No Freedom to Move

 

 

Marina Warner

 

The current politics of immigration have twisted human nature against itself, fostering unimaginable maltreatment of those who wish only to survive and live a better life. 

 In August 2018 the Irish journalist 

Sally Hayden, then in London, re-
ceived a Facebook message begging for

 her help. She followed up and found
that she “had stumbled, inadvertently,
on a human rights disaster of epic proportions,”
involving men, women, and
children who had fled from different
parts of Africa, as well as the Middle
East and Asia, only to find themselves
imprisoned in Libya in conditions of
extreme brutality. Cascades of more
Facebook and WhatsApp messages followed
as she became the point of contact
for asylum seekers who had found
her on the Internet and were appealing
to her to write about their cases, to
make representations to the authorities
about their circumstances and
prevent them from being altogether
forgotten and disappearing.
Hayden accepted the mission in
the spirit of her profession, not of
NGO work or activism. The enormity
of what she encountered inspired My
Fourth Time, We Drowned, her first
book and a magnificent, engagé investigative
report on Libya and on the
thousands of Africans who are making
the harsh journey across the Sahara
and then attempting to cross the
Mediterranean to reach Italy, Malta,
or Spain. Her title quotes a text message
from one of the many who were
trying, again and again, to make the
crossing, only to get caught by Libyan
coast guard officers paid by the
EU and returned to the dangers of a
detention center.

For most of the period the book covers,
2018–2020, Libya was in the grip
of civil war, as General Khalifa Haftar,
based in Tobruk, led a rebellion against
the UN- recognized government in
Tripoli. Neither side of that conflict
stands much scrutiny, but Hayden
keeps to the issue of the detainees. In
the course of her research, she talked
with Libyans, Eritreans, Moroccans,
Egyptians, and others from Sierra
Leone and Niger. As the civil war rages,
their cases are not heard; they are imprisoned,
starved, deprived of water,
air, exercise, medicine. TB breaks out
in one center; in another, Tajoura,
around six hundred inmates remain
penned in as bombs are dropped all
around them—at least fifty- three died
and many more were wounded (even
at this comparatively smaller scale,
the figures are approximate).

The book is a difficult read. The brutality
of the guards, the routine beatings,
rapes, forced labor, conscription,
enslavement, and sheer negligence,
all intertwined with the plots and betrayals
of vicious gang leaders who are
growing fat on the smuggling trade, fill
one with despair. But Hayden places
this hell on earth in a far broader picture.
Her reportage indicts the two gigantic
institutions that have overall
authority over the fate of displaced
people: the EU for outsourcing its control
of immigration to countries like
Libya and Turkey, paying their governments
millions of euros to police

Europe’s borders, and UNHCR for failing
the refugees whom it is mandated
to protect. The smugglers who run the
sea crossings are often working both
sides, luring refugees with promises
of safe crossings, conscripting them
into militias, enslaving them in hard
labor, tipping off the pirates who steal
their outboard motors, and informing
the coast guards so that the trafficker
can extort more payments. When no
ransom is forthcoming or is slow to
arrive from beleaguered families back
home, the refugees face further abuse.

It is a shameless new form of the slave
trade, and Western policies are not
merely complicit in it, but catalysts.
My Fourth Time, We Drowned lets
us hear the voices of the detainees
as they testify to their experiences.
These terrible stories seem the only
way to grasp what happens behind
the grim statistics. Such eyewitness
reports in our time, like the Kurdish
poet Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but
the Mountains (2018)—his lacerating
account of being held by the Australian
authorities for six years on Manus
Island in Papua New Guinea, originally
composed as WhatsApp messages—
are books of the digital age.

They embody the sharp contradictions
of a global world, which is borderless
where communications are concerned,
where money and goods may travel immense
distances (strawberries in winter
flown to Europe from Egypt), yet
is closed to millions of human beings.
Many, many have drowned in “the
liquid cemetery” of the Mediterranean.

The current official register puts the
number at around 28,192 in the past
nine years—but these are the known
deaths. There are many more missing
whose bodies were not found. The natural
barrier of the mare nostrum (our
sea) is fierce, often whipped up by violent
storms and extremely dangerous
for the overloaded gommoni or rubber
dinghies in which migrants try to cross.
In Sicily in 2007, the artist Isaac Julien
filmed splintered and rotting piles of
the blue wooden fishing boats for his
prophetic, poetic installation Western
Union: Small Boats. These traditional
and more seaworthy craft were in use
before being impounded and destroyed
by order of the border keepers.

Over Christmas four years ago,
Hayden joined (as a journalist observer)
a rescue ship, the Alan Kurdi,
named after the drowned child who
was photographed washed up on the
beach at Bodrum, Turkey, in 2015. She
describes how after the crew had made
contact with one boatload of refugees
and brought them on board, they were
legally obliged to destroy their dinghy
so it could not be reused. Such humanitarian
operations are now even more
severely curtailed by EU law, though
it is the long- honored law of the sea
to come to the help of shipwreck victims
or anyone in difficulty. Libyan
coast guards are now tasked with “interceptions”
and are on record brutalizing
and even pushing refugees back
into the sea.

The 2018 film Mare Clausum: The
Sea Watch vs Libyan Coast Guard Case
was made from official documentation
by the London- based research agency
Forensic Architecture; the footage of
men thrashing about desperately in
the water before going under, while
the guards manhandle those who have
managed to climb aboard, is devastating.

