closed down its operations in the small clinic in the prison grounds in the city of Misrata last week after it recorded 115 cases in which prisoners had been tortured during interrogation.

'Our criticism is not aimed at the prison management, as the inmates are well treated in the detention centre itself,' MSF spokeswoman Claudia Evers said. 'The evidence of torture was found after the prisoners were returned from the interrogation centres.'

Misrata was the site of fierce battles last year between rebels and forces loyal to Moamer Gaddafi, who was killed in October.

Sheikh Fathi Abdel Salam Darass, head of the improvised military prison in Misrata, is also unhappy about the mistreatment of prisoners.

'Anyone who goes to war is a real man, but people who beat a prisoner are cowards,' says the 37-year-old, who runs the prison with the help of 65 volunteers.

Business cards of Amnesty International (AI) officials lie on the prison director's desk. AI workers visited him recently, and he acknowledges that he has little knowledge of human rights regulations and international conventions.

Islam is his guiding light, Darass says. 'A minor beating during questioning is not so bad. But anything that goes beyond that should not happen.'

There is constant coming and going through the director's office, and his mobile phone rings all the time. The wire to the headphone attached to his mobile disappears in his bushy beard, and he wears a black-and-white headdress.

'When they see me, Western visitors think initially, another Osama bin Laden character,' he says.

'What's going on there?' he says on the phone. Two members of Gaddafi's clan have been detained by a 'revolutionary brigade' at a roadblock in the west of the city. They want to visit a relative detained in the military prison. 'OK. I'll come and sort it out myself,' Darass shouts.

He heads out to argue with the men at the roadblock. 'Nothing but chaos here,' he says, raising his eyebrows. Darass is unhappy to work without the authority of a ministry behind him.

More than 1,000 prisoners are packed together on the other side of the barred windows of his office, sitting on the ground in a roofed courtyard. Most of them have not been able to shave for a long time, although none has a beard as long as that sported by Sheikh Fathi.

He knows that some of these men sitting on the carpeted floor are innocent, while others have killed Gaddafi opponents and raped women. But he does not see himself as a judge.

'We ensure that the people brought here by the brigades and the army have blankets and enough to eat. We provide medical treatment and make sure that their relatives are able to visit them,' he says.

Security at the prison is not tight. Only a few of the bearded guards are visibly armed.

Prison staff say there has been only one escape attempt. 'On the streets, they would be at the mercy of people taking the law into their own hands,' one of Darass' men says.

Sheikh Fathi had little idea of how to run a prison when he took over the detention centre in the buildings formerly occupied by Gaddafi's internal security authority last year.

However, he knew the building well, because the Gaddafi regime was suspicious of devout Muslims with long beards like his.

He was called in and questioned on a number of occasions. 'But they never beat me, because I belong to a big family that they certainly did not want to provoke,' Darass says.