Politics & Government
![Sally Hayden - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_a_sally_hayden.jpg)
My Fourth Time, We Drowned: Seeking Refuge on the World's Deadliest Migration Route
The Western world has turned its back on migrants, leaving them to cope with one of the most devastating humanitarian crises in history.
Reporter Sally Hayden was at home in London when she received a message on Facebook: "Hi sister Sally, we need your help." The sender identified himself as an Eritrean refugee who had been held in a Libyan detention center for months, locked in one big hall with hundreds of others. Now, the city around them was crumbling in a scrimmage between warring factions, and they remained stuck, defenseless, with only one remaining hope: contacting her. Hayden had inadvertently stumbled onto a human rights disaster of epic proportions.
From this single message begins a staggering account of the migrant crisis across North Africa, in a groundbreaking work of investigative journalism. With unprecedented access to people currently inside Libyan detention centers, Hayden's book is based on interviews with hundreds of refugees and migrants who tried to reach Europe and found themselves stuck in Libya once the EU started funding interceptions in 2017.
It is an intimate portrait of life for these detainees, as well as a condemnation of NGOs and the United Nations, whose abdication of international standards will echo throughout history. But most importantly, My Fourth Time, We Drowned shines a light on the resilience of humans: how refugees and migrants locked up for years fall in love, support each other through the hardest times, and carry out small acts of resistance in order to survive in a system that wants them to be silent and disappear.
Reporter Sally Hayden was at home in London when she received a message on Facebook: "Hi sister Sally, we need your help." The sender identified himself as an Eritrean refugee who had been held in a Libyan detention center for months, locked in one big hall with hundreds of others. Now, the city around them was crumbling in a scrimmage between warring factions, and they remained stuck, defenseless, with only one remaining hope: contacting her. Hayden had inadvertently stumbled onto a human rights disaster of epic proportions.
From this single message begins a staggering account of the migrant crisis across North Africa, in a groundbreaking work of investigative journalism. With unprecedented access to people currently inside Libyan detention centers, Hayden's book is based on interviews with hundreds of refugees and migrants who tried to reach Europe and found themselves stuck in Libya once the EU started funding interceptions in 2017.
It is an intimate portrait of life for these detainees, as well as a condemnation of NGOs and the United Nations, whose abdication of international standards will echo throughout history. But most importantly, My Fourth Time, We Drowned shines a light on the resilience of humans: how refugees and migrants locked up for years fall in love, support each other through the hardest times, and carry out small acts of resistance in order to survive in a system that wants them to be silent and disappear.
Editorial Reviews
"I frantically underlined journalist Sally Hayden's first book, My Fourth Time, We Drowned ... Readers should ... let Hayden's vital reporting make them reconsider their view of what makes a moral world." -The Baffler
"My Fourth Time, We Drowned is journalism of the most urgent kind." -The Financial Times
"There is perhaps no better testament to the racist double standard at the core of European border policy than the accounts of refugees and migrants collected in. . . My Fourth Time, We Drowned." -The Intercept
"[A]stonishingly detailed... My Fourth Time, We Drowned is not simply a catalogue of misery: it is a meticulously documented record of the complicity of the very organizations that are meant to be forces of good." -The Times Literary Supplement
"Good journalism of this sort should, at the very least, make the reader angry. Excellent journalism should not only make one angry, it should make the reader feel the pain and the fear intrinsic to the reportage. It should make the reader want to act, to yell, to raise their fist, to do anything but throw up one's hands in despair. In My Fourth Time, We Drowned, Hayden does all that and more." -Counterpunch Magazine
"...a brilliant, unparalleled investigation of one of the most underreported scandals and monstrous crimes of our time." -Responsible Statecraft
"My Fourth Time, We Drowned is the most important work of contemporary reporting I have ever read. Every citizen of the European Union has not only a right, but also a responsibility, to learn about the realities described in this book. I hope that Sally Hayden's work can help to begin a radically new and overdue discussion about Europe's approach to migration and borders." -Sally Rooney, author of Beautiful World, Where Are You
"This book is a comprehensive indic...
