“Whoever was tortured, stays tortured” — Auschwitz survivor Jean Amery.
In My Fourth Time We Drowned, multi-award-winning freelance journalist Sally Hayden documents the experiences of those who flee homes destroyed by conflict and oppression. Sally Rooney’s reaction is typical — “the most important work of contemporary reporting I have ever read”. Numerous boat crossings from Libya are detailed, each risking what happened off the Greek coast in mid-June when a boat with hundreds crammed aboard sank. Of an estimated 700 plus passengers, less than 100 bodies were recovered. The majority, locked in the hold, were feared dead. Rescue charities, and authorities in France, Greece and Malta, as well as European border control Frontex, had all been alerted, and monitoring the boat for 12 hours, but disagreed over words exchanged with passengers and what unfolded. Alexis Tsipras, Greece’s former left Prime Minister asked, “what sort of protocol does not call for the rescue … of an overloaded boat about to sink”? If practical assistance was not offered until it was too late, organisations failed in their sea duties under international laws. Barack Obama and others noted the contrast in media coverage of the Titanic submersible incident and called out obscene inequality and disparity in life chances.
Meanwhile, Ireland is sending a Navy ship, Lé William Butler Yeats, to Libya, which may indirectly facilitate more drownings, because it is joining an EU naval operation tasked to sink or burn migrant ships encountered, often under smugglers’ control, meaning migrants must use increasingly more dangerous ships.
Hayden explores similar ploys; denials of responsibility, or outsourcing it to criminal operators, passing the buck, hands-off exploitation and careerism, politicising desperate plights, whitewashing with tokenism, jargon, image branding, and more. The stricter migration control regime installed by the West since Gaddafi’s overthrow in 2011 has paved the way for ever-graver human rights catastrophes befalling those seeking sanctuary. Hayden’s use of unfiltered messages received directly from hundreds of refugees themselves illustrates how these European policies often result in cruel inhumane incarceration across North Africa, with Libyan militias and the modern slave trade being bankrolled by the EU, and with NGOs and the UN standing by, complicit and even corrupt. The opaque trail of accountability and striking under-reporting of activities and conditions suggest a collective wish to ignore and forget so many victims of the West’s neocolonial foreign policy. The EU does not count detainees, or have a process to contact families in emergencies, though the UN tracks numbers drowned at sea. At least 23,000 refugees have drowned or gone missing in the Mediterranean between 2014 and 2022. 1 in 51 attempting the crossing died in 2017 versus 1 in 21 in 2019. The number of people living as refugees rose by nearly 20 million from 2021 to nearly 110 million people by December 2022, according to a UN report.
Hayden’s book is accessibly laid out, with lists of contents and key data, plus maps, notes on terminology, acronyms, acknowledgements and 65 pages of other notes and references, to end.
According to the late David Graeber, co-author (with David Wengrow) of The Dawn of Everything, for the vast majority of human social experience, people enjoyed “three primordial freedoms: the freedom to move, the freedom to disobey and the freedom to create or transform social relationships”. Peaceful anarchy was the modus operandi. While inequalities in early human societies were not unknown, the structures of domination common to hierarchical government were absent. The tentacles of many institutions now creep around the planet, enforcing an imagined world of divisive identities, affecting millions of individuals in every facet of their lives.
Exploration and colonisation over centuries brought genocides, ethnic cleansing, capture of labour, and accumulation of capital and resources. The spoils are still not going to those who earn them, although the Global South is waking up to the raw deals and lies imposed for too long. As power centres shift, Naomi Klein’s words seem apt: “In the hot and stormy future we have already made inevitable through our past emissions, an unshakeable belief in the equal rights of all people and a capacity for deep compassion will be the only things standing between civilization and barbarism”.
A tragic parallel can be drawn between current migration journeys and those of Irish migrants piling into the infamous filthy overcrowded unseaworthy ‘coffin ships’ often arranged by Anglo-Irish landed gentry during the Great Irish Famine halfway through the nineteenth century. Many applicants were already at death’s door, unable to bear further hardships on route to America or Canada. Drownings and sinkings were common. Over 100,000 chose this dangerous option in 1846 alone, numbers which shocked the US Congress into passing two new Passengers Acts to raise minimum voyage fares as deterrents.
