This strikes at a thing that has always disturbed me about far lefties who believe the hegemon is out to screw powerless brown people: the very same lefties often have a very condescending (almost imperialist, dare I say?) attitude about those very same brown people: that they are not smart enough to have agency, and are not making informed choices to go with the "hegemon". That they need to listen to the wise white lefty elite.

Orwell indeed. Still trying after all these years, the same old same old unite under us wise intellectuals, you have nothing to lose but your chains. Some been there, done that, didn't work out.

A.P. in The Jefferson (City Missouri) News Tribune:

Migrants stranded in Libya endure sewage, maggots, disease

Caption: In this May 21, 2019 photo provided by an African migrant, hundreds of migrants stage a protest in a detention center in the town of Zintan, western Libya, appealing for help from the United Nations. In the desert of western Libya, hundreds of African migrants were held for months in a detention center, packed in amid garbage covered in maggots and sewage, shared buckets of water, and barely surviving on only one meal a day. More than 20 have died from disease and hunger, while EU-funded aid agencies had little knowledge of the situation, according to leaked memos and migrants. (AP Photo)

[....]

“We need emergency evacuation from Zintan,” one told the AP. “We suffer physically, mentally and emotionally.”

Photos and videos taken by migrants showed heaps of garbage in the hangar, parts of the center flooded with sewage and plates of food crawling with maggots. The hangar had only four toilets, along with buckets for detainees to urinate in.

Migrants said they were not allowed out to see the sun, and the head of the center would often deprive them of food and water for days as a form of punishment. Those who were given food got only a small plate of pasta or couscous each day and had to share water that a few detainees were allowed to fetch once a day in buckets.

Internal memos and emails obtained by the AP show disagreement among aid agencies over conditions at the center, with one nonprofit working on behalf of the United Nations denying there was lack of food, even as it acknowledged it had not been able to see most of the migrants held there.

Migrants in the Zintan center and their advocates accused U.N. aid agencies of being slow to respond or forgetting them altogether. But the U.N refugee agency, or UNHCR, disputes that, saying the Libyan militias who run the facility have denied their workers access to all parts of it.

UNHCR chief Filippo Grandi told the AP that after photos from inside the site emerged last month, the agency intervened and evacuated 96 migrants from a separate building at the facility where it had access. They were sent to the one U.N.-run center for migrants in Tripoli.

“It is not because of lack of will or not even because of lack of resources,” Grandi said. “Access in Libya is the fundamental obstacle to saving more lives.”

Col. Nasser Nakoua, part of the militias who run the detention center in Zintan, denied there was any lack of access to the facility.

“Those saying that they have no access are just lying. The doors are open, and we want the agencies to come and help or just shut the place down, because there is severe shortage in everything,” he told the AP by phone.

He blamed the government, which is nominally in control of the facility, for failing to fund its operations. “We received nothing from Department for Combating Illegal Migration,” he said, referring to the body in charge of the facilities, “not a single penny.”

[....]

Currently, a U.N.-aligned but weak administration in Tripoli oversees the west, where Zintan is located, but much of its powers are in the hands of militias. Eastern Libya is controlled by a rival government aligned with the self-styled Libyan National Army led by Field Marshal Khalifa Hifter, who in April launched an offensive on Tripoli.

Some human rights advocates blame the European Union for the migrant crisis because it has funded Libya’s coast guard to stop the crossers at sea. That effort has been highly effective, with the number of people entering the EU via the central Mediterranean cut from 180,000 in 2016 to 23,400 last year and just 880 in the first four months of this year, according to the EU border agency Frontex.

At least 6,000 migrants from such nations as Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia and Sudan are locked in dozens of detention facilities run by militias accused of torture and other human rights abuses. And that comes after often-arduous journeys at the mercy of traffickers who are known to abuse migrants and hold them for ransom money from families back home.