MY FOURTH TIME WE DROWNED EB

Sally Hayden

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780008445584
• eBook ISBN: 9780008445591
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Afrique

WINNER OF THE ORWELL PRIZE

WINNER OF IRISH BOOK OF THE YEAR

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE

'The most important work of contemporary reporting I have ever read' SALLY ROONEY

The treatment of refugees has become one of the most devastating human rights disasters in our history. In this book, award-winning journalist Sally Hayden unfolds a staggering investigation into the migrant crisis across North Africa.

This book follows the experiences of refugees, telling a range of shocking and eye-opening human stories. But it also surveys the bigger picture: the negligence of NGOs and corruption within the United Nations. The economics of the twenty-first-century slave trade and the EU's bankrolling of Libyan militias. The trials of people smugglers, the frustrations of aid workers, the loopholes refugees seek out and the role of social media in crowdfunding ransoms. Who was accountable for the abuse? Where were the people finding solutions? Why wasn't it being widely reported?

At its heart, this is a book about people who have made unimaginable choices, risking everything to survive in a system that wants them to be silent and disappear.

1

Where It Ends and Where It Begins

‘I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.’

W. B. Yeats1

After ten hours at sea, Essey appealed to God for a sign. He was crouched in the middle of an overcrowded rubber boat, which was being thrown about by waves. His limbs were frozen still, apart from the occasional muscle spasm, and his fingertips had wrinkled. He could taste salt, though maybe this was not as much the spray as the sweat of unwashed bodies around him.

The sea was dark, the water cold. Some of the hundred people in the boat were crying softly, stomachs heaving as they retched from seasickness. Women would occasionally shout out, clutching their children as they beseechingly praised the Lord. Others had stopped making any sound at all. A passenger fainted, her weight on Essey. Around them, pooled seawater mixed with vomit. Every big wave was an insistent reminder that many of them could not swim.

Most of the men were perched sideways on the edge of the boat, with one foot in the water. They had taken off their shoes on the shore, or thrown them in the sea, so they were not weighed down and to avoid puncturing the rubber. The tired engine was another potential hazard: any leaking fuel combined with saltwater would cause vicious burns. Becoming fed up or frightened, one man lit a cigarette, and others began to argue, begging him to put it out. They had one satellite phone on board, provided by the smugglers. Once they reached international waters, they dialled a number, as instructed, and asked for a rescue.

As Essey prayed, he heard a hum and then a whirring. It was a small plane, one he felt certain must have been sent by Europe. Its appearance signalled hope for the Eritrean teenager and his fellow travellers. High above them, the plane began to circle. Its crew had spotted their dinghy, so small it looked almost invisible. The boat’s white rubber merged with the Mediterranean Sea as it lurched, the souls upon it specks of dust. The Central Mediterranean was the deadliest migration route in the world.2 All those lives, wildly adrift, could have easily disappeared without any trace. Did the plane’s crew think about that?

Next, a helicopter arrived. It began to circle too, before flying a slow path in another direction. ‘They are leading the way,’ Essey thought, anticipating a rescue ship ahead and European volunteers, their arms outstretched, ready to greet them. ‘It is taking us to where the safe boat is.’

Though he was still so young, Essey had spent years getting to this point. With success in sight, he was about to be thwarted. A message had been relayed.

The next people he saw were the EU-supported Libyan coastguard – rough, uniformed men who powered towards them on a motorised ship. Essey recognised their red, black and green flag, though others wondered aloud if it was Turkish or Tunisian. The Libyans carried weapons and were prepared to use them. There was no resistance as they ordered the refugees off the rubber dinghy. People who had not moved their limbs in hours were suddenly thrashed into activity, each stiff and frigid body part starting rudely and painfully awake. Their thin bodies were forced down low onto the new boat’s deck, and they cowered, surrounded by volatile men with weapons – a position they had been in many times before.

They had not realised they could be taken back to Libya, the country they were trying to escape from. This, along with the role the plane and helicopter had played by illuminating their position for the interception, dawned on each refugee in turn. It was painful, but even more crushing than this European treachery was the death of a dream. This could have finally been their moment, their chance.

It was 2018, and Libya was a war zone where refugees and asylum seekers were locked up indefinitely without charge or trial. Essey’s interception at sea marked the crushing culmination of all the time and more than ten thousand dollars he had paid out while attempting to reach safety. His hopes were obliterated by hardening European migration policy at its most brutal.

On the journey back to North Africa, Essey’s thoughts whirled. His family were fated to try and try, but they would never join the ranks of the world’s privileged people: those who could flee a war by plane; those who had a passport or the documents needed to apply for university; those who did not fear a pounding on the door in the middle of the night, a gun in the face and the understanding you would never be spoken of again. History was repeating itself. Essey’s father made a similar trip before him in 2012, after decades of obligatory, unending military service, and a lengthy separation from his family. Already middle-aged, he had set out for Israel, taking an earlier migration route well-travelled by Eritreans. Instead of reaching his promised land, he died in Egypt’s Sinai Desert – of hunger, lack of water, or sheer exhaustion, Essey never knew.