Unfortunately, modern Ireland mimics international shortcomings. Evidence of human trafficking of migrant fishers off the Irish coast is mounting. And the Irish Refugee Council has recently criticised the preferential treatment of people seeking protection:
“While we acknowledge the pressure on homeless services in Ireland, where homeless figures are at a record high, the decision to respond to two groups of people, that are both experiencing homelessness, with different policies on the grounds of their different status and/or nationality, risks being discriminatory and is not tenable”.
The 1951 U.N. Refugee Convention states, “no Contracting State shall expel or return a refugee in any manner whatsoever to the frontiers of territories where his life or freedom would be threatened on account of his race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion”.
In a shameful saga, Hayden can be proud of her contribution
That is the obligation under international law, incorporated widely into statutory law, but rarely cited anymore. Libya was not a signatory. Still, developing countries shelter about 87 % of the world’s refugees, most of whom have clear entitlements with experiences of conflict, poverty, enforced militarisation and so on. The goal of those fleeing strife is to contact the United Nations refugee agency, UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and/or the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) to get the documentation needed to be evacuated to a safe living environment.
What most undergo in between is what Hayden investigates, and how European states are increasingly availing of loopholes to get around their duties; instead devising means to shut down borders. With so many players benefitting from human misery, migration as a profitable industry and career-maker is revealed. Designated money finds its way to paramilitary gangs. Bribes and ransoms refugees raise from families or online are demanded at all stages; a slave trade playing out in plain sight. UNHRC involvement validates unmanageable arrangements, covering for policies making a mockery of human rights assertions.
Of about 17 million refugees under UNHCR’s mandate, only 102,000 were resettled in 2017. Founded in 1950 to protect refugees, the UNHCR enjoys a budget of $10 billion and has 18,000 staff on its payroll. Allegations that it works with punitive states with whom it shares refugee data are concerning. Irregularities abound. A bribe-taking scheme was uncovered in Sudan in 2018. The site of the blood diamond trade for nearly a century, Sierra Leone’s nationals remain poor and die young. The West’s enrichment at their expense is an argument made to validate economic reasons for migration. Migrants from Eritrea, Gambia, Niger, Ethiopia and Somalia also came looking for sanctuary. Rwanda tries to cash in through services offered despite being a brutal authoritarian regime that disappears dissenters.
Applicants are allocated to detention centres, warehouses mostly in Libya run by local militia often doubling as smugglers, who receive UN budgets, thus monetising captivity. Conditions are grim. Some camps have only 3 toilets for every thousand detainees. Some are built right beside arms stores, making human shields of the inmates. The site of Abdulaziz’s self-immolation, Triq al Sikka in Tripoli, held 4,500 people in 2018. Tales of torture, starvation, racism, total confinement, overcrowding, disease especially TB, mental illness, limited medical care, extortion, deceit, murder and threats of, if not actual, abandonment, are not unusual, inviting comparison to concentration camps. Half of pregnancies inside were thought to result from rape. Complaints and protests trigger accusations of riots, and of terrorist and criminal elements. Too often, the immigration system was more treacherous than horrors encountered in places of origin. Migrants encounter containment in Libya, formerly a genuine site of transit.
Inspection visits are carefully stage-managed. Lengths of stay range from a few weeks to a few years. Even then, travel papers may be refused. In 2017, the head of the International Criminal Court called Libya ‘a marketplace for the trafficking of human beings’, following CNN coverage of desperate people being auctioned. An official investigation was briefly broached. Libya’s other nickname is ‘the Tesco of the arms trade’, while oil ensures wealth revenue, for the powerful elite. External companies such as France’s Total Energies are still deeply involved in often unaccountable operations lacking an identifiable locus of control. Gaddafi proposed selling oil in euros rather than dollars once US-backed embargos imposed by the UN were lifted and promoting regional banking, but the country’s gold and silver reserves vanished after his execution, and rebels were hired by Geneva and Brussels, breaking the continuity of services people recalled under the ‘Mad Dog’. Over 906,000 people, nearly half civilians, died directly from post-9/11 wars, which displaced 38 million people and made many refugees.
