Sally Hayden (2)

Urgent, heartbreaking, well written with context provided in the overall narrative flow of the book, this was not a pleasant read, but a necessary record of the European response to people trying to move from African countries to a better life in Europe.

Hayden introduces her story with her receiving a Facebook message from a Libyan jail in August 2018, going on to briefly describe the situation for refugees/asylum seekers/economic migrants in Libya.
She then starts her story properly with Essey in Eritrea (a country about which I knew nothing apart from its location). He makes his way across Ethiopia and Sudan, to Libya, where he unsuccessfully tries to travel by people smugglers’ dinghy to Europe. Having been stopped by Libyan coastal patrols twice and getting his extended family to pay bribes to get him freed, his family runs out of money and he is imprisoned in Libya.
Hayden uses Essey’s case to discuss the political situation in Libya, the position of the EU in funding Libyan coastguards, so that refugees will not make it to EU waters, where they would have refugee status and the work done by the various UN bodies involved with refugees, partially funded by the EU.

Aside from all this, it was going to Sudan, in 2017, that really made me question which stories we hear about refugees, and how murky the truth can become when the biggest humanitarian organisation filtering them is also constantly angling for donations from states. As a journalist, my job is to elevate voices that may be overlooked, while making efforts to hold powerful individuals, organisations, and governments accountable. The power imbalance between UNHCR's staff, who have the ability to grant refugee status and the accompanying documentation and even transfer people to another state, and refugees, who have fled their countries and often lack legal rights, property, belongings, their family and communities, is one of the largest I can imagine, and therefore ripe for exploitation.

This can be a distressing book to read, for example when it recounts the problem of disposing of dead bodies of Christian refugees from Eritrea, when Muslims will not allow them to be buried in Muslim graveyards (page 276): By early 2019, so many people had died in Zintan that it became a logistical problem. The refrigerated area where the bodies were stored was full, and the local community of Muslims would not allow Christians to be buried in their cemetery. “Administrative reasons.” an aid worker explained to me. 'Having dead people is a burden.”

Hayden’s narrative is interspersed with quotes from text messages she has received, which purposefully break the flow of the story, successfully simulating the fractured nature of how events occurred.

This is powerful political journalism, and needs to be read as such, as she says to Moraes, the chair of the European Parliament's Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs Committee in 2018:
I explained that I was a journalist, it was not my role to propose exact solutions but I wanted to make sure European politicians were aware of the consequences of what they were doing. Surely someone should be held responsible? Moraes said it was difficult to implement change when public opinion and political will had shifted so far away from empathising. (Page 215)… (mehr)