The small country of Eritrea, with its roughly six million people, is often referred to as the ‘North Korea of Africa’ by the Western media.3 It is one of the most secretive and brutal places on earth, where citizens experience their lack of freedom as something physical and stifling. On the Reporters Without Borders 2021 press freedom index, it was ranked as the least free state in the world, behind North Korea itself and other countries well known for oppressing and jailing journalists, like Iran, Egypt and Syria.4 Yet Essey’s people were survivors and freedom fighters. They had battled for decades against European colonisers, as well as their much larger, oppressive neighbour, Ethiopia, which was constantly trying to secure access to the Red Sea coast by bulldozing through the small state’s independence.

Eritrea became an Italian colony in 1890. During the Second World War, the British defeated the Italians there and the UK took charge for the next decade. The US located a spy station in Eritrea, after realising it was possible to monitor nearly half the world’s radio waves from its highlands.5 The station was used to intercept information leading to the Normandy landings, and again during the Korean War, with the US arguing that Eritrea should not be allowed to have the independence its people desperately desired because of its strategic location. In 1952, Eritrea, which is also bordered by Djibouti and Sudan, was subsumed by Ethiopia.

During a thirty-year-long war of independence, Eritrea’s tegadelti – male and female freedom fighters – lived in trenches, sang revolutionary songs, and took classes on democracy as well as battle tactics. Around sixty-five thousand of them were killed before Eritrea achieved statehood in the early 1990s. Isaias Afwerki, a former liberation fighter, took control.6 Like many other leaders across the African continent, he initially preached people power, even as he transitioned into an autocrat and refused to allow elections. Under him was an army of young slaves. After sovereignty came, Eritrea’s education system was run by ex-independence fighters, with a command-style system of management that funnelled students into the army and national service indefinitely.7

Independence did not lead to freedom. By 2014, the UN Human Rights Council announced that around 6 per cent of Eritrea’s population had fled the country. The following year, thirty-nine thousand Eritreans crossed the Central Mediterranean to Italy – more than one quarter of all arrivals there by sea.8 In 2016, the UN body said crimes against humanity had been committed in ‘a widespread and systematic manner’9 across Eritrea, in military training camps, detention facilities, and elsewhere. People who were caught trying to escape described being incarcerated for years. Some prisons were underground, others, like one that survivors said included a roasting hot torture chamber for political detainees known as ‘the oven’, were facilities specifically designed for interrogation.10

‘Crimes of enslavement, imprisonment, enforced disappearances, torture, persecution, rape, murder and other inhumane acts have been committed as part of a campaign to instil fear in, deter opposition from and ultimately to control the Eritrean civilian population,’ the UN report read.11

‘Eritrea is an authoritarian state. There is no independent judiciary, no national assembly and there are no other democratic institutions,’ added Mike Smith, the chair of the Commission of Inquiry. ‘This has created a governance and rule of law vacuum, resulting in a climate of impunity for crimes against humanity to be perpetrated over a quarter of a century. These crimes are still occurring today.’12

Essey’s childhood memories are laced with his family. Sweet grandparents. Capital city Asmara, with its fading Italian colonial architecture. Cyclists everywhere, because it is almost impossible to import cars.

It is rare that journalists have been allowed inside Eritrea, and much of its population has no access to the internet. Even when a person does manage to get online, maybe in one of Asmara’s few internet cafes, the connection is incredibly slow. In 2012, the UN’s International Telecommunication Union called Eritrea the least technologically connected country on earth.13 Citizens who escaped its borders had to come to terms not only with what they could see and hear in person – new landscapes, languages and ways of life – but also everything they could now access online. The internet opened up their eyes to the rest of the world, to the full spectrum of human existence and previously inconceivable prospects, in a way that could feel both inspiring and crushingly overwhelming.

I had been fascinated by Eritrea for years. In August 2015, I was sent to Calais, in northern France, on an assignment for millennial-focused news outlet VICE, where I worked as a staff writer. On my first night there, I met Petros, a gaunt twenty-seven-year-old in a brown leather jacket who came from Keren, Eritrea’s second largest city. We stood in a green field at the edge of a raised motorway, where refugees and migrants gathered at dusk. They were all planning to jump on trucks or trains headed towards the UK. There was a bonfire under the nearby trees, where people of various nationalities warmed their hands and discussed their chances. A number were probably smugglers. In front of us, facing the lights of cars dashing by, a line of Eritreans knelt in prayer, asking God if this could be their night.

His story stayed with me. Petros was just three years old when his brother and uncle disappeared without a trace. Aged nineteen, frustrated after reaching adulthood with no answers, he asked about the fate of his brother at a community meeting.

Security forces came for Petros in the night. He was blindfolded and spent the next nine months in prison, where he was beaten every day. When Petros needed to pee, he was handed a plastic bottle.

He described a land where people could be happy if only they had free will and did not keep going missing. His wife ended up in the UK after travelling abroad to work as a maid for an abusive family in Saudi Arabia; she escaped during a visit to Europe. Petros sold everything he could to join her. As he spoke, his voice wavered, yet contained a level of determination I would witness again and again in Eritreans I met. It even veered into pride. Petros wanted to tell me how beautiful his father’s orange trees were, how rich the Eritrean landscapes, how wonderful their food and musicians, and how much he would miss everything he was leaving behind.

