Q&A with Sally Hayden
"I see it as my job to make sure that no one can say they don’t know about this anymore."
Throughout the Orwell Festival we’ve been sharing new writing and insights from this year’s finalists. The Orwell Prizes for Political Writing and Political Fiction 2022 shortlists, released last month, highlight the finest politically engaged books published in 2021. To see the lists, visit our website here.
In this next piece, we spoke to the journalist Sally Hayden, author of My Fourth Time, We Drowned, a finalist for The Orwell Prize for Political Writing.
In August 2018, Sally Hayden received a Facebook message. ‘Hi sister Sally, we need your help,’ it read. ‘We are under bad condition in Libya prison. If you have time, I will tell you all the story.’ More messages followed from more refugees. From there began a staggering investigation into the migrant crisis across North Africa.
My Fourth Time, We Drowned follows the shocking experiences of refugees seeking sanctuary, 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?
When it comes to refugees, are we better than this, or is this who we are?
I think it depends what you mean by “we”. There are many individuals across the world trying to do good work to help, including in developing countries which shelter 83 percent of the world’s refugees, but more and more we are seeing rich countries pump huge sums of money into securitising borders in ways that prop up militias, dictatorships and systems that oppress vulnerable people further.
Structures have been developed that silence people in desperate need of assistance, while using separation and language to distance people in the rich world from the realities of what is being done in their name to keep them comfortable.
I would like to believe that many Europeans or British people have not been aware of what is happening, because they would not stand for it if they were, and that’s why I see it as my job to make sure that no one can say they don’t know about this anymore. My Fourth Time, We Drowned is an attempt to provide evidence of the realities and reduce the distance between those who are comfortable and those who are suffering.
What does the situation look like for migrants trapped in Libya today?
The situation that I describe in my book is ongoing. Since 2017, nearly 100,000 men, women and children have been intercepted on the Central Mediterranean Sea as a direct result of hardening European Union migration policy. They are located by European surveillance, and intercepted by the EU-supported Libyan coastguard in a deliberate circumnavigation of international law, which would prohibit European vessels from returning people to Libya.
In Libya, a non-functional state effectively run by militias where there is no real rule of law, many returnees are locked up in detention centres which Pope Francis, among others, has described as concentration camps. Inside, there is torture, rape, medical neglect, deliberate starvation, forced labour, and a wide range of other abuses. Some people are sold by guards directly back to traffickers who torture victims, including by electrocution, to pay ransoms of thousands of dollars. This cycle continues until the person dies, manages to reach a place of safety, or - in some cases - returns to the country they originally came from, generally through EU-funded flights. The lucky few who do get to a safe country are often so traumatised they struggle to continue with any kind of life.
My Fourth Time, We Drowned starts with a Facebook message. How did the person you worked with originally find you? Did you ever have any doubts about taking the story forward?
In 2017, the year before I received that first Facebook message, I had done a reporting trip to Sudan, which neighbours Libya, and met a lot of Eritrean and Ethiopian refugees there. As a result of that trip, I published an investigation into corruption in the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR)’s resettlement programme. Refugees I interviewed said there was no way to be resettled without paying bribes, which sometimes came to tens of thousands of dollars. Two days after that investigation was published, in May 2018, UNHCR suspended resettlement and announced they were deploying an anti-fraud team. One staff member was later found guilty of abusing power and soliciting bribes, though refugees told me the problem was much bigger than that.
Though I didn’t know it at the time, this investigation was how the refugees locked up in that first Libyan detention centre got my name and decided to contact me. That enabled me to broaden my reporting into the direct involvement of the EU, as well as finding out more about the failure of the international community in enabling this to continue.
In terms of doubts, of course I went through a verification process to confirm information that was being sent to me. That first group of 500 detainees who got in touch in August 2018 were in a life-or-death, emergency situation, and I assumed that once they were helped my job would be over. I never envisaged that exposing what was happening to refugees forced back to Libya would take up years of my life.
Social media allowed you into places otherwise cut off entirely from the media. What does the future of this kind of reporting look like? Have journalists yet to fully realise social media's true potential?
I’ve always been a strong believer that a journalist should go to places and see everything they can for themselves, and my previous reporting on migration-related issues saw me travel to Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Calais in France, Burkina Faso, Panama, Kenya, Uganda, and a range of other places.
For My Fourth Time, We Drowned, I travelled to Sierra Leone, Sudan, Ethiopia, Rwanda, across Europe and went out on the Central Mediterranean in a boat and plane, but the key reporting on what is happening in Libyan detention centres was done through communication with detainees inside them who used hidden phones to send evidence of what they were going through.
Years of daily communication with detainees made me realise that sometimes it is not possible to get accurate information if you do visit a place; your presence can alter the situation in a way that might result in you actually covering up something through your reports. In Libyan detention centres, for example, guards would make detainees clean up before journalists visited; the electricity would be turned on; torture victims or sick people might be hidden from sight. No one could speak freely because they knew there would be punishments afterwards if they did.
Secret communication through messaging apps meant that I could receive videos and photos showing the daily reality of what was going on, and longterm relationships meant that I grew to trust my sources while developing many ways of verifying what they told me.
Many new sources and subsequent tips came through my own use of social media. I began posting screenshots of the messages I received on Twitter, and the resulting thread was viewed millions of times. That enabled more detainees, aid workers, politicians, and people involved in other ways to reach out to me and send me further information, which helped me fill in gaps and triangulate what I was hearing.
The book details multiple failures, not only from the EU border agency but the UN, which some argue has been used to whitewash those failures. What mechanisms are there for holding the UN accountable? Is it fit for purpose?
After I started this reporting, I was quickly contacted by UN staff who wanted to speak anonymously. They were concerned that their agencies were being used to whitewash the brutal effects of European policies, and the deaths and torture the policies were responsible for. A significant portion of UNHCR and IOM’s funding for their Libya operations comes from the EU Trust Fund for Africa, the same source as the Libyan coastguard support for intercepting migrants and refugees, meaning that they were effectively being used as another strand of the same policy.
One response I often get when investigating the UN in particular is that I should be careful about revealing anything negative about their workings as it’s better that they’re present in a location than not there at all. But as journalists our job is to speak truth to power and to be particularly inquiring when there are great power imbalances that involve vulnerable people. I can’t think of a greater power imbalance than that between refugees and an international organisation that has the ability to grant or deny them documents, or to select or stop them from getting brought to a safe country where they can restart their lives.
The events detailed in the book follow on from previous reporting I had done in regards to allegations of corruption within UN Refugee Agency operations in various countries (UNHCR have denied the existence of widespread corruption). In recent weeks, the BBC also released a feature-length documentary looking at the mistreatment of whistleblowers inside the UN, amid allegations that management and senior staff turn a blind eye to wrongdoing. Staff working for the UN generally enjoy legal immunity, which some say has created a culture of impunity. Issues are investigated internally but whistleblowers in a range of agencies and regions say they have been punished and in some cases fired from their jobs after making complaints. This corresponds with much that I have heard and documented. The main point that I tried to make in the book is that we need to be listening to the most vulnerable people, the refugees themselves, rather than always taking statements issued by international organisations or political entities at face value.
Sally Hayden is an award-winning journalist focussed on migration and humanitarian crises. Her recent book, My Fourth Time, We Drowned, investigates in shocking detail the experiences of refugees entering Europe from North Africa. Expertly and empathetically written, Sally Rooney describes My Fourth Time, We Drowned as “the most important work of contemporary reporting I have ever read.”