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"A magnificent, engagé investigative report… [an] act of witness...It is clear from [Hayden’s book] that the current politics of immigration have turned & 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… [It] strongly convey[s] the urgency of fundamentally rethinking immigration policy… It is already late to act, but that is a poor reason for inaction.” - The New York Review of Books
Winner Terzani Prize/Premio Terzani 2024
Winner ‘journalist of the year’, Irish Journalism Awards 2023
Winner best ‘foreign coverage’, Irish Journalism Awards 2023
Finalist in the 2023 BookTube Prize
Nominated for the Jan Michalski Prize for Literature 2023
Finalist for the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism 2023
A Sunday Times ‘one to watch’ 2023
Winner of The Orwell Prize for Political Writing 2022
Winner of The Michel Déon Prize 2022
Winner of the An Post Irish Book of the Year Award 2022
Winner of the An Post Irish Book Award for Nonfiction 2022
A Financial Times Best Political Book of 2022
A Kirkus Best Nonfiction Book of 2022
A New Yorker Best Book of 2022
A Guardian Best History and Politics Book of 2022
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.
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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor
Sally Hayden is an Irish journalist focused on migration, conflict, and humanitarian crises. She is currently the Africa correspondent for the Irish Times. Sally’s work on Libya has been featured by the New York Times, the Guardian, Channel 4 News, CNN International, Al Jazeera, TIME, BBC, Die ZEIT, Der Spiegel, the Sunday Times, the Telegraph, ITV News, and other outlets across the world. She has reported on other international stories for the Washington Post, the Financial Times Magazine, and the Thomson Reuters Foundation. In 2019, Sally was named as one of Forbes ’30 Under 30’ in Media in Europe, in part because of her work on refugee issues.
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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 early morning 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 staff had regular access to the centers, that did not seem to be true. Many detainees who had fled war or dictatorships were never even registered as refugees. That meant there was no list of their names anywhere. They were terrified of being sold back to smugglers, who torture migrants until their families pay hefty ransoms. They were begging to be saved.
I had stumbled, inadvertently, on a human rights disaster of epic proportions.
There were eight pregnant women and roughly twenty babies and toddlers among the Ain Zara group. As the man and I spoke on the phone, bombs exploded nearby, and I heard the sounds of shrieking.
“Now everyone is disturbed, it is becoming worse and worse . . . Look at the women and children, you can post this video for the European people to know.”
Frantically, I searched for an answer. I contacted the UN and international aid organizations working in Libya, but they said it was too dangerous for their staff to act (“In Libya today, everybody is at risk, so not an easy situation,” one aid worker responded, showing a callous pragmatism I was to encounter again and again). I emailed editors asking whether they would publish a report, but I was a freelancer, and—as often happens—replies were slow.
Feeling unmoored and useless, I began to post screenshots of my messages with the refugees on Twitter, where they were quickly shared, garnering tens of thousands of views, and then hundreds of thousands. Within months, their words would reach millions.
“There’s no food, no water. The children are crying. We are suffering, especially the children. We haven’t slept in two days. We are waiting for some miracle. Tell them the people are dying here.”
Time stretched out for me, with sleepless nights and nerve-racking days measured in countless moments laden with danger. I barely left the sparse room I was renting, except when I was picked up by a taxi to do TV and radio interviews after BBC producers spotted my Twitter updates. Online, there was a cascade of retweets and likes and shares, but in Ain Zara nothing changed. The refugees would turn off the phone to conserve its battery, silence suddenly interrupted by a flurry of messages at any new development. Eventually, buses arrived. Was this salvation? At first, we did not know if their drivers were Libyan authorities or smugglers (I would later learn there is not always much to distinguish the two). Armed men in uniform said they were taking the detainees to a different area, which was—at least at that moment—farther from the front line.
Then, about fifty hours after I received the first message, I watched through WhatsApp as the GPS location of the man’s phone edged across the city. I used it to update the refugees on where they were. “To your left, you will see the University of Tripoli,” I remember typing, and they responded excitedly when they...
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My Fourth Time, We Drowned : Seeking Refuge on the World's Deadliest Migration Route
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Melville House Publishing, 2023
ISBN 10: 1685890571
ISBN 13: 9781685890575
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