Six weeks later, in September 2015, I stood on the Simien Mountains, along Eritrea’s border with Ethiopia. I had hiked for days to get to a peak where I could see into Eritrea, accompanied by a kind Ethiopian guide and a local guard, a requirement for walking this rural terrain. The guard wore crocs, carried an AK47, and spoke little English. He was supposed to keep us safe from ‘bandits’ and sat out in the rain at night, his gun upright between his palms, keeping watch as we lit a fire for warmth before falling asleep in tents. As the sun rose, we walked by clumps of torch lilies; by child goatherds, baboons and donkeys; looking out for the rare but prized walia ibex goats and copper-coloured Ethiopian wolves. We passed through small villages, improbable for their remoteness. Locals – who came out to stare – were totally reliant on this soil. It felt like a place far from politics, though I later found out the Ethiopian government was forcibly relocating people from their villages as part of efforts to improve conservation and increase tourism.14

Eventually, on a mountaintop, my guide told me we would normally have been able to see Eritrea from where I stood, but there was too much fog. It seemed emblematic for such an inaccessible place. I stayed a while, gazing downwards and wondering at all that still was not clear to me.

By the time I stood looking into Eritrea’s blanket of fog, Essey had already left. When he was around ten years old, Essey’s mother escaped so her son could be saved from the same system of enforced national labour his father was pulled into. She raised him and his younger siblings in Ethiopia’s capital city, Addis Ababa, 1,200 kilometres away. Ethiopia and Eritrea were mired in a bloody border war, but that did not stop people from fleeing. By 2017, around 2,500 Eritreans were crossing the border into Ethiopia every month, joining the roughly one hundred and thirty thousand Eritreans already there.15

Ethiopia was like Eritrea in a lot of ways. The people were still ‘Habeshas’ – a word commonly used to describe those born of both countries. They had similar cultures, including the traditional coffee ceremony, which involved rounds of buna or bun sipped in small, handleless cups, often accompanied by popcorn. The dominant religion was the same: Christian Orthodox.

Addis Ababa’s streets were bustling with shops, stalls and restaurants selling bitter injera flatbread, tej honey wine and other staples. Churches blared out music and preaching from 5 a.m., as their congregations, draped in white scarves, trekked cobbled lanes to worship. Donkeys wove through roads packed with cars, while gangs of abandoned children smiled sweetly, sniffed glue to keep hunger pangs at bay, or begged for money. The altitude was high in Addis, which meant it was a good place for athletic training. In central Meskel Square, runners went through their laps at sunrise. They followed in the footsteps of Olympic gold medallist Haile Gebrselassie, treading this crescent-shaped terrace of tracks.

Essey was not Ethiopian though, he was Eritrean, and he was constantly reminded of it. As a child, his background occasionally came up as a joke insult during play fighting with friends. But when he matured, he realised the consequences were bigger than that.

Growing up, he had always been intelligent, with a fast smile and a knack for charming people, old and young. He was a quick student and loved reading. At his school, there were a lot of relatively affluent Ethiopians. Essey might have been talented, but it was hard not to notice how limited his options were in comparison to his classmates. He was trapped in the same invisible cage as refugees all over the world – one where opportunities for work, for education, for travel, are blocked because of a lack of documentation or a passport. ‘I wanted to have an identity there,’ he remembered.

This became especially clear when he won a scholarship to go...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraphs
• Contents
• Maps
• Timeline of Important Events and Relevant Statistics
• A Note on Sources and Donations
• Prologue – This SIM Card is our Life
• 1 Where It Ends and Where It Begins
• 2 Sudan: Through the Desert
• 3 Libya: The Twenty-First-Century Slave Trade
• 4 Ain Zara and Abu Salim: New Life and New Death
• 5 Libya: Escape to Hell
• 6 Triq al Sikka: Burnt Alive
• 7 Disunited Nations
• 8 Tunis: The Last Days of Rome
• 9 Abu Salim: Love Finds a Way
• 10 Khoms Souq al Khamis: A Market of Human Beings
• 11 Sierra Leone: The Temple Run and the Left-Behind Women
• 12 Brussels: Migration Crisis ‘Over’
• 13 Triq al Sikka: Going Underground
• 14 Tripoli: War Erupts Again
• 15 Qasr bin Ghashir and Zawiya: Shots Fired
• 16 Zintan: Libya’s ‘Guantanamo’
• 17 UNHCR Gathering and Departure Facility: The Hotel
• 18 Tajoura: War Crimes and War Slaves
• 19 Rwanda: A New Route to Safety
• 20 Tripoli: Closing the Gathering and Departure Facility
• 21 The Mediterranean Sea: Fortress Europe
• 22 Addis Ababa: Smugglers on Trial
• 23 Paris and Berlin: Europe on the Dock
• 24 Europe: Home Sweet Home
• Epilogue – Luxembourg: Essey
• Author’s Note
• A Note on Terminology
• Acronyms
• Acknowledgements
• Notes and References
• About the Author
• About the Publisher