"My Fourth Time, We Drowned is journalism of the most urgent kind." -The Financial Times
"There is perhaps no better testament to the racist double standard at the core of European border policy than the accounts of refugees and migrants collected in. . . My Fourth Time, We Drowned." -The Intercept
"[A]stonishingly detailed... My Fourth Time, We Drowned is not simply a catalogue of misery: it is a meticulously documented record of the complicity of the very organizations that are meant to be forces of good." -The Times Literary Supplement
"Good journalism of this sort should, at the very least, make the reader angry. Excellent journalism should not only make one angry, it should make the reader feel the pain and the fear intrinsic to the reportage. It should make the reader want to act, to yell, to raise their fist, to do anything but throw up one's hands in despair. In My Fourth Time, We Drowned, Hayden does all that and more." -Counterpunch Magazine
"...a brilliant, unparalleled investigation of one of the most underreported scandals and monstrous crimes of our time." -Responsible Statecraft
"My Fourth Time, We Drowned is the most important work of contemporary reporting I have ever read. Every citizen of the European Union has not only a right, but also a responsibility, to learn about the realities described in this book. I hope that Sally Hayden's work can help to begin a radically new and overdue discussion about Europe's approach to migration and borders." -Sally Rooney, author of Beautiful World, Where Are You
"This book is a comprehensive indic...
Short Excerpt Teaser
On Sunday, August 26, 2018, I was browsing through Netflix, in a sublet room in north London, when I 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."
Of course, this did not make sense to me. How did someone thousands of miles away find my name? How did they have a working phone if they were locked up? I was skeptical, but I replied quickly to see what would come next.
"I'm so sorry to hear that," I wrote. "Yes, of course I have time, though unfortunately I can't do much to help." We exchanged WhatsApp numbers. The sender explained that his brother knew my journalism from Sudan, a neighboring North African country, and had traced my contact details online. He needed them because he was trapped in Ain Zara, a migrant detention center in Libya's capital, Tripoli, alongside hundreds of other refugees. Conflict had broken out around them. Smoke rose above the walls outside. They were watching the city smolder and burn.
The Libyans in charge at Ain Zara, who had been abusing them for months, fled when the sounds of fighting grew nearer. It was never clear whether the guards-or the "police," as the refugees called them-left to escape or join in: many had sympathies with those fighting, while others were simply frightened or arrogant young men who signed up because they needed work, felt comfortable being armed, and had spotted the potential for extra profits through exploitation. There were still children and pregnant women inside the building. The refugee men, who had been locked in one big hall for months, broke down the separating door. They hoped the group would be safer if they were all together.
"We see bullets passing over us and heavy weapons in the street," my new contact typed, before sending me photos he said were from that day. One, taken through a window, showed vehicles with anti-aircraft guns visible outside the center's gates. Another was an image of himself: an emaciated-looking 28-year-old sitting on the ground with three young children.
Everyone inside the building was unarmed and defenseless: stick thin after months with maybe a meal a day, sometimes nothing. Their bodies were scarred from torture and beatings, inflicted both by the guards who had just left and the smugglers who held them for months or years before they arrived in Ain Zara. The war raging outside had been coming for a long time, and these people needed help-any help, even if it was a journalist in a faraway country with little to offer.
"If there is any United Nations Refugee Agency or human rights organizations near you, contact them. Since yesterday we haven't eaten any food," messaged the man. "If you have a page post something on that about this situation." He said he came from Eritrea, a repressive country in the Horn of Africa where citizens are forced into unending military service by the ruling dictatorship. He had breached two borders, survived kidnapping by traffickers, and traveled nearly 3,000 kilometers to get to Libya.
Like everyone else with him, the man then tried to cross the Mediterranean Sea to reach Europe but was caught and incarcerated. Now they were in trouble. They had one phone between hundreds that the detainees had kept hidden for months. He said it was the phone a smuggler gave him to bring on board the rubber boat so they could call for rescue once it inevitably began to sink. The European Union was responsible for the situation they were now in-it was Europe that had forced them back.
I spent the next twenty-four hours doing all I could to verify his story.
I asked for photos of his surroundings, videos, selfies, GPS locations, and contact details for his family members. I knew people in Libya, and they confirmed there was conflict in the suburb they were in.