After a taste of this ill-treatment or rumours of it in the legal system, other migrants decide to take their chances on dangerous illegal sea passages, to cost them thousands more euro again. Many are not aware the Libyan coastguard are tasked to intercept and return boats, if they don’t sink first. Some passengers do make it or are rescued by genuine charities, and eventually start new lives in Europe —the Holy Grail. When Italy signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Libya in 2017 to curtail migration, the EU pledged €100 million to train and equip the coastguard, following the creation of the related multibillion Trust Fund for Africa in 2015. Officials and staff of NGOs who benefit are kept pampered and safe in Tunis, or in guarded compounds. The International Rescue Committee awarded chairman David Miliband €1 million in 2018. MSF refuse such centralised funding so they can unconditionally focus on their mission and are among the very few organisations whose reputation remains unscathed.
In 2020, Oxfam called out the scheme circumventing international law as “an example of development aid being used as leverage to pressure African countries into cooperating with European demands to combat migration”. Overseas assistance money is going towards border controls. This also means African countries can be blamed when things go wrong. Oxfam’s follow-up report is due out later in 2023. Using rapidly advancing technology, with a budget swollen from €6 million in 2005 to €545 million in 2021, amid rolling rumours of abuses and scandals, Schengen-based Frontex detects movement and conveys information, engaged in what Lighthouse Reports calls anti-migrant activity.
In 2019, before Libya erupted into civil war, bringing more deprivations to detention camps, new European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen echoed far-right rhetoric in proposing ‘a Vice-President for protecting our European way of life’. This is true, if banking is more important than human rights. The causes and effects of migration are increasingly obscured, and responsibilities dispersed, spotlighting victims as targets of blame.
In March 2020, von der Leyen gave another far-right impression by thanking Greece for acting as the European Union’s ‘shield’, and pledging support to ensure that as a priority ‘order is maintained’ at borders, which is promoting global apartheid rather than hospitality.
In 2019, two Paris-based lawyers filed a submission to the International Criminal Court for the EU to be charged with crimes against humanity on the basis it sacrificed the lives of migrants in distress at sea, to dissuade peers in Libya from seeking safe haven in Europe, under a policy including forced transfer to detention facilities where appalling crimes were being committed in the name of, and for the benefit of the EU, perpetuating colonialisation. Consequently, migrants deserved recognition as a persecuted group. More and more activists and lawyers advocating human rights in a system incompatible with them conclude that immigration restrictions shame foreigners and should be phased out towards open borders, an approach supported by data from the New Internationalist. With science showing that the indigenous people of the British Isles were not white Britons, but descendants of boating immigrants, us and them simplifications do not hold up.
The working relationships between the network of guards, smugglers, EU, UN and NGOs starkly contrast with the EU’s line that ‘funding was crucial to save lives at sea and fight trafficking and smuggling’. Announcements that black lives mattered also rang hollow, when whiteness routinely bestowed unearned privilege and humours climate anxiety. At one camp, Zintan, refugee deaths occurred every two weeks. Bodies were stored in fridges or put in unmarked graves. At another, Tajoura, inmates were coerced to enact a sea drowning for visiting dignitaries, which was broadcast on TV. At the comfortable UN Gathering and Departure Facility, migrants were given the choice of checking out with just some pocket money into Tripoli’s war zone, or be relocated to a remote camp, after receiving rejection notices on the day Libya was elected to the UN Human Rights Council. No alternative to detention was developed while, as a volunteer observed, borders are institutional racism.