It can’t but strike shameful
echoes with the notorious episode of
the Zong—the 1781 massacre involving
a British ship that J.M.W. Turner
depicted in his l840 painting Slave
Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard
the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming
On)—which crystallized public outrage
against slavery during the abolition
movement. One can only hope that acts
of witness today such as Crawford’s
and Hayden’s will have a similar effect.
In 2019 two lawyers based in Paris—
Omer Shatz and Juan Branco—filed an
official complaint to the International
Criminal Court in The Hague asking
for the whole EU to be charged with
crimes against humanity for what its
policies and financial support have
wrought in the Mediterranean and in
Libya. Legally, such charges cannot be
brought against a whole institution but
must name individuals responsible.
Nevertheless, the lawyers tell Hayden,
theirs is a preliminary, necessary alarum
to wake up officials to the possibility
that they may be held personally
accountable and therefore, perhaps, to
forestall worse failures in their stewardship
of human rights.

Hearing of the surprise capture of
Kidane Habtemariam, one of the most
notorious and brutal smuggler gang
leaders operating in Libya, Hayden
travels to Addis Ababa in October 2020
in order to attend his trial. She finds
no other Western reporter there. The
indifference shocks her. News reports
of deaths at sea or small boats landing
on the south coast of the UK deliver
quick and easy visceral feelings, rushes
of sympathy or anger that the public
relishes, but the laborious procedures
of justice in a faraway African nation
can be shrugged off.

Habtemariam’s terrifying sidekick,
Tewelde Goitom, nicknamed Welid,
whose corruption and thuggery she has
noted before, would be found guilty and
sentenced to eighteen years in prison.
But Habtemariam, who carried out so
many of the brutalities Hayden has recounted,
asks to go to the toilet, walks
out of the compound, and vanishes. He
was eventually found guilty in absentia,
and sentenced to life without parole;
in January of this year, after a moneylaundering
inquiry in the UAE, he was
traced to Sudan and arrested.

The smugglers thrive in the current
legal landscape—in fact it could
not be more propitious for them. Closing
down legal avenues to movement
drives the displaced into illegal routes,
and makes them vulnerable to trafficking
and forced labor—often militia in
the case of the young men and prostitution
in the case of the young women
(but in both situations not exclusively
men or women). To my mind, Prohibition
presents a historical analogy, for
the widespread criminalizing effects it
had on the public, the police, and civil
society. The EU’s attempts to control
the exodus by proxy only strengthen
the common interest of the enforcers
and the criminals.

It is clear from both Crawford’s and
Hayden’s books that the current politics
of immigration have turned and
twisted human nature against itself
and our own kind and are fostering unimaginable
maltreatment of those who
wish only to survive and live a better
life. As Warsan Shire, whose family left
Somalia and then managed to relocate
to Britain, writes in one of her most
unforgettable poems, “no one leaves
home unless/home is the mouth of a
shark.” War, famine, religious and ethnic
strife, and natural catastrophes will
continue to drive thousands to leave,
despite the extreme danger.

Forthright as they are, neither
book addresses the question, “What
would happen if the borders were

opened?” But both strongly convey the
urgency of fundamentally rethinking
immigration policy, especially in the
context of accelerating global warming.

What if, instead of transferring
millions of dollars and euros to unstable
countries and dictatorships to
keep out border crossers and sanctuary
seekers, these vast resources were
used to set up legal avenues for migrants,
welcome centers, education and
training, and to rethink the restrictions
on their rights (to work, to move
on, to marry)? Before World War II,
from 1922 to 1938, there were Nansen
passports for undocumented refugees
(not entirely satisfactory, as Hannah
Arendt reported, but far better than
current attitudes to statelessness).

The apparatus of enforcement
crushes its targets; even when asylum
seekers finally succeed (and many
thousands do because they have legal
grounds for their claim), they have
been damaged physically by the horrors
of their treatment, and exhausted
psychologically. It is also worth considering
the damage to the enforcers,
not because I want to defend them but
because state support for their actions
does harm to the entire social body.
Frantz Fanon, when working as a psychiatric
doctor in Algeria, found himself
treating the survivors of torture
and their torturers; both were haunted,
hobbled, incapacitated by what they
had been through, what they had done.

It is already late to act, but that
is a poor reason for inaction. Many
fine minds are exploring the possibilities
of changing direction: Lyndsey
Stonebridge in Placeless People:
Writing, Rights, and Refugees (2018),
Mary Jacobus in On Belonging and Not
Belonging (2022), David Herd in Writing
Against Expulsion in the Post- War
World: Making Space for the Human
(2023), John Washington in his new
book, The Case for Open Borders.2 “As
we deny, cast out, and crack down, we
have turned our thresholds into barricades,”
Washington writes. “We lose
our own home by denying it to others.”
Are open borders so unthinkable?

When German chancellor Angela
Merkel accepted a million Syrians in
2015–2016, and more recently when
even the United Kingdom established
a sponsorship scheme for Ukrainian
refugees, as had happened for Jews
fleeing the Nazi regime before and
during World War II, they demonstrated
that a different course can
be adopted. The prime minister and
members of recent and current Conservative
governments of the UK are
the children of immigrants, not all of
whom were wealthy or particularly
educated (and therefore would not
qualify for admission to the country
today). It is one of the bitterest ironies
of the present political uses of
xenophobia in Britain that children of
Black and brown immigrants, whose
right to enter inspired generations like
mine to march in protest against exclusionary
government policies, are
now eagerly consolidating “the hostile
environment,” blocking legal routes of
immigration, and stoking the frenzy
against “small boats.” .

  THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

 My Fourth Time, We Drowned: Seeking Refuge on the World’s Deadliest Migration Route

by Sally Hayden

Melville House, 435 pp., $29.99; $20.00 (paper)