I called him numerous times.
As I requested more and more detail, the man I was speaking to told me how, before the fighting got bad, detainees had regularly been taken from the detention center and forced to work like slaves in the homes of wealthy Libyans. Women were raped, and Christians targeted for particular abuse-violently assaulted while their crucifixes were ripped from their necks. Some mornings, around 3:00 a.m., the armed Libyan guards would call hundreds of detainees out to be "counted," sadistically making them stand in the cold for hours. They probably were not aware, but this ordeal echoed Appellplatz, the earlymorning roll calls Nazis used to do in concentration camps-a grim ritual carried out with the aim of intimidating and humiliating prisoners.
Despite the UN saying its st...
Of course, this did not make sense to me. How did someone thousands of miles away find my name? How did they have a working phone if they were locked up? I was skeptical, but I replied quickly to see what would come next.
"I'm so sorry to hear that," I wrote. "Yes, of course I have time, though unfortunately I can't do much to help." We exchanged WhatsApp numbers. The sender explained that his brother knew my journalism from Sudan, a neighboring North African country, and had traced my contact details online. He needed them because he was trapped in Ain Zara, a migrant detention center in Libya's capital, Tripoli, alongside hundreds of other refugees. Conflict had broken out around them. Smoke rose above the walls outside. They were watching the city smolder and burn.
The Libyans in charge at Ain Zara, who had been abusing them for months, fled when the sounds of fighting grew nearer. It was never clear whether the guards-or the "police," as the refugees called them-left to escape or join in: many had sympathies with those fighting, while others were simply frightened or arrogant young men who signed up because they needed work, felt comfortable being armed, and had spotted the potential for extra profits through exploitation. There were still children and pregnant women inside the building. The refugee men, who had been locked in one big hall for months, broke down the separating door. They hoped the group would be safer if they were all together.
"We see bullets passing over us and heavy weapons in the street," my new contact typed, before sending me photos he said were from that day. One, taken through a window, showed vehicles with anti-aircraft guns visible outside the center's gates. Another was an image of himself: an emaciated-looking 28-year-old sitting on the ground with three young children.
Everyone inside the building was unarmed and defenseless: stick thin after months with maybe a meal a day, sometimes nothing. Their bodies were scarred from torture and beatings, inflicted both by the guards who had just left and the smugglers who held them for months or years before they arrived in Ain Zara. The war raging outside had been coming for a long time, and these people needed help-any help, even if it was a journalist in a faraway country with little to offer.
"If there is any United Nations Refugee Agency or human rights organizations near you, contact them. Since yesterday we haven't eaten any food," messaged the man. "If you have a page post something on that about this situation." He said he came from Eritrea, a repressive country in the Horn of Africa where citizens are forced into unending military service by the ruling dictatorship. He had breached two borders, survived kidnapping by traffickers, and traveled nearly 3,000 kilometers to get to Libya.
Like everyone else with him, the man then tried to cross the Mediterranean Sea to reach Europe but was caught and incarcerated. Now they were in trouble. They had one phone between hundreds that the detainees had kept hidden for months. He said it was the phone a smuggler gave him to bring on board the rubber boat so they could call for rescue once it inevitably began to sink. The European Union was responsible for the situation they were now in-it was Europe that had forced them back.
I spent the next twenty-four hours doing all I could to verify his story.
I asked for photos of his surroundings, videos, selfies, GPS locations, and contact details for his family members. I knew people in Libya, and they confirmed there was conflict in the suburb they were in.
I called him numerous times.
As I requested more and more detail, the man I was speaking to told me how, before the fighting got bad, detainees had regularly been taken from the detention center and forced to work like slaves in the homes of wealthy Libyans. Women were raped, and Christians targeted for particular abuse-violently assaulted while their crucifixes were ripped from their necks. Some mornings, around 3:00 a.m., the armed Libyan guards would call hundreds of detainees out to be "counted," sadistically making them stand in the cold for hours. They probably were not aware, but this ordeal echoed Appellplatz, the earlymorning roll calls Nazis used to do in concentration camps-a grim ritual carried out with the aim of intimidating and humiliating prisoners.
Despite the UN saying its st...