Hayden’s use of unfiltered messages received directly from hundreds of refugees themselves illustrates how these European policies often result in cruel inhumane incarceration across North Africa
Search and rescue charities faced pressure from authorities to quit. The Sean Binder trial illustrates how human rights activists are being targeted and punished. American activists also face criminalisation. Hayden travelled to Ethiopia when a smuggler-cum-guard who exploited about 30,000 refugees at Bani Walid camp in Libya, and rapist accomplice, were arrested in 2021 and put on trial. International interest was minimal, and legal proceedings baneful. The hypocrisy of the EU Migration Pact justifies replacing it with a policy that protects people, respects and serves the rights and humanity of people seeking asylum, and engages all European countries to share responsibilities. This shift would make hostile Frontex redundant and hold decision-makers accountable.
At a June 2023 rally, Donald Trump deplored the US failure to capture the Venezuelan oil supply. After a successful legal case against the EPA and Exxon Mobil in Guyana, citizens involved are wary of neocolonial schemes perpetuating the ‘resource curse’ of mainly South American and African countries being kept impoverished despite abundant resources. Welcome controls may emerge from the historic EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, requiring sustainability and human rights to be prioritised in how companies and investors based or active in the EU do business, which is advancing despite considerable political and industry pressure. Much jostling to offload obligations persists. European and Middle Eastern countries cite each other’s rhetoric and actions to justify deportation patterns in a cycle risking escalation, to the extreme detriment of refugees’ rights and lives.
Addressing the UN, the Pope said that, “the worst effect of this famine of fraternity is armed conflict and war that makes enemies of not only individuals but entire peoples and whose negative consequences reverberate for generations”.
In 2011, the U.S. Africa Command availed of two United Nations Security Council resolutions for its first project, oil-rich Libya. After blanket-bombing the country, the Pentagon and NATO recruited rebels, many linked to U.S intelligence, to conquer strategic towns and ports, leading to arms proliferation, and killing up to 100,000 people while displacing more than two million. Africa’s most prosperous stable state was no more.
Now with agreement close on Libya’s electoral law, a key cause of postponed national elections scheduled in December 2021 under the UN-mediated peace agreement, the EU has started plying Tunisia with money to take over migrant crack-downs from Libya, and linking it from Sicily with electricity cables too. All human rights conventions are being breached by demands for border controls. At least Canada is ending its policy of detaining asylum seekers in prisons. Things can change.
On settlement in Europe, many refugees struggle with loneliness, depression, poverty, racism, alienation and other trauma, potentially intergenerational. As one said, “I am free, but my mind has not yet reached its destination”. As EU Trilogues on a new EU Migration and Asylum Pact proceed, member states citing socio-economic and far-right pressures for reluctance to support integration mechanisms, will be able to pay into a Solidarity Pool instead, reinforcing the business aspect. The Irish government is supporting what NGOS oppose for omissions including assurances about independent observers, and reform of the Dublin Regulation, regarded as a perverse incentive and unfair burden on countries with external borders.
A joint NGO statement responding to the Pact warns against EU complicity. According to Human Rights Watch, these measures will only increase suffering. They ignore historical and current interstate, transnational and globalist injustices, and related usually murky economics crying out for investigation; for example, Bangladesh. “The gold standard then, and debt- and deficit-based global finance now, are shining examples of methods to drain wealth from the global south”. Aware of the relentless over-exploitation of their natural resources, capital and labour, the Global South is finally looking at its own alternatives.
“Whilst many media reports of migrants focus on numbers of arrivals, returns and deportations, it is important to remember the human faces and stories behind these statistics. Migrants play diverse sociocultural, civic-political and economic roles in both their origin and destination countries, as workers, students, entrepreneurs, family members, artists, and much more” – IOM.
UN human rights expert F.G. Morales calls for regularisation and urges governments “to end the criminalisation of irregular migrants and promote solidarity and change the narrative on migration and combat xenophobia, racism and discrimination”.
Hayden acknowledges the power imbalance between migrants and journalists, who must beware of turning into data vultures, sugar-coating facts and growing immune to inequality instead of empowering migrants to add their own voices. How stories are told colours understanding and reactions. In a shameful saga, Hayden can be proud of her contribution.
“We can disagree and still love each other, unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist” — James Baldwin.
